Standing Wave [Paperback]

More than anything else Robert Allen in Standing Wave gives the impression of having a conversation, an intimate conversation with us, whom he regards as old friends. Here’s his handle on loneliness:

I am increasingly alright. What would you want me to say?
I have no grid on which to reckon sure things. I am talking
and singing to myself at an accelerating rate,

which argues mental problems, or the lonely recursiveness
of language, when it is directed at no other. I wish those I think are listening
were here, greedily drinking from the well spring

of my words, like the dead beyond Lethe, who god
knows all have a full slate of problems, and would
love to listen, even talk back, given half a chance.

I have two thousand square feet in which to dance, but
no one to dance for. Though I paint shapes of feet,
opposing mine, still, the music always ends with me falling

on a folding chair; an empty floor with a map for dancing,
and the dust of randomness settling on the wooden sill.

There you have the sonnet form-4 X 3 lines + 2 trailers-Allen uses for about half this volume (“Thirty-eight Sonnets from Jimmie Walker Swamp”), and there you have this man’s gentle tone. He’s concessive, wishful, full of doubt, discovery and perspective. Allen hints at rhymes, but his hints sound more musical and fluent than the sing-song rhyming schemes becoming fashionable again these days. I hear the whisper of second thought in “still” and in the final word “sill”. There’s also “chance” and “dance”, and “for” and “floor”, but in a totally unobtrusive context. Although Allen writes of the “dust of randomness”, I suspect he’s extremely calculating and bug-eyed aware. These sonnets are meditations not on spiritual puffery, but on the niggling rust in the armour, on war and history, the riot in the garden and George Gershwin. He can even write something mindful of America’s mindless game of boredom and statistics-to-death baseball.
His “Aw shucks” tone is deceptive. “Half/ my life has been knowing the dark earth of here,// and not the promised secrets of the universe. I have it/ all here in my head. I don’t know what it’s worth.” He doesn’t know what it’s worth? Even if Allen is being coy, it is clear he values this “dark earth of here”. Likewise, he begs the question about what he has known for the other unaccounted half of his life. One of his successful techniques is having one sonnet borrow insights from another, so they become prolonged meditations. Initial reflections on the Trojan War extend into night thoughts of the military prowess of the USA and post-Cold War impressions until he circles back in the fourth sonnet with these lines:

If the Greeks are building a horse
it’s because war has ceased being a joyful game
and they must start killing to go home.

How contemporary! I’d jump at the chance to tattoo Stephen Harper’s forehead with these four sonnets, especially the concluding lines: “ . . . their frail bodies proof that of all things// that relieve us of the weight of air, those/ that kill us ride into our minds the easiest.” He completes the 38 sonnets by coming full circle with an echo of the “dark earth of here”. “If I see only order around me/ I will jump, be the childish Lucifer falling.”
To write about “The Encantadas”, the second half of Standing Wave, I must first plead two-thirds dumb. Represented here is the final third of a long loping poem, first published in Magellan’s Clouds (1988) and continued in Ricky Ricardo Suites (2000). According to Allen’s notes, the first two-thirds of the poem concerns Jack, an oceanographer, and Jack’s body double, Teddy, the tap-dancing turtle. In this final installment Jack is back on the high seas on the urging of Core, his muse, smuggling Greek wine to Northern Europe. It reminds me of the Rheostatics’ “Onilley’s Strange Dream” for no other reason than its mood-a kind of world weariness and tense overkill.

. . . No one is original, of course - but
gets consequence and cause messed up; no
wonder we worship arbitrary

gods; the earth’s a magical place thereby, with wrung-necked swans and
grave owls; with thought running like blood in our consciousness, with only
a bootstrap segue into afterlife; a roadmap, a shining negative. Small

time bombers have made the world intolerable for the smug . . .

Allen claims “Quick cuts are an important formal element of the poem, as are interruptions, discontinuities and abrupt changes in speaker.” The cuts, interruptions and discontinuities I can enjoy and savour. Life is thankfully full of interruptions, discontinuities and change. As for that “speaker”, I own a pair of Paradigm bookshelf speakers, and they are solely dependent on what signals get pushed through them. Jack, Teddy and Core rely on Allen’s wisdom and creativity. He is the one to ultimately opine, “I refuse to think/ of memory as surrender. I think it is all things considered. It is consideration”-as is this wonderful book.

Andrew Vaisius (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

"Allen has to be ranked as one of Canada's finest poets." -- Montreal Review of Books

The themes of Standing Wave will be familiar to readers of Robert Allen’s acclaimed poetry and novels: the slow rusts and wild incandescences of memory; the myths and delusions sustaining our lives; the uneasy duo of body and mind. In this book, he brings two different lenses to bear on these ideas: a wry, conversational formality in “Sonnets from Jimmie Walker Swamp”, and the long and complex syntaxes of the final section of his ongoing long poem, “The Encantadas”. Put together, these two sequences are the black and white photographs and the colour film of the same restless dream. More than any of Robert Allen’s other books, Standing Wave illustrates, through this two-fold structure, the range of language and cadences still possible in contemporary poetry.