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The Pierre Bonga Loops
by Troy Burle Bailey
Vancouver: Commodore Books, 2010
192 pp. $ 22:00

Troy Burle Bailey’s first book of poetry, The Pierre Bonga Loops is so ambitious that it is magnificent in its faltering. Doudou Boicel has simpler aims.  His self-published, “fictionalized (auto)biography,” The Polygamist’s Tale is touted as “a highly effective remedy for stress.”  Why? “After reading it, you’ll feel that all your frustrations have been released.” Boicel preaches the virtues of fleshy amour.

Bailey has written what is likely the first contemporary book of poetry by an Afro-Manitoban. It does for the Northwest what Bailey’s poet-publisher Wayde Compton does for British Columbia in his own work, i.e., provide a literary myth for the local – historical – black community. A Winnipegger, Bailey seeks to provide Western African-Canadians – and all his readers – an appreciation for the culture of the Black Prairies and its origins, not in slavery, but in fur trading.

If his seemingly autobiographical, opening poem is correct, as a schoolboy, Bailey saw “a dark voyageur” in a painting. Years of research later, Bailey knows all there is to know about black fur traders in ye olde Rupert’s Land. There were several, but his “documentary poem” focuses on one, namely Pierre Bonga. This book-length poem is just what its title suggests – a series of narratives and verses that loop about documents treating the legendary Bonga and other black voyageurs.

Indebted to narrative lyric suites by Compton, Michael Ondaatje, and Robert Kroetsch, The Pierre Bonga Loops is experimental, elliptical, fragmentary, allusive, playful, but also, too long and often as opaque as the inside of a fur coat. One is reminded of the manic surrealism, too, of Ishmael Reed, but without Reed’s concision.

Bailey can be lyrical: “[it feels like we must be] / made up only of damp sound from the waves pounding our hull, punishing our boat, the canoes made of / endless scrolls of birch paper with ebony flecks of code, each speck / A missing Voyageur, / A lost wife, / A hard series of Portages, / Of strokes, / Of broken paddles….”

But his prose poems, meant to sound weighty, are fat and ponderous:  “Originally ornament and fetish both, the cowry, shattered shells of Apocrypha, dripping malaise furious as venom, clutched by apprehended Africans like a mourner’s prayer shawl to ward off Malfeasance, and seized anon by trade merchants to purchase perchance a ticket Home, these, an old man and his kin cross-reference for generations.” Bailey is at his best when he allows the verse to move toward song, avoiding the drag effect of trying to say too much in too many words. The Pierre Bonga Loops is a sharp debut in African-Canadian and Canadian letters. The poet will be even sharper once he is leaner.

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