For and Against
By Sharon McCartney
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2010
73 p. $17.95
Coming to Terms with It
Based on the evidence from For and Against, Sharon McCartney has taken Yeats’ advice to “Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death” very seriously. In fact, she has added some foot notes of her own: cast that cold eye on love too, and on the dismissal of love, on family, on animals, cash, horny friends, sex with the Tin Man, risotto, old-man jock-sweat and—keep the knob way to the blue for this one—relationships. These poems are painfully earthbound and completely unsentimental. “Dump out the overstuffed drawers” McCartney writes, and “make room for new disappointments.”
That sentiment pervades For and Against; this is a chronicle of disappointment. From the failed marriage that is the core of this collection, to the long-digested failures and tragedies of the speaker’s family, to the youthful naiveté that “dies, the good feeling,” McCartney has concluded that life, indeed, is suffering. Things fall apart, no? Entropy is the fundamental law of nature, right? You’ll get no argument from McCartney. She might respond with this, from “Against All That:”
Unfair, unfair, I said
weak with dread and certainty that no matter
where I hid despair would find me. So goodbye
to vacuous drunken laughter, unabashed
stripping under stars, goodbye to six-packs on
a charcoal beach, goodbye to hapless kisses.
However, this dismissal of happiness, this acceptance of despair, does not condemn the speaker to a life of hardship and suffering. Rather, it allows the speaker to accept such a life, and ultimately to survive it by detaching from it. And there’s an added bonus to this: she can dismiss the negatives that come along with being attached to the happiness she once felt. Again from “Against All That:”
Once and forever goodbye to regret. To stupidity.
To my father’s third wife. And good riddance
to a bald excuse with no more to show than
the red shirt that’s wearing thin on its bony hide.
Still, the decision to give up on happiness does not simply reward itself, especially because McCartney does not just detach from it. Indeed, she retains an intimate connection to her subjects while refusing to submit to them. This requires a certain level of mental toughness, and McCartney’s poems are a deep reservoir of that. Take, for example, “For My sister’s brain.” The harsh reality of her sister’s condition—“her brain cratered/ by cancer”—does not sadden or defeat the speaker. Again, this book’s voice is intensely intimate, but although she is clearly affected by her sister’s condition, this instance of pain only seems to clarify the speaker’s perspective. After a night’s attempt of running away, the speaker returns to her sister’s sickroom, where her mother is tending to her “vegetative” child.
A surreal scene, my mother bathing my sister’s
ivory-blue body, a green cloth between the legs,
swabbing the stomach tube, the trach, stretching
the limp limbs ten times. I think now it must have
been a way to shame me. But the lesson was lost.
I had no shame. My sister’s brain set me free.
Nothing I could ever do could cause that much pain.
Thank you for your careful and intelligent review of my book. I want to point out, that not all readers will be as well-read as you, and without that little story at the beginning, they would have no idea who I am talking about! Rosemary