Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems, review by Cynthia Coristine

 

Farewell, Darkness

   Selected Poems

by Stephen Morrissey

Ekstasis Editions, 2023

Review by Cynthia Coristine

I found my voice in poetry when I was able to turn the darkness of my life experiences into poems; I affirmed what I had seen and I said, “thank you, darkness” and “farewell, darkness”; and that is the birth of the poet.
                                            - Stephen Morrissey

In Farewell, Darkness, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey presents a selection of some eighty of his poems written between 1971 and 2021. These poems have been selected from his nine earlier published books of poetry, and from six of his eight chapbooks.

Morrissey’s poems have, as he writes in the preface to the book, consistently focussed on the themes which have been central to his life, namely "the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members, and romantic love”.  Having been written in the shadow of a mountain, (Mount Royal), his poems resonate with Morrissey’s sense of himself as a Montreal poet.

Stephen Morrissey’s personal experience with the transience, and fragility, of life began early: in November, 1956, when Morrissey was six years old, his 44-year-old father died following heart surgery in a Boston hospital.

As he was later to write, “My father died, and the light went out”. Compounding the darkness of the loss, was the fact that his father was never spoken about in the immediate family again, and his unmarked grave (at Montreal's Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery), never visited.  This failure to address what had happened in any meaningful way set the stage for the lack of resolution and the unexpressed grief which affected Morrissey as child, and which followed him into later life. He felt “damaged” in some indefinable way which was beyond his ability to express: “I was all alone / just a bone without flesh / or face, just / a hollow sound / a ball bearing / rattling in an empty can.” (From “When Father Died”).

Morrissey realized that the remnants his father’s life which had been left behind, were a poor substitute for what he could now, never, come to know about him.

The Return of Memory

returning to the basement in mother's house

my father's business papers once stored

in my cupboard as a child

are still wrapped in brown file folders

it seems no time has intervened

that it is still possible for him to return

and return to these papers ...

what remains of father

expense accounts, business letters to strangers

in daily life we show no more

than these letters reveal…

Determined to preserve, at least, the events of his own life, beginning at the age of 14, Morrissey began to keep a daily diary. He also meticulously chronicled the lives of his extended family members, including those of (unmarried) great aunts and uncles, to ensure that their lives would not be “lost”.  He would also go on to capture something of their lives in his poetry.

Three Poems on a Single Theme

…my mother's uncle

who lived his last forty years

in a mental hospital

for the poor

left there by his brothers

after their mother died

he took with him

what he owned

breath gone   memories

dispersed

seagulls over the grey sky...

Home

I return to Grandmother's

flat although she's dead

almost thirty years,

walk up the grey front stairs

feel the door knob turn

in my hand and smell the

dusty stairwell leading to

the flat's entrance: a large

lace-covered table, a sideboard

and gramophone player broken

many years. I sit with her in silence,

childhood's timeless years,

hours spent staring out a window

at passing streetcars, or playing

with toy cars on a glass-topped

tea wagon.

...off the kitchen is where

her aged father slept; later

it became a junk room, a red

cardboard carton of Cokes

always by a bureau for visitors,

and Auntie Mable returning home

with lemon squares from Woolworth's

downtown. Or Saturday night hockey

on black and white television.

Morrissey found that writing poems was a way – in fact, the only way – in which he was able to find his “voice”. "Scribble down your nakedness" Allen Ginsburg had advised in a 1967 interview read by the seventeen-year-old Morrissey. "Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting." After reading Ginsburg’s words, Morrissey's course as a poet was set:  rather than censor what he wrote, his poems would instead cut to the emotional core of life as he experienced it. This is a path from which Morrissey has never deviated, and one which gives his poems their emotional resonance: to a greater or lesser degree, we have all been there.

The Things She Left

The things she left are not many,

furniture divided, years of photographs

sorted through, freezer and piano

rolled into the back of a truck.

A coincidence: the movers were the same men

who moved us here, ten years older,

they are fat and nervous.

Days unwind, a tapestry with threads

cut from a tangled mass of colour

and pulled across a year of leaving.

A thread breaks and the whole

tapestry unravels, becomes a new image:

my wife and son, dog in the back seat,

drive away – her final kiss, but for what?

That I made it easy for her to leave, didn't argue?

Behind me a half-empty house,

no diversions possible in the echoes

of a summer afternoon…

Morrissey's poems are also an affirmation of life, and of the things which sustain it. The sentiments expressed in The Divining Rod and in Reincarnation are recognizable to anyone who has ever survived a bad marriage, and then been “reborn” into a good one.  Rescued by it.

The Divining Rod

...With her I left behind

my old life, with her

I left a dark place

of   sleep and endurance,

with her I stopped being

a monk to a dying religion,

my prayers whispered

as I slept as though dead,

vapour, mist, a body

animated by silence and sorrow…

Reincarnation

We meet again, again flesh

and blood, again bone, tendon

and memory. Events of old lives,

clothes divested as I divested

the past in meeting you,

in meeting you again

and again and again

into infinity.

Forty years of waiting for you,

a dark delirium of the soul;

we met apparently for the first time

but home is where we are together

in this room, this house,

the two square feet we occupy

in a single embrace

…With you I have

returned home, not to a place

where walls enclose silence,

but soul meeting soul

in the ancient movement of time.

The pared down simplicity of the exquisite Her Red Duffle Coat are emblematic of Morrissey’s work.

Her Red Duffle Coat

Her red duffle coat

lies on a hall bench;

the coat is a pile of cloth

without the presence

of her body in the coat.

Her red duffle coat is cold

without her animating

spirit. It is a limp

rag, less each

day without her

wearing the coat

to give it

reason to exist,

to  give the coat

a life force

which is love.

The coat’s sleeve

hang by its side,

no embrace

from this red coat;

without her wearing it

it’s an empty shell.

The coat

is a prisoner

of her love, when

she wears the coat

it is not

any coat.

but hers.

Morrissey’s poems pair the elegiac with the life-affirming, two of the elements which constitute his “signature” as a poet.  This is reflected in Everything Must Have an End,  which is also the last poem in the book.

Everything Must have an End

What is not possible is greater than what is possible

that’s what you know about life when you’re older

than sixty or seventy years; the limits of existence…

And in the end, what is it you remember?

Thirty-five years teaching?  Adult children

gone off to make their own lives? Investments

and the mortgage paid off?  Great art and poetry?

Books you’ve read?  Friends you’ve had?

Or the one you loved, the one who breathed life

into your once young body and soul, that person

you still love in the land and geography of old age.

"Poetry is nothing if not passionate”, as Morrissey writes in the preface to Farewell, Darkness. "Passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing defines poetry."

Morrissey's own refusal to tailor his writing to "fashion" is what gives his poems their resonance and their emotional accessibility: by affirming a shared human experience, they  can be read again and again, with the unabated pleasure of a first reading.

--January 8^th, 2024

About the reviewer:  A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine is the co-author, with Ian Browness, of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life of James Coristine.