The Ventriloquist: Poetic Narratives from the Womb of War

The Ventriloquist gives us four fearless and seminal works by one of Canadas master poets and is a scathing indictment of war and its ravages. Its also a testament to the power of poetic narrative.Gary Geddes is known for his first-person narrative poems and seamless impersonations. He sometimes speaks of his poetry as rescue work a term he attributes to Joseph Conrad which involves gathering the vanishing fragments of memory and giving them the permanence of art. For Geddes however its not personal memory but tribal or collective memory that most demands his attention.Those figures from the past reaching out to be heard in The Ventriloquist include a youth in charge of horses on a doomed and bloody mission to the New World during the Spanish conquest; a so-called mad-bomber who dies in a washroom of the House of Commons when the dynamite he is carrying explodes; a wily and outrageous Chinese sculptor and his legion of warrior subjects struggling against imperial edicts to conform; and POWs in Hong Kong and Japan in World War II doing their damnedest to survive a struggle that continued back home in the face of shocking neglect.Geddes finds that the phrase the ventriloquism of history perfectly describes his poetic process here and in other poems and jokingly admits that hes never quite sure if hes ventriloquist or dummy. His critics however have no doubt about his talent for giving voice and have called his work stunning wonderful breathtaking in its imaginative reach and verbal dexterity.Of War & Other Measures Robert Kroetsch wrote Its the kind of poem poets are only supposed to be able to dream.... The sustained calibration is beautiful. I didnt know the long poem could be so taut.... The years of art and craft are in the book.Hong Kong Poems prompted Michael Estok to say in a review in Fiddlehead: It is a weighty and worthy and admirable undertaking.... [Geddess] book of elegies puts him on the same level of poetic intensity (perhaps he even surpasses it) of Miltons Lycidas or Tennysons In Memoriam.These words of praise are reflected in the awards the books received: the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize Writers Choice Award the National Magazine Gold Award and Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region).