The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston brings together sharp, edgy, quirky voices in which the actor/poet speaks for the historic and the legendary, for a songbird, oxygen, and a board of directors. On first reading of Elston’s collection, thoughts of lad lit, then theatre of the absurd surface (Six Actors in Search of an Author?), but these poems are neither superficial or existential. A second reading challenges the first impression of witty lightness. The poems imagine; they reimagine, and they question. Elston’s “voice” is clear, clever, and has something to say.
The collection’s initial poem, “The Stake,” begins: “The night before, / and Joan is certain. As ever.” Like the absurdist existential authors of the 1950s, the ending mirrors the beginning: “Oh, I’ll burn, Joan laughs. / I do every time. Your move.” The magic lies in the couplets between. The chess-playing voice asks: “Do I want to make her wonder?” In the fifth couplet Joan asks: “How can these cassocked frauds judge me, / Joan sighs. Are you like them?” The voice watches a spider. Chess, a suggestion that life and death are a game? The spider, an allusion to spider-wisdom à la Charlotte’s Web? There’s also a “fallen bishop” and much to ponder.
This prologue poem introduces key themes that thread through The Character Actor Convention. Thoughts of dying and death subtly weave through the poems, as do games. The bishop (religion) and judging also thread through the collection, as they do in “St. Helena” (21) where the voice plays cards with Napoleon:
St. Helena
I’d sit with Napoleon in exile
and chat casually.
There are more variants of Patience
named after me than any other man,
he’d mention, casually. He had a habit
of counting waves and cheating
every time we played cards.
The money meant nothing to him,
less than nothing to me.
You do know that nobody
who joins me here may leave?
he sometimes asked, while watching
the distance for sails. I dug a little hole
in the sand with my left foot.
All summer, I never told him
we don’t even have God in the future.
Joan and Napoleon aren’t the only characters that confront death. In “For a Good Time” (57), fish fly larvae “die within days.” Elston refers to other historical personalities who meet death – “eight / dead Philippes. Eleanor of Castile, / of Provence, of Aquitaine…Joan of Arc…the dead Louis’s.” But I’m struck by the fish flies – hundreds gathered on outside furniture this spring and every light-coloured surface in my river town, crunching underfoot as I walked on downtown stinking. What inspires Elston to combine fish fly larvae with these historical figures? His vision is playful, unique, and surprisingly perfect. He draws us in with the whimsy and stops us with insight and the juxtapositions of his subjects. Life is brief for both the larvae and us. Life is so brief, the voice “stop[s] gunrunning, / start[s] writing poems.”
The title poem falls mid-collection (33).
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Kathryn MacDonald 