by Margaryta Golovchenko | Contributing Writer

The Suicideâs Son
James Arthur
Vehicule Press, 2019
In his seminal 1967 essay âArt and Objecthood,â Michael Fried declares that â[t]he shape is the object [âŠ] what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape.â Itâs an attempt to work against the literalist use of the term âobjecthoodâ and its increasingly antithetical relationship to art. That question of objecthood and âthe condition of non-art,â as described by Fried, is revived in James Arthurâs new collection, The Suicideâs Son. For Arthur, the individual is seen as an object by contemporary society, from the way trauma is addressed and often dismissed, to how politics and tragic events can feel like theatrical miniatures when retold by media. The Suicideâs Son is interested in moments and places that present
human history
with all context sheared away, as if
there were no context, or as if the context
had been destroyed. As if no context
were the context, and the only context
there could be.
The structure of The Suicideâs Son mimics the process of getting lost in thought, moving organically from nostalgia to observation to questioning. It is fitting that the personal narrative of the collectionâs single speaker is told through flashes into the past followed by leaps into the present that still somehow remain stuck in a moment long gone. There is a sense that the collection is a way for Arthur to work against the idea of a closed loop and the sense that we are shaped byâand thus entrenched inâthe circumstances in which weâve grown up, whether these are personal, familiar circumstances or broader societal ones. The pulsing heart of the collection, then, can be found in the opening lines of âSchool for Boys,â which not only give the collection its title but also act as the force against which the speaker of the collection struggles:
. . . The son
of the suicide
becomes a suicide. His own son
becomes a drunk. Youâre not meant
to be unhappy,
you think, so it must be something
that youâve done;
there must be a reason why you are
the way you are.
From Frankensteinâs monster to the Big Bad Wolf to Chaucerâs stories to Hearst Castle, Arthur collects and curates a 21st century Wunderkammer over the course of The Suicideâs Son. He gathers together the real and the fictional based not on their so-called objective value for society and history, but for the role theyâve played in shaping the who the speaker has become over the course of his life. He reminds readers that loss has a greater influence on the individual than the desire to possess or exert control, as in the somber poem, âGoodnight Moon,â where the speaker admits to his child that
For me, beginnings and endings
are getting hard to tell apart. There was another child
your mom and I conceived, whoâd now be reading
teaching you to read â who we threw away
when he or she was smaller than a watermelon seed.
This brings the question of objecthood to one of the most asked of questions: What is the role of poetry? Is it an object? If so, how does it behave as an object? If not, what is its function? Arthur answers these questions in âEloquence,â stating, âI want things from poetry // that it could never give: / power to undo, to mend. To compel forgiveness / and forgive.â Taken as a whole, The Suicideâs Son is a collection through which the journeys of both the speaker and the reader are akin to a trip to a museum or art gallery, where the familiar Do Not Touch finds its counterpart in the way moments can feel inaccessible, as in âIn Al Purdyâs House,â where the speaker states: âI know better than to make myself at home / in a house that isnât mine.â The abrupt ending of âRoar,â therefore, feels especially fitting, suspending the collection in a state of limbo that serves as a reminder that what happens next will be unpredictableâand possibly endless: âDragonflies, butterflies. They / skitter across the air â”
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Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, and critic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. A reviewer for Anomaly and The Town Crier, she is currently completing an MA in art history and curatorial studies at York University.