Dave Margoshes

The Horse Knows the Way by Dave Margoshes

A strong collection of poems, The Horse Knows the Way avoids such standard fare as themed sequences, direct personal memoir, political preaching and self-conscious obsession with archaic forms and gets down to the real business of poetry, which is to make the reader feel something.

Author of twelve books ( several of poetry) The Horse knows the Way is a marked improvement from Margoshes 2001 output The Purity of Absence (the only other I’ve read). His earlier book was hindered by tired word combinations, stilted and lax rhythms, affected language and self-aware sentiment in an effort to force us to feel something (see it for yourself on Google books). With the The Horse Knows the Way, Margoshes has cut loose considerably; it’s as if by giving up trying so hard to write a good poem, he’s released his voice.

Margoshes’ imaginative inquiries follow internal logic and successfully breathe life into situational poems about nature, love and family. Once Margoshes finds an imaginative thread, he hangs on, and follows it to surprising conclusions. “The Poem the Fox Wrote,” begins “today I caught my first sight of one,” a simple poem about seeing a fox that leads into a playfully magic realist realm, and ends with the speaker becoming one of the foxes. “I went happy to my den, curled into myself and dreamed of them.” What works is the poem’s consistency of voice. Margoshes proves that form does not need to be summoned by Villanelle, Sonnet, Pantoum or Sestina. His use of form is intuitive, rather than planned, and as in many of the poems, it successfully creates an organic whole. This is the self-created form of improvisation.

One of the ways he achieves this is by repetition, assonance, and sound-echoes of syllables, all to emphasize a rolling rhythm.

“The heavens conspire against us, thickening
their tongues. Our eyes too thicken, darken
with cloud , clouding our minds...” (Until we Shine)

Too many free verse poets forsake basics of rhythm and sound in favour of content dictated work. You can feel Margoshes working the other way round---language leading the content (The Horse Knows the Way, a fitting title for this book). Margoshes’ magic realist perspective, and his bemused sense of wonder, conspire to create poems on the premise that language itself is experiential. These poems understand that without sound, rhythm, metaphor, and the resonance of unexpected words choices, it is difficult to call any piece of writing “poetry.” One can feel his poems unwinding organically from process, rather than poems that insist on content driven themes.

“Oh give me a home, a rope, a drink
of water from the cold well, a biscuit
with gravy and coffee in a tin cup too hot...”
(West by West)

At his best, Margoshes shows that sound and rhythm are physical skills, not just knowledgeable devices. A poet feels his or her way physically through a poem. As poets know, when the writing is going well, the physical experience of writing is close to singing. The real trick with poetry is recording that music. The work of poetry is accomplished with the body as much as it is with the intellect.

When Margoshes isn’t working as well he gets bogged down in inconsequential minutia and tedium that are of little interest. “Breakfast at 7, lunch at noon, the day measures itself out...” until the poem gets to “not too cold, not too hot. / Not too hot, just hot enough...” (Extremes) etc. The poem does not amount to enough to be of any interest to a reader. While you can feel his technique at work, trying to prime the engine, the poem never actually starts. Also his unfortunate tendency to indulge in sentimentality is still present at times. In “The Hunger” he sledgehammers a perfectly good poem by repeating the title as the last line: “Pain/ or joy, or the constant humming thrum/of assertion against the cold...the opening / void, the hunger.”

One wishes at times Margoshes would attend a little more to the idea of structure. In “Hunter,” the poem is diminished by both a weak structure and poor narrative order. Form is also about knowing what to take out. The poem shows a boy discovering his power to kill, ending on “the surprise / of my diminishment, more a child then / than ever” (with the double entendre of the poem also seeming to be sexual discovery). The first two-thirds of the poem express his ineffectiveness that “there was no more chance of my killing a grouse...” only to end on the very killing of the grouse. Why have all this aimless preamble, only to disprove it? The poem does not know where it’s going (sometimes Margoshes’ strength) then suddenly arrives, having changed its mind along the way. (The horse is not serving him well here.) While it might be true that his free rambling technique allows Margoshes to succeed in many places, it also results in a number of aimless poems.

While “Horse...” is far from a perfect book, it exemplifies something I rarely find in Canadian poetry. Unaffected, emotional spontaneity. While Margoshes could have been more craft-minded in places, on the whole this unfinished marble approach to poetry works well for him, and the poems have an uncommon liveliness. I look forward to seeing his next book, and hope that his trajectory continues.… (mais)