The Suicide’s Son by James Arthur. Véhicule Press, 2019. 90 pp. $14.95 (paperback)


Here is a trim poetry paperback that pops in pure fire-engine red—it’s The Suicide’s Son, (Véhicule Press, 2019) a second collection by Canadian-born poet James Arthur. Even before opening to consume the gifts held within, you are struck by the provocative title, which on the cover appears to fall into a fire-scorched hole. As with his first collection, Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) this is a title that brackets the entire work. Though it is about fathers and sons, love, and living in a challenging world against the backdrop of death, The Suicide’s Son is only tangentially about suicide; yet the threat of suicide suspends over the collected poems as the scarecrow in “Effigy” waits for the lit torches, “dancing on air above the riot square.”

Though there is no title poem in this collection, “School for Boys” comes closest to functioning as one. It is the darkest poem in the collection, but arguably the most redeeming. It opens with a simple equation fraught with a sense of terrible inevitability: “The son / of the suicide / becomes a suicide.” The poem lets that statement stand as a cornerstone that informs much of the collection, but indirectly, almost invisibly.

In this poem, suicide as legacy opens out to sin as legacy through “the power of original sin.” It suggests that sin may be found in the predatory mischief of a young boy as well as the predatory crime of the pedophile. But sexual assault is worse by an order of magnitude, and it affects its victim forever:

The anger, the shame:
Over time, these things just become
A piece of who you are.

The speaker confesses a litany of boyhood delinquency, from shoplifting to fighting and wrecking other boys’ fortresses, to bullying. One of life’s cruel ironies is that victims too often make victims of others, in this case a “pale, elfin redhead” who was the designated whipping boy in second grade. Reading the poem, I felt guilty for chuckling at the weaker boy’s attempt to defend himself:

He said he was an extraterrestrial
in disguise, that his people
would soon arrive and kill us, every one,
or take us off to be vivisected.

You have to give the poor kid points for imagination—and vocabulary. Unfortunately, the threat of death or vivisection does not intimidate the bullies, though the speaker can’t help but wonder: “I think I half believed him. / But his people never came.”

“School for Boys” then take us to a supposed character-building private school that turns out to be just another venue for sexual predation. Still, the poem allows us a gift of kindness in the form of a scowling physics teacher who is secretly a painter of delicate watercolors. Sharing his art with our speaker, this teacher provides the comfort of brief refuge as well as sage advice:

                              Life
is not a boy’s school,
he told me; be one man for the world
and another for yourself.

“School for Boys” is deeply confessional, but never maudlin or self-indulgent; personal, yet relevant in the larger human context. Scenes are strung together as if by high-tension wire, charged with the electricity of painful memories. What I continue to find arresting in Arthur’s poems is their honesty. He lays himself bare, and it is up to us to react, consider, and decide to inhabit the truth revealed by each poem.

Stylistically, Arthur has staked out his own territory. Regardless of line length or arrangement on the page, he uses full sentences, generally with appropriate punctuation and capitalization, making his poems as accessible as common prose. The language and pacing are that of the classic storyteller, yet the effect is anything but conventional. Everything is tightly crafted, and he makes liberal use of enjambment and caesura to vary rhythm, direct emphasis, and control rhyme patterns. Nothing is inscrutable or imprecise. It all adds up to maximum impact conveyed directly from the words to the reader’s brain, and via brain to heart. These are not poems trying to be clever, dropping images like breadcrumbs that don’t lead anywhere.

There is no superfluity (or sentimentality) to be found in any of these poems. Arthur has shown himself again to be a master of poetry that speaks of the essential, through a voice that is dark, ironic, insightful, but often playful and tender. Take the meltingly tender personification in “Wind,” its presence “at times embracing you so lightly / in ways you don’t even think of / as touch.”

The playful part comes out in poems like “Ode to the Heart,” in which the speaker addresses his own heart, and the trope of the classic ode is turned outside-in:

But if I needed reminding
of what I have in common
with the ibis or the snail,
the narwhal or tiger,
I could slip my hand
inside my shirt and feel you
at my core, a clockwork fist
clenching and unclenching,
lumping out your truth,
survive, survive, survive

This heart is not the romanticized symbol of valentines and rhyme, the poem asserts; this is an organ “indifferent to poetry,” that goes a bit wild with the surge of adrenalin caused by certain (presumably confrontational) conversations. Out of the teasing yet affectionate tone comes the final truth of the poem:

               Other times
I think you’re talking to me
from your cage, instructing me:
If I know what I’m doing,
I’m not doing it right.

In another of Arthur’s strong endings, the poem makes a cognitive leap into its larger thought: the dumb “lumping” of the heart is thoughtlessly mechanical, but perfectly right. What a comfort for the speaker and for all of us, to take this as a basic tenet if we so choose; to leave space for doubt, confusion, and to understand that certainty may not lead to better outcomes in life. And might this also suggest a hint of Ars Poetica? Arthur certainly seems to know what he is doing in his poems, but they have an organicity that feels unplanned, as if the poet is taken by surprise as much as we are by what comes out on the page.

As a poet, Arthur has matured into this collection in concert with his maturation into the world of fatherhood. Many poems in this collection reflect the expanding consciousness of parenthood, how it often transforms our perception of ourselves, society and the world.

Several poems take children’s classic picture books as their theme, refracted through Arthur’s multifocal lens. “Children’s Book” revolves around a picture book that makes a sound when you turn the last page – the chirp of a cricket. When the imbedded electronic chirper goes haywire, the father in the poem, “knowing what must be done,” sets to with a paring knife:

                                                     The book’s voice box,
to the father’s eye, looks like a dime-sized bicycle bell,
and as he pries it free, the chirruping intensifies…

And this stereotypical fatherly duty shades into the unexpected: “…becoming something like the death cry of a creature / with an actual beating heart.” Arthur’s poems are full of juxtapositions like this, pushing in different directions within the overall frame. This technique is a big part of what makes each poem provocative and thrilling in its own way.

In “Goodnight Moon,” even a speaker who asserts “I used to be as unsentimental as anyone could be,” has fallen prey to the seductions of parenthood: “Now I’m almost absurd, a clown, carrying you on my shoulders….” Whether or not you’re familiar with the beloved picture book by Margaret Wise Brown, you can’t help but be charmed by the way the poem echoes the original, adding some tongue-in-cheek twists: “Goodnight, fair trade coffee. Goodnight, Prada shoes.”

But watch out, because once you’re laughing along like a giddy toddler, Arthur injects a dose of adult reality, a shockwave woven so seamlessly into the picture book language that you could almost miss its gravity:

                                      There was another child
your mom and I conceived, who’d now be reading
and teaching you to read–who we threw away
when he or she was smaller than a watermelon seed.

While rhyme lulls us into a Seussian space, the words “threw away” land with a combination of wistfulness and self-recrimination. In the poem’s context, those two words are enough to convey how some choices we make may later be viewed from a different emotional perspective.

In “On the Move,” the speaker explains: “Day by day, I’m feeling my way into fatherhood, / learning what my son is to me, and I to him.” One of the side-effects of this induction, it seems, is a new and heightened awareness. The speaker on a lone walk notices the small creatures around him (albeit with something less than affection) from the “filthy squirrels” to “stubborn birds” to a cemetery for dead pets. “Animals have never meant very much to me, / but I’ve got them on the brain these days–” he reveals, ranging into thoughts about the mechanisms of evolution and circling back to being glad to be human: “I walk upright, practicing / the song of my species, by speaking.”

And speak he does, through the conversational cadences of his poems; as Chaucer spoke, all those centuries ago, a ghost that Arthur calls upon in “To Geoffrey Chaucer” with the plea, “I wish I could get your advice / on how to write this second book.” We journey through this poem in much the way the pilgrim Chaucer travelled, gathering “many a song / and many a leccherous lay.” But inevitably we are brought forward in time, to “men, jackhammers, heavy trucks” and a swirl of leaves whispering

                             Love life more;
Love life more–
I string and restring
My one phrase, trying to build a home inside it,

Here is that tangential specter of suicide that creeps in like miasma through vulnerable cracks. It is something toxic to be reckoned with and, above all, fought against. The dark hand of death informs the collection as a whole, but each poem draws toward the necessity of embracing life. It is love, in its many forms, that presides over that dark hand, pressing it back into the recesses of the poems’ consciousness.

And when romantic love takes over, we are treated to the irresistible, sexy seduction of “Wolf,” where the big bad wolf of the fairy tale is unambiguous in his desire: “shy girl in crimson cowl, let me unfasten the buttons / that you’ve done up to your collar.” We feel the thrill of the wolf’s lecherous gaze as he plots, answering his predatory nature. But at its closing, the poem pivots as Wolf tries to mitigate his wildness:

It’s not like I’m not able
to live inside the law. It just makes me crazy,
seeing little pigs building up their houses
with hickory sticks and straw.

What feels light-hearted at the start resolves to another of Arthur’s unsettling but resonant endings. And we almost want to offer the wolf a comforting postscript from the old pop song sung by Sam the Sham: Even bad wolves can be good. Somehow, we get the feeling that this Little Red already knows that.

Another Arthur trademark is his judicious use of rhyme. Varying degrees of rhyme ring softly within just about every poem, linking lines, stanzas, even beginnings with ends. In “Hundred Acre Wood,” for instance, the rhyme is story-book direct, but still expertly deft. The hard end-rhyme of “cold” and “told” is separated by the space of two stanzas. “Understand” at the end of one couplet’s first line, is separated by a couplet before it is repeated at the end of the next couplet’s last line. Moreover, the second “understand” shifts focus from an observation about the speaker’s child to one about anthropomorphizing Winnie the Pooh.

In “A Local History,” occasional rhymes land in unpredictable places, much like the flies that fill the grandmother’s house: “Year/pioneer, plough/mounds, snow/Ontario, restore/before.” Placed inconspicuously, often through enjambment, the rhyme chimes in some deeper level of the brain, providing a subtle rhythm without intruding on the smooth flow of the lines.

Now I must face the problem with reviewing a book of wonderful poems: as much as you want to keep going, you have to stop sometime. Readers of reviews don’t want to hear about every poem, leaving nothing for self-discovery; happily, even at this length I have only scratched the surface of the experiences in The Suicide’s Son. Arthur’s poems range and prowl like the wolf, hungry and full of primal need. Each one shocks, surprises, and delights according to its will. In “Effigy,” he concludes, “for us it is the finest most natural thing / to lean into the wind / and start burning.” And nothing is more human than this poet’s bared consciousness casting for ways—and reasons—to pull back from the fire and survive, survive, survive.