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Poetry Canadian

Dungenessque

by (author) Ron Charach

Publisher
Signature Editions
Initial publish date
Mar 2001
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780921833765
    Publish Date
    Mar 2001
    List Price
    $14.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Of Petrushkin!, Ron Charach's last book, The Globe & Mail wrote: "These poems remind us how effective narrative and anecdote can be in poetry. They owe more to Chekhov and I.B. Singer than to Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Charach's use of language is not dazzling; it is unobtrusive and utilitarian because his goal—something rare nowadays—is to say something about the human condition. And he says it with a voice notable for its compassion and humour."

In his new collection, Dungenessque, Charach builds on his strength as a storyteller, infusing his poems with the metaphoric intensity that characterized his first book, The Big Life Painting. One by one, the matrices of our identity—physical, sexual, relational and cultural—are shown to be as pitiable and as strangely noble as the bold character armour that conceals them. Dungenessque is a compelling study of pride, shame and redemption. With the insight of a practising therapist and the skill of a surgeon, Charach removes the outer shell that protects us from each other to explore those vulnerable areas in which the embattled self resides. Dungenessque is Charach's sixth collection of poems.

About the author

Ron Charach is a poet and practicing psychiatrist. Born in Winnipeg, he has lived in Toronto since 1980 with his wife Alice. They have two grown children now pursuing university educations.

Ron Charach's profile page

Excerpt: Dungenessque (by (author) Ron Charach)

Dungenessque Dungeness, Washington, The Olympic Peninsula

Crack me open like a crab amused at the strange soft fur along my shell. Tour my body find the emotional limits, dredge my character for small signs of pretense; you know they're there. Haven't others glimpsed claws beneath my hands? You listen so closely, stretching out my present against my past on a long net, laying bare

Boil me live in a scalding cauldron like you would a crab, turning your head as the claws fold in silently and you wait for the soft clicking sound. You can eat me tonight or tomorrow, or the next night. because the cooking's done; all that's left is to analyze what can and can't be consumed. Tomorrow you and your analyst will pick through the bowl of white flesh from my brittle compartments. There may be a joke or two, 'Who'd have thought the old boy would have so much meat in him?'

 

Ant and Aphid

Along a cedar crosspiece on my garden gate, they move past in deadly duet. A carpenter ant lugs a bright green aphid, its legs waving weakly in the breeze, and climbs the thick stalk of ivy to its nest under the warm wet eaves.

 

This tiniest of nature’s victims, does it leave descendants, a work history, even if no clock was punched? At its sudden violent passing will there be testimonials, or co-religionists obsessively scouring the garden square for signs of massacred remains?

Have not hired ladybugs headstrong and pretty as gaily painted tanks carried out such ethnic cleansing?

A red-winged songbird swoops down, plucks both ant and prey from the ivy and soars skyward —a miraculous ascent?

This morning, awaking, at once I knew I no longer had skin, that everything and everyone who passed my way would move me, the world’s pain as much as its beauty.

And look! The solar clematis sprung up along the fence are beaming apricot-white faces, petals boldly unfurled, determined as any natural thing whose hours are numbered.

Editorial Reviews

“Charach's voice is pliant and sonorous; sinuosity of thought flowers into deep and true feeling. this is an impressive and engaging collection.”

—The Canadian Jewish News