The Anatomy of Keys
By Steven Price
Brick Books, 141 pages, $18
When Ehrich Weiss died in a Detroit hospital on Halloween, in 1926, the world was shocked: He had seemed to be something invulnerable, the man who could escape from any coil, mortal or otherwise — Harry Houdini.
He was 52.
Born in Hungary, he spent much of his childhood in Appleton, Wisc., the son of a would-be rabbi who ended his days as a worker in a sewing factory in New York. His father's death haunted the son, as did the death of his adored mother 21 years later.
It was in Appleton that the young Ehrich caught the magic-and-mystery bug from a travelling circus, and while he would for a while bill himself as the King of Kards, and would late in his life stage elaborate illusion shows, it was as Harry Houdini, the escape artist, that he made his reputation from New York to Hong Kong, from Melbourne to Bombay to Montreal.
Crowds gathered to watch him, many times manacled and shackled to heavy weights and then nailed into a crate thrown into the sea, to emerge on the surface, sputtering and grinning, long after he should have drowned. On stage, he would be locked into a huge milk can full of water, inspected by detectives and members of the audience, hidden by a curtain for a minute, then two, then unbelievably four minutes, until he reappeared, free, gasping, soaked, triumphant. Upside-down from a crane over Manhattan in a straitjacket, escaping in full view of a huge crowd, few of whom could begin to discern how he did it.
There have been biographies and novels and movies. The brilliant silent conjuror Teller played Houdini with me in the television series Witness to Yesterday. Posters from Houdini's shows in the early 20th century are sold on the Internet for substantial prices. Eighty years after his death, his name is still legendary.
And now a young B.C. poet, Steven Price, has imaginatively recounted that life in a gripping volume that travels through a mind stricken by his parents' deaths to the point where the idea of escape becomes the driving image: the pilgrimage, the grail. It is a psyche that is always a part of a body, and a body always part of its own ending.
..... a throat believing evil inevitable as breathing.
This is a dark, compelling book that may have you looking over your shoulder for something lurking in a dark corner.
Seeking not escape, but a way in.
There is a poetic adroitness here so knowing that it often hits you only afterward how deliciously chosen each syllable has been. Comfortable to the point of invisibility with metre and rhyme — or without. A touch of the Villanelle, a touch of Dante, echoes of Eliot, touches of poets and forms I know I've read but cannot quite .....
This is a long poem by a poet and teacher of poetry whose technique allows him frequently to achieve what all artists dream of: the virtual disappearance from our awareness of the subtle technical intricacies that are unfolding there.
When I bring to a dinner party some treasures from one of my recently discovered poets, I am often met with, "Oh yes I used to like poetry when I was a kid, haven't read any since school," and so forth. This usually evaporates after I've read them a piece or two from, say, Karen Solie's Short Haul Engine or Billy Collins's Sailing Alone Around the Room. Or I bring some Yeats, in which I've found something that I'd missed before, or Auden.
