This is the sort of thing I especially like, though it’s unclear exactly why. Beautiful language? Heck no! Making any obvious kind of sense on the surface? Not so much!
Only Seemly, Guy Birchard’s eighth book, came out in 2018 from Newfoundland’s now-defunct Pedlar Press. It’s written in short scraps of prose, three or four to a page, some with a diary feel and others more in the tone of a historian, archivist, or third-person reporter of observed events. Connections and context are to be pieced together as you go. The effect is like when you pick up a crumpled, handwritten note off the sidewalk and find yourself trying to imagine what it might be all about.
Typical entry: “Cast into silence out of midday State Avenue summer dazzle, the darkest bar we ever entered. Kansas City, Kansas.”
Another: “Hobo equably returns a wave from boxcar rolling through Saco past the saloon across the Hi-Line from CMR pocket park box elder shade trees under which the bronze plaque recollects renowned local waddies without reference to the horses they notoriously thieved, circa 1900, from old Billy Bonneau’s forebear up across the Medicine Line.”
You get the idea. You like it or you don’t. If this is your thing, there’s a lot here to like. If not, it’s only 45 pages, so maybe just give it a go?
This is where I sense my ignorance groping over top of vast depths of allusion and intertextuality. I have a feeling there’s a lot more going on in this book than what’s immediately apparent to me, like stepping into the middle of a conversation that’s been going on for a while (like, since before you were born). Probably I should know who is Guy Birchard? He’s written many, many books. It might help to have read the other ones first. (I checked him in my local library catalogue, turning up one listing, but it’s an anthology and it’s in Dawson City). This is me as a baby reviewer, just getting to know the literary landscape in real time, and you get to follow along with me on that. Such are the perils and pleasures of allowing random books to find me in the universe. Hey, universe—send more like this!
Publication Details:
Author: Guy Birchard
Title: Only Seemly
Publisher: Pedlar Press
Year: 2018