Recovery Community
Conor Mc Donnell
Mansfield Press, 2020
Review by Robert Colman
A lot has been written about life in lockdown over the past year and a half—so much so that even new literary journals, including The Quarantine Review, have been launched out of the need for writers to express the essence of the novel situation we’re experiencing. As someone who works from home most of the time, I initially felt that societal restrictions wouldn’t affect me as they did the many who commute to work and are used to the circadian comfort of ritual comings and goings. More fool me.
It took reading Conor Mc Donnell’s debut collection of poems, Recovery Community, to get to the heart of what the pandemic really made me feel: trapped physically and emotionally by lockdown; powerless amidst world strife that was magnified by the lack of other stimuli to empower oneself to effect change; and blunted by days that, particularly mid-winter, were akin to the movie Groundhog Day.
To be clear, Mc Donnell’s book is not a pandemic-inspired collection. It examines trauma, illness, and loss through the voices of a host of characters, and the poems lean on his experience as a physician, movie lover, and avid record collector. Through a panoply of voices, Mc Donnell is able to capture the feeling of being trapped by one’s fate and the larger forces of the world that one cannot hope to control. It’s a voice of the pandemic by chance, rather than by choice. For example, one of the most effective and surprising poems in the book is “We Are Shine.” This piece is one of several that serve as an homage to a film—in this case, The Shining (1980)—and it’s remarkable for two reasons: it’s a list poem that works, and it does much more than simply recapture a scene or idea from the film. Over five pages, Mc Donnell re-lives the whole film through lines starting with “we are.” Here is the first section of the poem to illustrate:
The Interview
we are wait
we are have an appointment
we are way to making ends meet
five months peace is just what we need
we are quite the story
The piece starts calm, like the movie, but two pages in it ratchets up to:
we are bargained we are sold we are settlers we are wagons
we are fall and irreparable harm
we are could be a whole lot better we are nothing we can’t handle
At first, I thought it would be necessary to know the plot points of the film, but as the tension builds (fuelled in part by the incessant repetition of “we are”), that notion falls away. The poem lives as jump cuts—from action to emotion—and makes up for any lack of specific knowledge. Eventually, the poem gets more frenetic, the energy heightened line by line through lack of punctuation, as Mc Donnell’s anaphora drives the reader forward. Panic and anger eventually lead to a line that I think connects the poem to the essence of the book: “we are waiting to be told we are always to be here we are no sad snowman.” We are in the mind of the narrator who wishes to escape and cannot. In owning this inability to escape, however, the poet offers a kind of redemption.
There are other films through which Mc Donnell explores similar experiences of being resigned to a certain fate. These include Vertigo, Double Indemnity, Night of the Hunter, and Mulholland Drive, and are scattered throughout Recovery Community. Which brings me to pacing. Mc Donnell varies form often, from couplets to list poems to prose poems. While the film poems anchor the book, the chorus of voices created by Mc Donnell’s formal variations is engaging and allows him to show his poetic skillset. Consider these examples from two poems that face each other:
The rabbit’s foot, the monkey’s paw
A bolt shot through an eyebrow
A ring snaked through a nose above
a mouth beneath a nipple
(“Talisman & Brand”)
…People you know your whole life
live next to you work next to you stealing narcan from walmart packed next to
pregnancy tests and kotex sucking every crooked penny up till the first cheque
bounces last gram of pride just disappears…
(“//911//9/11//”)
Even in a seemingly rambling monologue, “narcan” and “walmart” rub shoulders, while “next pregnancy tests and kotex” bounce off of “every crooked penny” and “the first cheque.” Meanwhile, the trochaic ending of the words “eyebrow” and “nipple,” bolstered by the precision of each line’s measure, makes it feel as if those words rhyme.
Ultimately it’s the list poems that harness the power of Recovery Community. Poems like “Thirty-three rants per minute,” which plays on the titles of popular albums to express frustration at the world, and “Monstros Olympus,” which reads like a sped up ad for excess, each line starting with “This is…” are essential to Mc Donnell’s take on isolation. In the thick of these poems, I think of the James song “Born of Frustration,” Tim Booth howling after singing the title lyric. It’s the pent up energy of being inside oneself for too long finally released; it’s feeling that maybe it’s too late to change fate; it’s being aware of powerlessness. All of this is at the heart of Recovery Community.
Don’t read powerlessness as a synonym for hopelessness here, though. There’s an optimistic undercurrent in Mc Donnell’s work. Many of his poems are angry, and like Booth’s primal howl, that anger stretches toward the hope that the title Recovery Community suggests. Like keeping oneself together during the pandemic, it takes a community to make survival an option.
Robert Colman graduated with an MFA from UBC in 2016. His most recent book of poems, Democratically Applied Machine, was published by Palimpsest Press in 2020.