With nine previous trade collections and a number of significant awards in his rear-view, John Barton is well within selected-poems territory. But as perhaps the first career retrospective by a Canadian openly gay male poet, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin <\/i>also charts the broad strokes of a 30-year sea change. In a recent discussion of emerging queer writer Ben Ladouceur, Barton notes that in his own time the experience of being a queer male has come to no longer entail \u201can a-priori <\/i>despair over same-sex identity\u201d (Arc <\/i>73). One reading of Barton\u2019s career suggested by this selection of poems is as a project of undermining and deconstructing such despair.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a sense in the earliest poems here of a voice coming to self-knowledge in a vacuum\u2014the initial instinct, to fill that great unspoken with volume, scope, wilfulness-as-prophecy:<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve let you in,
\nfilled empty marble halls,
\narching silences that have lasted generations.
\nMy doctors will be shocked.
\nHitler will be shocked.
\nThey never knew I would give birth
\nto a new age.<\/p>\n
The early long poem \u201cHidden Structure\u201d cycles metaphors (the sea, the sun, the infinities between atoms) in search of one large enough to assert its own existence. While the poem lacks the worldliness and emotional nuance of Barton\u2019s mature voice, in its questing, its meandering, its piling of aphorisms, \u201cHidden Structure\u201d performs a necessary work of setting terms: \u201cWe have destroyed in living \/\/ alone the meaning of love.\u201d \u201cThose who love shall love \/ no matter how the bodies join.\u201d This movement over 18 unguarded pages through anguish into love and (self-)acceptance forms a basis for both a personal poetics and for survival.<\/p>\n
There is an echo of that project in the coming-of-age poems from 1994\u2019s Designs from the Interior<\/i>. These graceful lyrics have a prelapsarian quality, nascent sexuality honeyed by nostalgia. Here sin is not in the hand that \u201cembraces mystery, the hungry \/ language of involuntary \/\/ nerve endings\u201d but in the cult of shame that makes simple words of love dangerous. In this queering of familiar adolescent tropes like playing doctor, he produces the most conventionally beautiful poetry of his career. It\u2019s an attempt at deploying the Keatsian beauty-truth connection as a mathematical proof: the existence of beautiful gay love poems proves the objective beauty of gay love itself.<\/p>\n
The later poems cease to presume a \u201cuniversalist\u201d audience. Theirs is a subjectivity that does not hedge its expression in hopes of heteronormative sanction. At the same time the writing itself becomes simultaneously denser and more conceptually expansive. Simile is replaced almost entirely by metaphor, concerned with wholeness rather than comparison. Ideas emerge in long chains that almost defy short excerpts,<\/p>\n
…collapsing
\ninward as memory spirals down a vortex
\nof expanding<\/p>\n
particulars, which with every tighter downward turn more
\nminutely blur<\/p>\n
Compared with early work like \u201cHidden Structure,\u201d the Barton of gems like \u201cSaranac Lake Variation\u201d and \u201cDays of 2004, Days of Cavafy\u201d is less defined by his aloneness, as though in the connections forged by 30 years of writing to predecessors like Frank O\u2019Hara and C.P. Cavafy, and to generations ongoing, it has become a bit easier to simply be a poet, and a man.<\/p>\n
JM Francheteau<\/strong> is a rural transplant based in Ottawa. Recent poems have appeared in CV2<\/i>, ottawater<\/i> and the chapbook A pack of lies<\/i> (Dog Bites Cameron, 2013.) He co-organizes the Ottawa Zine Off! series and blogs at jmfrancheteau.wordpress.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n