The Character Actor Convention,
Guy Elston
The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025
As a fellow poet, I first encountered Guy Elston’s work when we were featured readers at the Art Bar in Toronto back in August 2024. I bought a copy of his chapbook, Automatic Sleep Mode (Anstruther, 2023) at the time because I had so loved his poetry and the way he read it. Some of those quirky poems are in this debut collection, the cleverly and amusingly titled The Character Actor Convention. Published last year, Elston’s first full book of poems is sharp and carefully crafted. The poet’s witty voice and sense of humour is central to his style of writing, and it’s a breath of fresh air on the Canadian poetry scene.
In “The Great Sheep Panic of 1888,” Elston documents the thoughts of one of the sheep that fled “various fields across some 200 square miles of Oxfordshire” on November 3, 1888. Google it and you’ll find a whole lot of fascinating factoids about what exactly happened, but what you’re left thinking about is why the event occurred—at approximately 8pm that day—and then you’re left considering how humans react with panic, as well. The voice of one sheep speaker draws the reader in: “It’s that word panic/I take offence to. Like you show your true self/for one moment and everyone says/Are you feeling okay?” The voice continues to engage the listener, “You’re telling me you’ve never felt penned in,/just waiting for something terrible?/Panic can’t last a lifetime.” The ease with which Elston channels the voice of the philosophical sheep is admirable in its certainty. As a reader, you must suspend your disbelief but also extend your imaginative prowess. That’s refreshing.
King Tutankhamun makes an appearance in “Treasure,” and Elston channels his voice on the page with italics. Here the reader eavesdrops on a fascinatingly imagined conversation between the poem’s speaker and the iconic dead mummy. “Yep, they went full British Museum on my ass,” Tut says, sounding frustrated, only to have the speaker reply, “But you’re an icon now, a symbol of wonder.” The chat continues with the speaker asking, “Do you think it’s possible to know a god?” The dead boy king “spits out a tooth, so it clatters off a gold relief” and answers, “Come on man, I’m nineteen.” It’s impossible to read one of Elston’s poems and not chuckle, shake your head, or just marvel at how his mind works.
A mix of persona poems, as well as dialogic poems (between creatures or famous dead figures and the speaker), populate The Character Actor Convention. Elston uses epigraphs to offer some background, and then—as a reader—you’ll likely find yourself going off into a rabbit hole of internet searches to learn more just because they’re fascinating events. There’s a uniqueness in the content matter here that’s refreshing, especially in contrast to the thematically centred poetry collections which seem to have become more common in Canadian poetry in recent years.
Not all these poems dance with eccentricity, so a close reading is required. In “A Drop in the Bucket of Public Waste,” the epigraph lets the reader know that this will not be a quirky and superficial dance as the poet writes: “Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta.” Here is a reference to the ways in which microplastics permeate human lives, woven into fabrics and flesh alike. In “Sunday Drive,” lab rats are compared to wild ones: “Wild rats give up in minutes,/but lab rats paddle for days/in water-filled cylinders, believing in,//beseeching!/human hands.” And in “Instrument,” Elston contemplates the temporal nature of death and mortality, ending with a contemplation on the worth of a life and how it’s been used.
There are layers of meaning and interpretation to be mined in Guy Elston’s The Character Actor Convention, so don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just all about whimsy. The poet’s craft is keen and clever—and his work also points out the inane nature of our world today. There are tiny, poetic digs at the superficiality and the solipsistic nature of the internet’s social media platforms. All in all, this debut collection should rightfully serve as a doorway into a well-established and lengthy poetic career.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent books include The Pollination Field (Turnstone, 2025) and The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). She is the Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (TWUC) and recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. Kim may be reached via her author website.