Jérôme Melançon : Dream of Me as Water, by David Ly

Dream of Me as Water, David Ly
Palimpsest Press, 2022

 

 

 

There are longings at the heart of David Ly’s Dream of Me as Water. Through poems that disguise themselves and appear conversational, Ly opens the way to confidences. The collection’s sections highlight this mounting intimacy, this slow opening up: “Dream,” “Dream of Me,” “Dream of Me as Water.” The speaker does not change topics, does not jump in; slowly, he advances, ever deeper, within the same element, bringing back images and motifs, letting the relationship to his reader become more complex, closer, more familiar.

The words are precise; the phrasings are light: “I want to be the ocean // and the lightning that could // strike it at any moment.” (37) Or “The water ripples and I jolt / awake on my back.” (25) Or “Oceanside, I haul my net / reel and reel / until the present thrashes // its prehistoric fins and stares up at me / asking” (61) But as I attempt to choose lines to cite to make this point, I find that they are all so intricately woven together that any choice feels like an unjust separation from the rest of the poems. These poems, even when broken up and making their way one step at a time across the page, are reaching for the long line, the end of the breath, the falling into the next breath. The meaning of any one line within a poem depends heavily on what is yet to come and on the preceding accumulation.

And yet Ly’s language is the language we speak, transfigured by earnestness and the pull of metaphor. Picture a back and forth, a wide space between this reversal of the physicality of fishing: “Softly lit / by glowing lures / thought / leaks / (drop by drop) / into a disordered world” (67). His poems are deeply mediated and situated by Google searches, Instagram feeds, television programs, movies, and trend-observing objects (a pink Himalayan salt lamp). They contain glimpses and echoes of poems from his debut collection, Mythical Man, recognizing that his readers are likely to already have some familiarity with his writing, or likely to want to deepen that familiarity – to go back to the source, in a sense.

These poems are direct, with the directness from which we wish to preserve our loved ones. They begin with lines like “I’m looking to feel better” or “If I could go back and change” or “You said you wanted nothing.”

Visually, some of these poems (7) are rivers: winding arrangements of short lines, evoking currents, the carrying of objects and selves, but also the strength of thoughts, their obsessiveness, the further thoughts to which they deliver us. Ly gives us the passage of time and the stability of feeling in these sideways transitions. In the poem “Still,” from the beginning to the end, it’s the movement within that gives the words meaning, so that this meaning isn’t transferable to only one of its segments.

Some of these poems (2) are pools: blocks of prose that come close to narration. They let an idea sit – witnessing a meteorite fall and deeply caring for someone; a sudden love for Stevie Nicks and the fear of the implications of this love. No deepening, nothing hidden, only the mystery of the presence of elements and their juxtapositions.

Some of these poems (8) are waves: a placement back and forth on the page, where the flow of ideas is loosened; a balancing movement, touching the extremes of oppositions where there is no middle. Their movement steps over the disjunctions Ly often includes, explicitly in the text, implicitly in its placement.

And while most poems play with more, or much less, regular arrangements on the page, these three unfixed forms stand out in the commitment they embody. Although many of the poems in this collection reference solitude, Dream of Me as Water is a commitment to presence and togetherness, it holds the promise of laughter. It’s a collection written with the seriousness and the lightness of dreams, the anticipation of the moment when we can finally awaken and recount them to those who have been waiting for us to join them.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter still, at least as of the time of writing, and will be as long as it is more than ruins, and back on Instagram, both at @lethejerome, and trying out Mastodon @lethejerome@mstdn.social.

Kim Fahner : Mythical Man, by David Ly

Mythical Man, David Ly

Palimpsest Press, 2020

          Mythical Man is David Ly’s sharp debut collection of poetry, and it makes you think about identity, race, social class, gender, and gender preference. It makes you think about love and desire, about our relationships with one another, about distances that grow when connections are shattered, and about how we constantly define and redefine ourselves as humans. It’s a book of poems that questions masculinity, as well as the notion of toxic masculinity, and it’s a book of poems that is full of lines that sing with wit and bittersweet wisdom at the same time.

          The four “Mythical Man” poems weave a thread through the collection. They feel like tiny touchstones as you read, as you discover them one by one, like markers of identity along the journey. In one piece, the speaker’s voice says, “We press against each other/so hard/that I should just admit/I want to be/absorbed into you.” In another, the poet writes “This will only feel/like forever for now.” In the final poem in the series, he alludes to how we are defined by our ancestral and familial bonds, suggesting that even these bonds can become restraints—things to be broken free of, and the very things that need to be questioned and destroyed in order to permit new creation. Our identity reveals itself slowly, through the way in which we lead our lives, and through our ability to question the patterning with which we’ve grown up. Ly asks us to think about what identity means, but also about how we maintain our independence when we come into the strange and exciting geography of a new intimate relationship.  

          There’s an underlying thread of desire and intimacy that runs through the collection, with a focus on the nuances of gay love and creating relationships within an urban centre. In “Logging On,” the poet writes, honestly, “As simple as it is, hookup culture is confusing as fuck.” In “Poem Made From Kindling,” the speaker wonders “how long is too long/to hold a gaze?” The poem, “Transit Romance Guy” speaks to a situation that any of us could easily relate to—a chance meeting on the city bus, and an imagined ‘what if’ sort of story that is woven in a person’s mind. In “Hunt,” the speaker pleads: “Clutch me in the dark—together we’ll stay/silent as I brush the vertebrae/protruding from your charcoal-flecked skin.” All of it is about the importance of connection—emotionally and physically—on a deep, human level.

          Ly is a poet who can craft beautiful images. In “Nymphaeacea,” the speaker says “I should have believed more as a boy.” Now, as an adult, they say that they would feel less guilty “for moments of self-compassion” that “bloom/in the imagination like pink lilies/bobbing on a boiling black lake.” The images in “Walking Together At The End Of The World” are—quite simply—stunning: “We traverse hand-in-hand//across frozen seas, across engulfed metropoles/built to withstand the apocalypse, the ice//beneath our feet pulsating with the glow/of a skyscraper-sized cuttlefish.” An eyelash is lifted by a bit of breeze, sending it “dancing through the air.” Sometimes, reading a David Ly poem is like seeing a line, an image, or a stanza dance elegantly in slow motion across your field of vision. You must pay attention.

Mythical Man is a collection of work that lays out the myth of what western society imagines a man should be, based on the veneer that is so falsely and erroneously conjured in popular culture. It makes a reader question what masculinity really entails, and what makes toxic masculinity rise up in such a wildly unchecked way in our culture. The poems also remind the reader that race and identity can never be separated from our explorations in love and human connection. Then, it slays the preconceived myths, charging the reader to consider and then subvert their own deeply embedded biases and stereotypes. Why continue to propagate them without purpose, and so thoughtlessly? Mythical Man offers alternate doorways of understanding to readers who will likely find themselves with more open minds after reading Ly’s work. Here is, to be sure, a strong collection of poetry, and one that bodes well for Ly’s future releases.

         

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers' Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim blogs fairly regularly at kimfahner.wordpress.com and can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com