Toronto: Coach House Books

88 pgs./$15.95 US

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.” Continue reading →