Imaginary Origins: Selected Poems 1972-2003 [Paperback]

In the Introduction to his selected poems, Imaginary Origins, Cyril Dabydeen claims to find his poetic self in crossing boundaries and looking in different directions. He writes about Columbus and Pablo Neruda. Dabydeen’s “Discussing Columbus” uses participles as a means of participating in the dialogue between poet and reader, poet and Columbus. Dabydeen relies heavily on first-person pronouns and end-of-line stops:

I talk in tongues of newness,
I fulfill a rage without disdain;
I am the voice within, I cringe,
coming to an understanding
of who I am, where I am going next;
this Columbus in me, smashing the waves
into smithereens with bare hands.

Through alliteration, internal rhyme, and participles, Adam, Columbus, and Dabydeen find common cause in the poem’s epigraph from Bartholome de las Casas: “All the peoples of the world are human.” The poem works out-and works through-this all-inclusiveness to come to an understanding of identity, the inner Columbus making and breaking waves. Destiny’s “next” leads to the opening of the second stanza: “Next, making much ado about Behring Straits.” Talking and grimacing, the poet of participles discusses Canadian treaties and constitutions, “making memory out of nothing.” In the face of a sudden divide, “I linger and laugh at other boundaries / which I do not understand. . . ” Making much ado about nothing, the poet risks extending that lack of understanding to the reader even though he embraces the totality of “a deserted but peopled land!”
An earlier poem, “For Columbus”, exhibits similar characteristics of inclusiveness: the poet longs for Italian brothers, Greek sisters, an African father, and Indian mother, and a French aunt; in short, the extended family of mankind. He then turns to other Spanish explorers, such as Cortez and Pizarro, who clashed with Montezuma and the Incas. The poem concludes with a Robinson Crusoe persona engaged in another form of colonialism with Friday commanding and the Spanish Empire sinking in the background. All that Crusoe is left with are a Bible and the bottomless sea.

As I try to jump over it, my paradiso,
El Dorado, the heathen sky
falls prostrate
at my feet.

Dabydeen also pays homage to Pablo Neruda, but his poem (“After Pablo Neruda”) appears underdeveloped because his epigraph from Neruda’s “Memoirs” is as long as the actual poem. Instead of creating a monument to the Chilean poet, Dabydeen offers a flat, unheroic stanza:

To be a hero
in undiscovered
territories
is to be obscure:
these territories
and their songs
are lit only
by the most
anonymous
blood
and by the flowers
whose name
nobody
knows.

In “Weaving Fables” Dabydeen drops stanzas like stones, each one a discrete unit. The poet is “Mowgli”, Kipling’s native boy; he is also the Bengal tiger, before shifting to the sea around Bombay. As the poet goes back in time, he recalls the tragic history of the “Middle Passage”, the abysmal transatlantic crossing from Africa to America. But the transitions from sugar plantation to a tenement in Calcutta are too abrupt, the woven fables forming a pattern not easily discernible.
A similar problem plagues the title poem, “Imaginary Origins” (which originally appeared as “Maestro”, indicating a certain editorial indecisiveness.)

From among cows
you blossom,
out of offal
pungent in the air.
You throw a lasso
and grapple
with horns.

The reader, too, grapples with the horns of Dabydeen’s dilemma, but the lasso fails to tie up all the loose ends of his poetry. The poems selected from his ten volumes of poetry in Imaginary Origins fail to satisfy completely. In exploring his “hinterland spirit” through loss, dislocation, confessional, and mythopoeic modes, Dabydeen’s vision in different directions is often blurred.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)