Shored up against the glittering allure of memory’s slipstream, Living Under Plastic, Evelyn Lau’s fourth poetry collection, offers readers a fleeting glimpse of that which endures despite the diurnal dejectamenta pooling in the deluge of contemporary existence.
Most often enacted upon “a raft on a sea of nightmares” despite its highly dramatic emotions (especially of the hysterical variety) and hyper-traumatic events, Living Under Plastic lays it on the bottom line:
Here on earth, this is what you are missing—
a crab carcass floating downstream, hinged
and jointed like intricate jewellery,
the bells of white boats knocking in the harbour,
the thud and drone of Olympics construction.
The garbage and music …
The garbage and music indeed. Both saturate the work’s underwhelming soundscapes and pseudo-heightened mindscapes. It almost goes without saying the Vancouverite tips her fedora in the direction of Emily Dickinson, Jeramy Dodds, Susan Holbrook or Leonard Cohen, attempting to come to terms with the finality of suicide or assiduously tackling the gruesome 49-slain stain this world now knows too well in perhaps the collection’s finest composition, The Pickton Trial: “ ‘Believe it or not, once, I had a chance/ for me, believe it or not …’ Pickton said, laughing./ Yes, once you too had a chance to escape/ this city mapped in memory,/ these streets and alleys crisscrossed/ with their cryptology of pain …”
Living Under Plastic, by Evelyn Lau, Oolichan Books, 96 pages, $17.95
According to the back-cover blurb on Lau's latest, the poems featuring in these pages represent “a major departure” for the author of such works as 1989’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Oedipal Dreams (1992), Other Women (1995) and Choose Me (1999). “Instead of the obsessive focus on relationships and emotional damage that has characterized much of her earlier work, this book opens up to explore new subjects: family history, illness, death and dying, consumerism and the natural world.”
Obsessive focus? Emotional damage? New subjects? Consumerism? Huh?
The “new subjects” of these meditations, these streams of dismal Stygian rumination? Father, Grandfather, this terminally self-destructive companion or that brittle yet frangible speaker accomplished in the art of living under plastic (in all the glory that concept connotes and denotes): “I want/ to say no, you do not have to do this,/ you do not have to nail yourself to this cross,/ under the flaming sky, wait for the vultures/ to pluck out your eyes.” (Eliot? Check.)
An oddly uneven work, Lau’s follow-up to 2005’s Treble will either bedazzle or bewilder readers, most likely because its complement of speakers gives voice to suicide’s attraction, despair’s consolation and the impossibility of resurrection, while bizarrely sharing space with narrators terminally struggling beneath the weight of consumerism’s endless denials and demands. Name-checking – Starbucks, Ikea, Holt Renfrew – dates and weakens a work already compromised by its repetitive fetishistic returns. Ostensibly intended to provide readers with an ironic take on silver flash and gold flake, Living Under Plastic’s trio of parts contains much too much … well, loving attention to the good shopper’s mission and the acquisition of more and more must-own – ultimately disposable – designer products and bloated boatloads of stuff.
Examples? Retail Therapy, The Mall and, most obviously, the Plathitudinous Rings:
I hover over the glass case like an anxious parent
picking out her offspring from the row upon row
of identical faces. The jeweller lifts another band
from where it sleeps snug
in its velvet cradle, my face trembles up at me
in reflection, a sliver of self wavering
across the watery surface of precious metal,
frozen in fear like an actress's in a horror film,
her face mirrored in the blade of a kitchen knife …
