A CRUMPLED SWAN

A journey into a dream.

In 50 brief, illuminating essays melding memoir, close reading, literary analysis, and cultural criticism, critic and essayist Collard takes Abigail Parry’s poem “In the dream of the cold restaurant,” from her collection I Think We’re Alone Now, as inspiration for reflecting on poetry as genre and on this singular, enigmatic poem in particular. “I want to be able [to] bring to a poem the same knowledge and attention that an art historian brings to a painting,” Collard writes. The poem relates a scene involving a man who fashions a napkin into origami shapes; a surly 17-year-old waitress with a mysterious scar from, perhaps, a burn; and another diner, seated on a mezzanine, reading: All are depicted with both the “glib economy” and “gaunt extravagance of dreams.” Collard reads and rereads the poem, each time “impressed and astonished” by its “subtly-managed uncertainty and instability.” He investigates its language, rhythm, and allusions to Greek mythology. He brings to bear a range of contemporary critics. Not alone among poems he admires and discusses in these essays, this one obsesses him: “I carry the poem with me, and am in turn carried by it, or carried away.” Having grown up among Jehovah’s Witnesses, Collard, as a teenager, escaped a cult that severely circumscribed his world. “My behaviour from the age of eight, when my parents were evangelised, was constantly policed,” he writes; “everything I did and everything I said was either approved without warmth or criticised and corrected.” He saw literature as an antidote, “a way of engaging directly with other thinkers, other perspectives.” In Parry’s poetry, he feels “in direct contact with an intelligence I find sympathetic.” Collard’s insightful essays reveal him, as well, as a sympathetic presence, sensitive and wise.

Fresh, perceptive literary essays.