Most of what is wrong with David Jure’s
“The Patient English” is reflected in the title. The name of a book, especially
a book of poetry, should communicate the essence of the collection. The poems
in this book neither express patience nor anything particularly English.
Obviously the
title is a play on Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, but it’s not
a good idea for an unknown poet to use their book title to draw a comparison
with a renowned author. What does “Patient English” convey? That the author is
the opposite of Ondaatje? What would be the opposite of a skilled and creative
writer?
What the title
“The Patient English” conveys about the content of Jure’s book is that it is
overloaded with wordplay. I love good plays on words more than most people but
too frequently Jure’s puns distract from what he is trying to say in the
overall poem. Puns also seem to distract Jure, as often after one of his plays
on words the poem falls apart. It’s as
if he is thrill riding his poetic vehicle off-road for the joy of going over
the pun-bumps, but then his wheels get stuck and he stops short of his
destination.
A good example of
this can be found in the third stanza of his poem, “Another Adaptation of Dylan
Thomas":
Abandon all hope ye who enter here
Walk down to the Beagle for a beer
Fairfield daze in fading light
Wage wage against the lying of the trite
The fourth line of
this stanza is a play on the third line of Thomas’s masterpiece “Do Not Go
Gentle Into That Good Night”:
Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of
day
Rage rage against the dying of the light
Jure’s
line “wage wage against the lying of the trite" adds nothing to his poem
other than a rhyme. His next two lines are fine, "if I could just morph
into the park / or find some solace in the dark", but then the rhymes
become silly for the next six lines: "or treat life as just a lark / or
wear a suit and call myself clark / I could expunge the superman years / atone
for all the richard geres / finally get in touch with david meares / put away
the effect of the jeers”. If he were to eliminate the "wage wage …"
and those lines and just continue the poem from “be a jure and court things
pure” he would have a better poem.
Jure’s poem
“Seattle Scars 1989” is one of the best in the collection, but the line, “ …
love is a four letter word” is unnecessarily lifted from Bob Dylan and a line
like “Have I been lucky in love? Some
would say know” with the useless punning of “know” for “no” does not move the
piece along. Why would some say, “know”? What does “know” communicate?
Throughout the book he shows a weakness for substituting words he intends to
use with homonyms, just for fun.
The final stanza
of the poem creates an interesting moment with an observation about love in
poverty and how it relates to the speaker’s love life:
I recall once coming through Seattle after
being
beaten in California. it was the day of New
Years day and
in the black district, among the poorest of
the poor
I saw two destitute blacks,
Boy and girl, who were unconscious
in an embrace, their lips mere centimetres
apart
and I had no camera, or I might have been
in Life”
But then he
inserts the lines, “and the champers would have flewed / frood” and in doing so
breaks the mood. He finishes the poem with a comparison between the speaker and
Jesus. This pulls the poem away from the most beautiful part and leaves it
incomplete. If he wants to refer to what Jesus was trying to achieve he would
need to expand the poem in such a way that the reference relevantly ties in
with the earlier part and builds to a stronger conclusion than would have been
arrived at by ending with the line “I might have been in Life”. David’s
achievement with this line is more important than a vague reference to Jesus in
the end.
In the title poem,
“The Patient English” there are again too many distractions from the flow of
meaning. The second line, “gnarled logs and embers” should begin the first
stanza and should flow directly to the fourth line “where the car went over the
edge” because the third line, “the slash of the nash” is unnecessary. After the
fourteenth line, “nothing these days comes easy” the poem becomes confused by
plays on words like “the burn of the byrne and all the bairns”. The line is
clever in itself but as a presence in this poem it robs the whole piece of
meaning. There are thirteen lines cluttering up the composition with puns until
we get to "sheer glass and lsd” when it starts acting like a poem again.
He does it again
in “Adaptation of a Dylan Thomas Poem", which illogically comes four poems
after "Another Adaptation of a Dylan Thomas Poem". The opening line,
“do not go mental yet good knight” is not a bad beginning but then he
immediately weakens it by throwing in “wage wage against the lying of the trite”,
which is the exact same line he used in the other adaptation. Like that other
poem he descends into a cartoonish smear of uncareful rhymes that do not even
follow the rhyme scheme of the original poem by Dylan Thomas. The last
two-thirds of the poem abandon the rhyme and the adaptation. He could more
successfully just use “Do Not Go Mental Yet Good Knight” as the title of the
poem, begin the poem with the second stanza and forget about calling it an
adaptation of a Dylan Thomas poem.
“Nostrodamus” is a
poem that dips in and out of rhyme but the rhymes do not add anything to the
piece. Jure is not a careful rhymer and he is able to communicate much better
without rhymes.
One of the best
poems in the collection is “A fifth poem about Montreal" but another title
that’s drawn from the poem would be better. Good beginnings and endings are the
most important parts of a poem and this poem has both:
“Precise and prolific
the master leans towards Pacific
his greybeard seared like
a small dark rock
on his beach …”
He
descends into bad distracting rhyme at one point, but it doesn’t ruin the poem.
In
the poem “Unannounced but not without notice” the composition moves along fine
up until and including the line, "All’s fair in love and wardrobe",
which should really be the end of the poem.
Jure
finishes the collection with copies of responses from politicians to letters
that he’d sent to them. It seems odd that in a book featuring his own writing
he does not show copies of the actual letters that he wrote to Bill Clinton and
Gordon Campbell.
The
final piece, “Oldfinger” is an amusing story about James Bond being sued for
sexual harassment because of the way he treated women in every one of his
movies. It was written by Frank Cammuso and Hart Seely, and published in The
New Yorker on June 13, 1993. It seems that Jure liked it enough to include it
in a book of his own writing. It is not a good idea to present other people’s
work in a book of one’s own poetry. It promotes comparisons when he should be
trying to have his work stand on its own.
There
are a few prose pieces at the beginning of the book.
“The
Mysterious Case of the Missing Golden Boy” is somewhat incoherent with a lot of
names that pop up without any explanation as to who these people are. Maybe they
are all pseudonyms of real people in the Vancouver area. It’s safe to assume
that Gideon Cromwell represents Gordon Campbell, who was the premier of British
Columbia during the period that a lot of these pieces seem to have been
written. The story is playful but goes nowhere.
“Final
Word", a story about the narrator's girlfriend being obsessed with Tom
Jones, holds together fairly well although it’s not particularly interesting.
“A
Vague Piece About My Vanishing Victoria" is ironically one of the least
vague pieces in the collection. If he were to work on improving the prose it
would be worth sending to a local journal for publication.
There
are also two one act plays in the book.
“Windsurfing
to Port Angeles” is one of the best pieces in the book with its windsurfing
drug smuggler travelling to the United States as a metaphor for Leonard Cohen
two-timing Canada with the US. The characters of Larry and John are distinct
from on another unlike Jack and Karla in Jure’s other play, "The Allies".
Jack and Karla are essentially the same character with different genders. They
each have the same kinds of observations and express them in the same manner.
In
“The Allies” the welfare cheques were supposed to be delivered by a postman
named Dave, who is in the character list but does not appear. Instead the
welfare cheques simply descend from above, which is a nice touch. I assume Jure
changed the ending and forgot to remove Dave from the dramatis personae.
In
Jure’s prose pieces and plays the puns don’t do as much damage because they are
drops in a much bigger pond. In poems however, wrong lines cause short circuits
that shut the whole poem down.
Rhyming
in poetry is like dynamite. One has to know how to handle it without destroying
the poem. I speak as someone that loves rhyme more than any other poetic form
when I say that David Jure should either avoid it or approach it with more
respect.
Pretty much every
poem in this collection that doesn’t have rhymes or plays on words is much
better for it and most of the other poems could be saved with some simple
surgical removal of rhymes and puns.
There are a lot of
autobiographical poems in this collection and rather than arranging the poems
according to when they were written I think the order should be chronological
according the events of his life that the poems describe.
“That Famous
Canadian” would be a much more appropriate name for this book.
Valuable insight!
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