I’ve been rereading Brought Down by Simon Constam since last fall, trying to understand what is layered beneath the obvious beauty of the poems. One middle-of-the night I scribbled on a piece of paper: These poems feel like Buddhist koans – a search for insight – tests. Or maybe, not to provoke “great doubt,” but to express both doubt and faith. It is with this idea that I’ve approached the review. The first poem is a good place to enter the collection, since prologue/first poems generally set the tone and subject for a book.
The first two lines of “Every Glory is Diminished by the Truth” establishes one of the issues nagging away at Constam: And do I flinch at the mention of Deir Yassin? / And do you flinch at the mention of Ma’alot? (The Glossary tells us that Deir Yassin is the site of a massacre of Arabs by Jews in 1948 and it tells us that Ma’alot is the site of a 1984 Palestinian terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of 25 hostages.) Brought Down was published in 2022 before the current war in Gaza; war is not what this collection is about. (Although it might be the backstory.) This collection is one man “wrestling with what lies behind the curtain.”
Writing in a “blurb” for the book, George Elliott Clarke says: “Constam appears as … a Seinfeld-mode Job, questioning God about his ‘masquerading as the dark.’ God is ‘arbitrary’ and we are fickle … .” A disquiet comes through Constam’s struggle, as in:
Simon Agonistes
I am hiding from Him,
like Adam.
Way down in the labyrinth
of Tokyo’s malls,
Eve knows nothing about it,
she thinks it is just a trip,
into the city.
Not to belabour the struggle aspect of the poems, I also want to quote from “HaMakom” (a name for God, also meaning place), and the struggle for place resonates across the decades. “[T]he mind wanders,” the people wander, the book is a jail daring the heart to accept. Finally, I am left with the suggestion of the diaspora.
HaMakom
We meet in a small place, a shel shul,
beneath a tallis’ embrace. There is a book
in my hands, but I do not need it.
The text is a jail. Behind its black bars
the mind wanders. Behind the music
of the words, the meaning is obscure.
Some say the words themselves are
Prayer. Some say the emptiness behind them
is the God who deigns to meet you there,
dares you, some say, dares
your heart, to be without meaning,
to come unrooted as a tree would give in
to the wind and a leaf would float to the sea.
Before turning to Domestic Recusals, let’s look at the title poem, “Brought Down,” the final poem in the collection. It begins: Blood is a river that will not stop and toward the end Constam writes … Everywhere we look, / there is an explanation of who we are and / who they are and what we might become. / In every room we gather, we see certain things / about ourselves but never speak them. We see how they [the ancestors] have suffered // and humanity suffers, every beautiful child / who came from long, long ago … .
There is beauty in the writing; there is pain in the struggle. Brought Down is poetry with subject, tension, music, and craft.
The poet’s conflict, found in Brought Down, continues in Domestic Recusals, but it is different. Simon Constam writes that the poems “come from experiences in and out of marriage, in and out of depression, into and out of different ideas of how men and women operate in relationships.” In these poems readers will find the seriousness cut with something close to humour:
Billet-Doux
Walking out this evening,
wrapped against the snow,
when I see
the idea of home
in the eyes of passersby.
I miss you deeply.
And when I am warm again in my rooms,
my footsteps are alone.
But I lie down with you.
Listen, the future comes calling ceaselessly.
I cannot keep even your absence
Here for long.
The poems in Domestic Recusals are love poems with a twist of angst and self deprecation, although that might be too strong a word. But argument and God are still present although limited, as in the short poem “Certainty.”
Certainty
With certainty, we subdue the inexactitudes of God.
With certainty, praise of Him comes easily.
With certainty, no one, not even God disturbs us.
With certainty, we’ve won the argument
with ourselves.
In Constam’s writing, he argues with his loves, within himself, with his God, and with the forebearers who carry the weight of religion. His self-questioning even flows through the more earthy, lush, sensuous poems that run throughout Domestic Recusals. Consider the titles: “Come to Bed with Me Tonight, Solo Traveler,” “Little Black Book of Scars,” and “Seduced.” Constam’s undercurrent of arguing with himself is his voice, the voice that remains constant regardless of his subject. I am captivated by the way it holds me.
I admit that my first reading of these collections left me uncertain (not unusual for me) and so I returned again and again. The more I read the poems, the more certain I’ve become that Simon Constam is a poet to follow.
Available through your local bookstore or online:
Brought Down by Simon Constam (Resource Publications, Eugene, Oregon, 2022). ISBN 978-1-6667-3435-5.
Domestic Recusals by Simon Constam (AOS Publishing, Montreal, Quebec, 2024). ISBN 978-1-990496-47-9.
Kathryn MacDonald 