PEI poet Steve McOrmond made his mark in 2004 when his debut, Lean Days, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award ( an award for the best first book by a Canadian poet.) His follow up, Primer on the Hereafter, won the Atlantic Poetry Prize. As expected, his 2010 release, The Good News about Armageddon, is a great, and, distinctive collection of poetry.
As the title implies, these are poems that tackle contemporary crises, but with a sort of matter-of-factness that is quite powerful and, impressively, never trite. The collection is topical and yet not solipsistic or a warning or offering answers. Cynical, though not without comedy. The poems are “just saying,” and doing so with a well-spent economy of words. Its outright fortitude spares it a preachiness or a purple tinge, and intellect and truth spare it from bordering on angst. It is written with an effective fervor that gives teeth to these biting, mostly splendid poems. Something meaningful echoes back as you read, and the weight of its subject matter is partially unloaded with a share of comedic relief as well. If crying about it can’t change the world, you might as well laugh about it.
Its finer moments are nothing less than potent: the language and how it is delivered, the imagery, the humour as a vessel to best carry substance. My favourite aspects of the collection get at the absurdity of this: we’re living on a planet we know we are destroying, and we’re living in a world fraught with increasing issues, and increasing apathy to them. It’s just another oil spill, it’s just another war, it’s just another talentless teen celebrity getting all the media spotlight.
“Online, I am no closer
To the blessed interconnectedness.
Deaf woman mauled by mountain lion.
Are Paris Hilton’s 15 minutes over yet?
Outside, a cold wind scatters
the last of the fallen leaves.
Human disinterest story.
Corpse lay next to TV for 3 years.
This just in from Hubble: a pair of black holes
locked in death dance. Make it your screensaver.
Are we winning the war on terror?
I think it might snow.”
What’s evident in reading this: Maybe the end of the world isn’t a big and sudden bang. Maybe it is a slow death, like a socio-economic-environmental cancer, already metastasizing through the planet as I type this …
“When there are no more wolves,
What will you cry then?”
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