A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems
by Kate Braid
Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-894759-28-1, 120 pp., $16.95 paper.

In A Well-Mannered Storm, Kate Braid, one of BC's leading poets, evokes another Canadian icon, Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Gould's musical celebrity and worldwide following started with the release at age twenty-two of his interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. His persona is that of the artist eccentric who preferred the recording studio to the concert hall where his personal idiosyncrasies distracted live audiences.

To introduce the icon, Braid creates k, a fan who writes to Gould with her personal responses to the music and with her personal problem, creeping deafness, with which she assumes Gould will empathize. This k persona satisfies our expectations that poetry is usually somehow personal rather than a shorthand way to write about the arts, culture, or heroes (television, movie plots, politics, etc.) k's deafness in one ear also seems functional. Gould too hears things differently from "normal" people and this dis/ability both contributes to his genius and interferes with his ability to communicate with audiences.

Braid includes snippets of Gould's biographical information to accompany the poems. Details such as the strange relationship with his mother, no reference to his parents after the age of twelve, multiple prescriptions from multiple doctors, an unconventional personal life, a seeming inability to function at a domestic level all tend to pique our interest in the artist's personal life and habits. Yet we cannot avoid connecting the eccentric and self-indulgent behaviours with those of other musical icons, including Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson. The artist as hero. The artist as shaman, transporting us to, helping us connect with, realms beyond the human, the music of the spheres. The dead artist as psychopomp, receiver of prayers, sharer of dreams, up there in the pantheon where God used to be.

The poetry of A Well-Mannered Storm, the words and their arrangement upon the page, are subservient to the ideas and images that they are being used to transmit. Nothing in the writing detracts, like Gould's humming, from the art it is interpreting and sharing. My favourite section is Braid's description in REALIA of the visit to the archives, touching his chair, smelling his shoes, putting on his coat. Yes! Yes! Haven't we all dreamed the investiture, the closet as the closest we can get to donning, slipping into, inhabiting the body of the other, the beloved?

J.M. Bridgeman writes from BC's Fraser River Valley.

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