I would like a different body, a different mind, a different life,” Fraser Sutherland opens his latest collection of poems. “Is that too much to ask?” Despite what reads as an epigraphic appeal, however, this uncle of CanLit provides hindsight rather than transformation. Unfortunately, I think; I would love to see a more muscular exertion of Sutherland's good ear and brisk critical mind. But he is not interested in reinventing poetry; in The Philosophy of As If, Sutherland again works with the habits and motifs that have marked his work – distance, logophilia; a toying with vernacular to see how far it bends.
Rather than reinvention, The Philosophy of As If seeks a return to the “old days,” when a poem “was an oscilloscope registering the curve of moods.” As in the poet's own plea for a different body, mind and life, the entreaty for purer poetics comes from the superfluity of the real:
The poem is out of its mind
trying to be a tree,
a tragedy, a true confession.
It wishes the poet had more legitimate
means to relieve his mind,
less wasteful ways of exacting revenge.
By way of atonement, perhaps, we have the collection's final poem, a 19-page incantation titled And All Shall Be Redeemed. Some of these long lines, each a copulative sentence, show Sutherland at his wry best – “and comedy and tragedy shall retire as roadies emeritus” – or hell-bent on re-exalting language – “and gambrel, gable, hip, and mansard shall cause roofers to purse their lips.” Is The Poem mollified? The poet juxtaposes, inverts and waxes cleverly chiasmic, but too often, the metaphorical roofers are left dangling (sorry) on the edge of so what.
The undeveloped does give way to the possible, to the as if. The collection is intellectually informed by Hans Vaihinger's Philosophie des Als Ob. In a recent interview for The Globe and Mail, Sutherland explained that, for much of his career, he has been contemplating the words of Vaihinger, especially the philosopher's assertion that imagination or belief is as important, and perhaps more influential, than reality.
Sutherland's imagined or wished-for “different life” is an examination of the quotidian. The speaker of Texture waits for nothing in particular while plucking out beard hairs, wondering how or whether to “safeguard data” and smoking out the bathroom window: “I would like to become a cop,” the poem ends. “It would give my life some meaning.” Yet therein, Sutherland lobs pellets of vivid observation: “My wife wears a Nicoderm patch like a rose tattoo,” he writes in that poem. Elsewhere, the expository From a Hospital Bed ends with the stirring plaint, “Do not admit from me a frail surrender.”
The first persons Sutherland steps into are unabashed – the “least pornophilic of men,” an invented folk-song hero, an 11-year-old shrugging out of an Eliotesque moment to go home for lunch – but they somehow seem superficial. The poems are often occasional, some so figuratively slight as to make one question whether they are actually poems. They work best when the author himself, well-read and seasoned, comes through. Replies To a Little Girl in the Back Seat of a Car That Draws Up Beside Me at a Bus Stop on Chilly Night in March Whose Smiling Mother Calls Out ‘She Thinks You're Santa Claus' is hilarious, at once wide-ranging and compressed. In his own voice, Sutherland offers “Scheherazades scribbling To be continued on your thighs.” In Green, a storm “casts ashore a boyman who,/ given his future,/ gets up and walks away from me.”
Sutherland's strength is this deceptive simplicity, a verbal clarity and concision that come from his long practice of observation, a life well inked.
Though too young to be wishing already for a different life, Katia Grubisic does covet the neighbours' trampoline.
