Poetry Review

Brian Joseph Davis

Globetrotter & Hitler's Children
By Amatoritsero Ede
New York: Black Goat/Akashic Books, 2009
106 pp. $17.50

It is Toronto’s burden to inspire only complicated love in its citizens. Sure, some days we may long for that simplified, all-consuming loathing that Los Angelenos feel for their town or to have the capacity for brazen boasting particular to New Yorkers. I’ll take Toronto’s comfortable ambiguity any day and nominate as poet laureate Amatoritsero Ede. As a Nigerian-born, now Canada-based poet, Ede is well positioned to chronicle the realities of our city, as he does in Globetrotter, the first half of his diptych portrait of two countries.

It is a paean but it is a suitably complicated and dead-on one. Ede’s style is amazingly compositional, using short percussive phrases to sculpt an exegesis of Hogtown — as it sees itself and how those outside see it. “toronto is / Amsterdam / adrift at sea,” Ede writes on his opening page. “toronto is / Prague / without her anchoring of / narrow streets narrow sky / and / virgin-tight apartment blocks.”

For a city that, uniquely, swings between Protestant practicality during workdays and weekend-long orgies, Ede’s particular style is consonant with his subject. Old-fashioned techniques, like his judicious use of the exclamation mark, blend in with his evocative word clusters, such as “shelled like lobster / caught / in a frying pan fray / fried flag red.” Also, has Toronto’s summer ever been described as cannily as in this passage: “summer’s riot is loud / as it boils / you moonwalk / wade hung-armed / and bat-blind / through hot glue”?

If Ede’s second section isn’t as satisfying, it is mostly by comparison to the strength of the book’s first 59 pages. Built around the author’s experience of contemporary Germany — something less liberal than the ideal vision of itself the country presents to the rest of the world — Ede damns the country’s abysmal treatment of its immigrant community. There’s anger, passion and Ede’s great writing, but the poet wanders into subjects ranging from the meaning of war to love with sometimes too-thick imagery.

Individually, the pages of Globetrotter work, but wholeness proves elusive. That said, there’s no more perfect line of poetry this year than, “Evil is a professor,” and, where another poet might get bogged down in qualifications, Ede is not afraid to describe succinctly any empire’s primary villains: “men / with balls like cannon / thugs in bow tie....”

Culled from eye weekly