The Ventriloquist

The Ventriloquist gives us four fearless and seminal works by one of Canada's master poets. A scathing indictment of war and its ravages, it's also a testament to the power of poetic narrative.

Gary Geddes is known for his first-person narrative poems and "seamless impersonations." Those figures reaching out from the near or distant past to have their story told include a youth in charge of horses on a doomed and bloody mission to the New World during the Spanish conquest; a so-called "mad bomber" who dies in a washroom of the House of Commons when the dynamite he is carrying explodes; a wily and outrageous Chinese sculptor and his legion of warrior subjects struggling against imperial edicts to conform; and POWs in Hong Kong and Japan in World War II doing their damnedest to survive, a struggle that continued back home in the face of shocking neglect.

Geddes finds the phrase that best describes this kind of historical rescue work is "the ventriloquism of history," but jokingly admits that he's never quite sure if he's ventriloquist or dummy. The critics have no doubt about this, however, calling his work "stunning," "wonderful," "breathtaking in its imaginative reach and verbal dexterity." Robert Kroetsch described War & Other Measures as "the kind of poem poets are only supposed to be able to dream ... the sustained calibration is beautiful. I didn't know the long poem could be so taut.... The years of art and craft are in the book." Hong Kong Poems prompted Michael Estok to say in a review in The Fiddlehead: "It is a weighty and worthy and admirable undertaking.... [Geddes's] book of elegies puts him on the same level of poetic intensity (perhaps he even surpasses it) of Milton's 'Lycidas' or Tennyson's In Memoriam." These words of praise are reflected in the awards the books received on first publication: the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, Writers Choice Award, National Magazine Gold Award, and Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region). The Terracotta Army, which won the latter award, was also dramatized and broadcast by CBC and BBC radio.

REVIEWS

"A powerful indictment of war, showing through narrative power and lyrical intensity the personal cost of armed conflict.... Like [John] McCrae, Geddes speaks for the dead, reclaiming their voices, their stories, and a forgotten part of their lives. And what they have to tell us isn't pretty or patriotic. We are not told to 'take up the quarrel' or grasp the torch of war, but to beware, especially of language. The epigraph to Geddes' collection is a quote by Margaret Atwood: 'War happens when language fails.' If only our world leaders would exchange literature and not missiles, we might be able to avoid the destruction of life, spirit, and dignity that happens in war. Geddes' The Ventriloquist: Poetic Narratives from the Womb of War should be first on their, and our, reading lists." ---Kevin Bushell, The Fiddlehead