{"id":10159,"date":"2013-09-12T17:22:11","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T12:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/hard-fought-david-groulxs-a-difficult-beauty\/"},"modified":"2013-09-12T17:22:11","modified_gmt":"2013-09-12T12:22:11","slug":"hard-fought-david-groulxs-a-difficult-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/hard-fought-david-groulxs-a-difficult-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard Fought: David Groulx\u2019s A Difficult Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

The poetry in David Groulx\u2019s fourth book, A Difficult Beauty<\/em>, is grounded. Grounded in Groulx and his personal history. Grounded in the dirt and dust of Elliot Lake, the boom\/bust town where he grew up, and the uranium mine where his father must have worked, the miners\u2019 houses full of radiating dust and radon. Grounded in work: in addition to poems about mining, there are poems about the time before and after work (much of it in hotel bars), about roofing and the particular skill of keeping a cigarette lit with sweat dripping off of your nose. Grounded in the history of settlement and the present of protest: there is a poem about the Mayflower (\u201cI remember when I was \/ young \/ my mother gave me a plastic model of the Mayflower . . . It just wasn\u2019t in me \/ to put together \/ the strange canoe \/ with its little white Indians\u201d); there are poems about Gustafusen Lake, Oka, Burnt Church, Caledonia and Ipperwash. Grounded in race: there are poems that try to tease out the many meanings of being both Ojibwe and of French ancestry (the poem \u201cHalf\u201d looks at the many other examples of mixed blood, from Star Trek\u2019s Spock, half Vulcan\/half human to Jesus, half human\/half god) and many good poems that look at \u201cIndians\u201d and whites looking at each other:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Indians Drink\u201d<\/p>\n

In the golden nugget<\/em>
\nthe Indians drink
\nwith their backs against the wall
\nthey watch the white people dancing
\nsometimes the Indians dance too
\nsometimes they don\u2019t
\nsometimes they just watch
\nlike it\u2019s a white people powwow<\/p>\n

Many of the poems in A Difficult Beauty<\/em> are anecdotes, small stories, often about Groulx\u2019s family history or the people around him. They are good stories, well told, and poignant for their shortness and surprise. So many of them mix pleasure and pain:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne Swollen Afternoon\u201d<\/p>\n

She came by yesterday
\nto puff some weed with me
\nher face was swollen
\nshe got drunk with her
\nold man last night
\nher eyes were nearly shut
\nher mouth was the same<\/p>\n

she sits with me
\nhas her smokes
\nand her drinks
\nwe laugh a little<\/p>\n

she says her mouth
\nhurts when she does<\/p>\n

What I appreciate about A Difficult Beauty<\/em> is its sense of miscellany and Groulx\u2019s ability to understand what his poems are doing. These poems are comfortable in themselves and the stories they tell. Sound, rhyme, complex metaphors, similes, and allusions don\u2019t get a whole lot of attention here, but the poems probably work all the better for it. Many of these standard poetic concerns seem to shear off because of the difficult places Groulx forces his poetry to go: how often do you read a poem about a highway being built through a reserve or about the cops shooting a dog hit by a car?<\/p>\n

There is little beauty here, but, what beauty there is, is hard fought for and rendered well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shane Rhodes<\/strong> is the author of five books of poetry including his most recent X<\/em> (2013), and Err<\/em> (2011 and a finalist for the City of Ottawa book award) both with Nightwood Editions. Shane has also published three earlier books with NeWest Press. Shane\u2019s poetry has won an Alberta Book Award, two Lampman-Scott Awards, the P. K. Page Founder\u2019s Award for Poetry and a National Magazine Gold Award. Shane is the poetry editor for Arc<\/em> and is the 2013 Queensland Poet in Residence in Brisbane, Australia.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Arc Poetry Magazine<\/a>: Grounded in the dust of words<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The poetry in David Groulx\u2019s fourth book, A Difficult Beauty, is grounded. Grounded in Groulx and his personal history. Grounded in the dirt and dust of Elliot Lake, the boom\/bust town where he grew up, and the uranium mine where his father must have worked, the miners\u2019 houses full of radiating dust and radon. Grounded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"10435,9977,16250,10361","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2075,1924],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[226],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10159"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10159"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}