The Character Actor Convention, Guy Elston
Porcupine’s Quill, 2025
It takes getting to the collection’s titular poem, which is located at about the halfway point of the collection, to feel the depth of Guy Elston’s poetic vision really sink in. For The Character Actor Convention, Elston’s debut poetry collection, this moment is akin to a lightbulb, not quite an aha so much as it is the smugness of satisfaction when witnessing a writer in full control of a narrative carefully guide their reader where they want them to go. Like the titular poem, in which “‘we’ and ‘they’ blend”, The Character Actor Convention is like stepping into a circus tent, expecting only to laugh but quickly finding a sobering and moving edge to what was billed as light entertainment. One is left feeling amused and troubled in equal measure.
Let us start with the entertainment, then, the peanut butter to the pill. Elston’s skill in finding opportunities for puns and wordplay is undeniable, even unmatched, as far as my recent recollections of poetry collections I have read. It’s been a while since I laughed at something witty and silly as a poem about water, in which hydrogen speaks to oxygen as if to a former lover or a best friend who is now more of an enemy: “O, you’re an asshole. But O,/ when we were fresh,/ when we flowed…”. Poems like “Test Subject”, which is written from the perspective of a sunflower, and “Halloween Training for Horses”, which speaks to the horses receiving “spooky training”, are entertaining in their vision while revealing a tenderness to their respective nonhuman subjects.
For those who, like myself, get their kick from general cultural nerdiness, Elston also has the bases covered. A litany of historical and cultural figures litter the pages of The Character Actor Convention, among them Joan of Arc, Tutankhamun, and Saint Augustine, while a bunch more find their consolidated home in “For a Great Time.” “Funerary Mask” is a gathering of cultural and literary references held together by material culture dimension due to its physicality, as the speaker is carefully itemized/anatomized. Other instances delighted me as an art historian, from the updated “rip-off” of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1912 manifesto that under Elston’s hand became “A Drop in the Bucket of Public Waste”, to the line “in Late Antiquity alone,/ or the Mediterranean Pagan-Christian/ Intermediary Period, as my department/ was last rebranded” in “The Dream Historian’s Dream”, which made me laugh and groan in equal measure for its tongue-in-cheek truthfulness.
The moment of sobriety, then, comes with the poems “Home Sick” and “Three-Star Resort”. Grounded in reality, where “Beauty is not/ an ideal in my country, but a taxpayer-funded, licensed service” and “A thin towel” stands “between a reserved lounger and chaos”, these poems read like glimpses behind a curtain to reveal an Oz-ian truth. In these moments, the world takes on the quality of a fantasy and disassociation kicks in, much as it does with “The Character Actor Convention”. These are the moments where Elston’s humour takes on a comforting, even quasi-prophetic, quality. When history and culture combine, crashing against each other like tectonic plates, it is the dash of the playful and the speculative that put things into perspective, not to placate but to impart sobriety.
Margaryta Golovchenko (she/her) is an art historian, poet, and critic currently based in Calgary, on the ancestral land of the Siksikaitsitapi – Blackfoot Confederacy. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently Daughterland (Anstruther Press, 2022).
