‘Swan Dive’ by Michael Prior

Reviewed by Jim Johnstone

The elegance of a swan dive—the moment where the diver pauses, arms outstretched, and surrenders to gravity—is in its vulnerability. Writers experience this kind of vulnerability when they publish, and while branding a collection of poetry with the grandeur of such a gesture might initially seem arrogant, it also concedes the risk of failure. The high of publishing rarely lasts long, and the illusory nature of posterity is enough to pull many writers apart. Enter Michael Prior. Swan Dive, the author’s first chapbook, finds him perched above the Canadian literary community looking down. To say that this slim debut was anticipated would understate Prior’s ascension to the nation’s pole position among writers under 30. Prior’s rise has been prodigious: with multiple awards to his name, he has become nearly ubiquitous in Canadian literary magazines. Swan Dive continues that trend, giving Prior a limited-edition springboard to “learn on [his] own what can’t be reset,” and challenge the expectations for his fledgling career.

“Ventriloquism for Dummies,” Swan Dive’s opening salvo, finds Prior with his hand up the back of his predecessors’ shirts. Or so he’d have us believe. The voice that begins “Pine plosives, alveolar carpentry: / my life, lived like an elaborate glove” is his own: playful, polished, and self-aware. Consider the assonance that pulls “plosives” and “alveolar” together, the way the “l” sounds evolve into the alliterative “life, lived like,” speeding up the reader’s tongue. In the first two lines of the book, Prior’s technique is already doing heavy lifting by mimicking the momentum of living, while also establishing a sonic identity. Offered up as a moment of self-discovery, these lines morph into self-mockery as the poet continues:

Tilt my head, a pale seashell scribed by lathe,
and listen to the few unfurling thoughts,
the dry shake of dust. Semper idem, no?

A note at the back of the book alerts the reader that the poem’s meter is lifted from Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” an appropriate transmutation considering that Childe Roland’s madness is adopted from Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Later Prior takes a line directly from Browning: “My first thought was, he lied in every word.” More thesis statement than recognition of influence, this declaration would fit any of the poems in Swan Dive, but shuffled up front it alerts the reader to the poet’s knack for deception. Prior prides himself as a ventriloquist, as an entertainer who is adept at building worlds, and penning monologues for the dubious characters swimming in and out of them.

While seldom overtly humorous, Prior’s wit shines near the end of “Ventriloquism for Dummies” when he proffers: “Got wood? It’s all I’ve got.” It’s another lie, but a good one, putting the poet’s humility center stage. Only he’s already eclipsed much of the Canadian establishment in a single step, regardless of his relatively slight body of work. This introduction segues nicely into the title poem, which is prefaced with an epigraph from Shakespeare, and stars Ophelia, the much-beleaguered potential wife of Prince Hamlet:

It’s hard to stay angry on a bed of water.
Harder yet to remain above the tide—

hence the anchor, hence the dive.
For those of us who practise our Ophelia,

we creatures of conscience, let it be known
that I have keened the lake in colder

seasons, seen the loves returned by acts
of ice. Olive bottles, agate necklaces

bought in beachfront shops for cheap.
I shall th’ effect of this good lesson keep.

I rearrange my lost and found. That man
who was discovered rooting the bottom

three decades after his death: in his boat
a fish still writhed the line. Hear me out.

Even the swans’ necks don’t shape a heart
when they hunt beneath the dark.

Besides the undercurrent of Ophelia’s suicide, the beauty of the language in “Swan Dive” stands out. Prior writes as if he’s trying to lure his readers to their deaths by making such a fate seem attractive, a fate reserved for “creatures of conscience” whose anger isn’t long for the world. One can imagine him whispering the poem on a self-help line, letting the slant rhymes of each couplet (acts / necklaces, boat / out, heart / dark) seduce the listener with their chimes. In this sense, the poem is a duplicitous balance of morality and charisma, almost cultish in its persuasion. Even the man 30 years dead at the bottom of the lake, the poet claims, has a fish hooked on the line. Then, “the swans’ necks don’t shape a heart / when they hunt beneath the dark.” The inversion of message in the final couplet is Prior’s trigger, the final blow meant to throw the reader over the edge.

Despite his predilection for responding to the founding fathers of English language poetry (besides Browning and Shakespeare, Robert Lowell and Lewis Carroll make cameos later in the book), Prior’s verse is wilfully contemporary. In part, this is due to the cultural immediacy of the work, which often uses nostalgia as an emotional touchstone. Take “Tamagotchi,” an ode to the digital pet craze of the late-90s. Replete with dead hamsters and goldfish, this poem couldn’t have been written at any other time in history (despite the universality of a line like “If you practised, your love could be reset.”) The contrast between high and low culture, between the old and the new, keeps Swan Dive afloat where many contemporary collections of poetry lapse into one-dimensionality. In “The Train’s Ceiling Has Been Painted to Look Like the Sky,” Prior projects a scene filmed on a Super-8 camera, doling out homespun wisdom like “golf balls / kill more people than lightning,” all the while borrowing footage from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Even Mötley Crüe is given the nod in “Methods of Loci” when Prior writes: “On this floodplain a jackrabbit / kick-starts its own heart.”

The second half of Swan Dive foregoes ‘Ventriloquisms’ for ‘Second Skins.’ These poems are primarily mock narratives from the perspective of animals—a veritable bestiary sounding the depths of Prior’s ambitions. Consider the beginning of “Hermit Crab,” undergirded with music reminiscent of the ocean’s advance:

Regardless of what you’ve been told,
I moved in because I didn’t want
to hear the ocean anymore,

the slosh of water autopsying itself—
a reminder that I would one day
be an unclaimed vacancy.

That endless hum and pulse rattled
the limp spiral of my body, echoed
through the sideways cadence

of my thoughts.

Anthropomorphic to the point of sounding almost entirely human, Prior’s speaker dons a carapace to protect against “water autopsying itself” on an unnamed beach. The opening stanza establishes the first person “I” as bedrock for his expression, and from there “Hermit Crab” progresses in a more-or-less linear fashion. Prior gets the music right, but the poem is less felt than objectively imagined, rendered as if he were looking at the decapod from a remove. There’s a chill running through lines like “a reminder that I would one day / be an unclaimed vacancy.” While cognitive distance might seem appropriate for an anthropomorphic monologue, it’s evident in all of Prior’s work, dragged along like a vestigial claw. Simultaneously his biggest strength and his biggest weakness, the poet’s tightly wound logic will turn back “the visitors / who unknowingly hold [him] to their ear” for too long at the end of “Hermit Crab.”

Gripping the reins of sense too tightly is a minor qualm in a debut chapbook however, and even an admirable attribute for a poet who was born in 1990. Moreover, this is the kind of concern that comes with elevated expectations, and Prior has a deep flex to his diving board. On the whole, particularly in ‘Ventriloquisms,’ he shines. There’s no hesitation to the poems in Swan Dive, no lack of resolve, just the grace of the poet’s words as he cuts through the page with fervour. There’s something else too: defiance. It would be misguided to bet against a poet with Prior’s talent, who boldly warns against “mis[taking] who I was then for whom / I might have become.”

Frog Hollow | 40 pages | $20.00 | paper, limited edition | ISBN #  978-1926948249