Match, by Helen Guri (A Review by Adam Sol)

Here’s what I know about Helen Guri. She lives in Toronto. She’s shorter than I am. And much thinner. I think she’s dating a guy named Tom. She may have a cat. She wrote something funny online about Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and Anne Carson (see here: http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/feature/sophoclean-rob-ford). And her first book of poems, Match, is about a lonely 40-something year-old man named Robert Brand who purchases, and then has a sort of relationship with, a mail-order sex doll.

The lyric poem can do a lot of things, and inhabit characters is one of them. Full disclosure: I’ve been known to do it myself. And while there are some characters (Prufrock, Henry from the Dreamsongs, Olson’s Maximus) who are clearly intended to be read as stand-ins or distorted masques for their creators, for others the relationship is less clear. So while relishing the oddness of the premise of Match, as well as Guri’s wonderful musical ear, I thought a lot about the central character: not just “Who is Robert?” but “How does the poet Helen Guri want me to approach him?” The jacket copy blurb about the book directed me towards one central concern: “Can anything good happen when the object of one’s affection is, well, an object?” There are other themes in the book about how the line between objectification and love is not as clear as we’d like to believe, and about how technology- electronic, synthetic, plastic- intrudes upon, replicates, or even replaces ‘true’ relationships. As Guri writes in ‘Hovercraft, Out Warm, Love Doll,’ “Where there is no inside the outside means everything.”

But I was worried when I started reading Match that that would be it- that Guri’s Robert Brand would be a vehicle for a familiar indictment of contemporary culture, that she might be tempted to resort to snark- in short, that her portrayal of this hapless fellow would feel cruel. Perhaps I was prepared to be a bit over-sensitive because I myself am a 40-something year-old man. But I’ve also noticed a recent strain of contemporary poetry that confuses cruelty with honesty, and that uses self-referential language or snappy imagery or formal acuity as cover for a lack of empathy. Here especially, it seemed to me that the easy laugh would make the whole structure come crashing down. If Guri had made Robert distasteful, or merely pathetic, I would have been angry with her- why invent him just for the sake of shooting holes in his face?

I need not have worried, and if this were a longer-form review, I could (and would be happy to) go into more detail about how Guri avoids these pitfalls to create a character, and a sort of strange situation, in her book of poems that is thoughtful, clever, and even moving. I could discuss her exquisite ear, and her sharp, witty imagery. (One favourite was: Her torso is as spare as the twine between / two tin cans.” And another, from ‘If Love is a Sleeping Jackrabbit’: “Critter that twins its springs in a gizmo, / keeps its leaps sly / between twelve dens in sleep.”) Most importantly, I’d trace how the novelistic aspects of the book artfully follow Robert’s development of empathy, which expands outward as the book progresses: first mostly he worries about himself; then he imagines the feelings of his doll; then he begins writing letters to an imagined woman working at the factory where the dolls are produced. Et cetera. In this sense, Guri’s control over her subject is training for us- just as Robert’s empathy grows more outward-looking and complex, so too do we as readers feel a more complex empathy for the man who, during the first pages of the book, may have seemed more like the butt of a joke than a semi-heroic character. To me, then, Match is about the longing to know another, even if that other is (at first) an inanimate object. Not the nature of love, or of sexual or romantic desire, but the nature of empathy, of human connection.

Adam Sol’s fourth book of poetry will be published in the spring of 2014.