No replies to this topic

[Gregory Hartnell]

+++
Gregory Hartnell reprints here a book review which appears in the current number of the Island Catholic News, edited by Patrick Jamieson (Volume 20, Number 10, November, 2006) under his nom de plume 'Goyo de la Rosa.'
+++

Astonishing Word Play on 'A Life of Tragic Reversals' (Plus Place Names) [headline]

The Secret World of David Jure [subhead]

By Goyo de la Rosa, Victoria

The Patient English, David Jure, Word Works Publications, 60 pages, Victoria, 2006.

David Jure, alias J. David Burke, the intrepid London England-born Fairfield poet, Shakespearean actor, Concerned Citizens' Coalition municipal candidate and boulevardier, has just released his fifth chapbook, and fans of the multitalented artiste will not be disappointed.

In 'The Patient English,' Jure has matured into a somewhat melancholic muse, returning to his familiar themes with more acceptance (or resignation) and less rancour, although the righteous anger at social injustice is still very much in evidence.

Themes include: family, friends, isolation, loneliness, angst, paranoia, addiction, psychiatry, incarceration, memory, music, travel, the Bard, Monty Python and other famous Europeans (including, of course, the mythical '007'), replete with numerous local character and Canadian place name references and fun puns, which the poet seems to indulge just for the sake of it.

A VOICE SO UNIQUE

Jure's voice is so unique, his obsessions so human and familiar, that it is virtually impossible not to be impressed by his accomplishment. Somehow, he makes his sophisticated literate anarchic world comprehensible to us, and that is nothing short of miraculous, considering the veil of tears he has been through, particularly his encounters with the provincial psychiatric drug system.

Can you say Haldol without thinking of Hitler? Neither can he: 'I will rule or I will die on half measures of psychiatric bungling in a locked ward on a drug invented by the Nazis,' as he puts it in the poem 'the patricia bay series.'

Maddeningly, he sometimes resorts to the e.e. cummings trick of not capitalizing when he should. Then at other times he capitalizes as a proper bourgeois poet. This consistent inconsistency in style is in keeping with the dada absurdist tradition within which he works.

KEY ELEMENTS IN HIS GENIUS

Author of 'Merlin's Millenium,' 'Yellow Pyjamas,' 'Dark and Dangerous Daze,' and 'Various Means of Escape,' Jure's new chapbook opens with an amusing 'list of essential one liners and maxims and sayings culled from a lifetime of tragic reversals and basic major disappointments' thats sets the tone for what follows: three prose pieces (including 'The Mysterious Case of the Missing Golden Boy' with references to yours truly), two one-act plays ('Windsurfing to Port Angeles' and 'The Allies'), 26 poems, including five on Montreal, two about Patricia Bay, two about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, with two photocopied letters from famous politicians (Gordo and that good ol' boy from Hope, Arkansas) thrown in for good measure as appendices.

As a bit of a parlour game, I have in the course of preparing this review taken a yellow highlighter pen and marked up my third or fourth copy of this book, looking primarily for local references, and startling lines, some of which I will now share. Let's start with the last of the 27 'essential one liners' mentioned abover: '27 - one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small but I say dedication not medication.'

For local character and place references and his unique humour, one could do worse than read 'The Mysterious Case of the Missing Golden Boy;' City of Pardons, Rattenbury's Revenge, the Causeway Piper, Paul's Crown House, Villages (sic) 900, Sam's Deli, Burke and Hartnell, David Anderson, Gordon Head, Gulf Islands, Premier Gideon Cromwell, the Raging Grannies, David Arthur Johnson, the Crimes Communist, Colwood, etc. "Burke and Hartnell ended up with the Raging Grannies in city cells for a night after trampling some prize tulips..."

LOCAL PLACE NAMES

In the same vein, 'A vague Piece About My Vanishing Victoria' has these local place references: Turner's sign at Fort and Richmond, Harry's Flowers, Johnny's Grocery, Willows Beach, the old Charming Inn, the Church of Our Lord, the Fairmont Empress, the regretable Cook Street bus service, the Kiwanis Pavilion at Willows, the Selkirk waterway, Carnaby Street, long a bastion of Yates Street and Jimmy Chicken (the island, that is).

I could go on and I will. Bear with me, out-of-town readers, this is not simply a book of interest to local Victoria readers. The point I am making is that this poet, more than any other local living one that I can name, has consecrated the Joycian virtue of celebrating the universal in the local, and this, in my estimation, is one of the key elements in his genius.

Social historians of the future will no doubt study these references in scholarly tomes on the contemporary Victoria poetic scene, and Jure will be a key provider of information of what and who was here...now.

And certainly, no one I know can look at Victoria in quite the same light as our poet. Bent through his readings of Shakespeare, Beckett, Joyce and Thomas, his obsession with the Pythons and Bond, Jure shows us a Victoria that is ever so slightly off-kilter. We then have to ask ourselves, is this really what Victoria is like, or has Mr. Jure gone off his meds?

Read 'The Patient English' and find out what a mania for justice looks like when one subsists on the inadequate disabilities pension under the most corrupt provincial government ever.

+++