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Reading the Bible
Backwards
by Robert Priest
Toronto: ECW Press,
2008 ISBN: 978-1-55022-835-9 102 pp., $16.95 paper.
From its shiny black cover that looks so much like a vinyl record you want to pop it onto a turntable, you can see this book is bound to be a classic. Anyone familiar with the work of Robert Priest knows to expect poems based in wordplay, with puns that appeal to every sense, especially the sense of humour.Even his website is playful. A YouTube video sees him singing in a field he shares with a couple of horses. And oh yes, he's naked, wearing nothing but a smile and his guitar.
When Robert Priest (w)rites a poem, he pries into the wor(l)d, pulls out new meanings like a cat with a ball of string. Interspersed among the pages is a series of poems Priest calls 'meme splices.' These are poems that play around with similar but oh-so-different words. Among these are splices for faith/face, friend/fiend, angel/angle and my favourite, "Word/Bird Meme Splice."
All too soon the words migrate
They spend the winter elsewhere
We see them going and we are silent
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Why would you put a word in a cage?
Why would you want a word swinging on a little perch?
Saying itself over and over: word word word word [70]Because so much of Priest's work relies on having the reader apply internal knowledge of the language, I suspect he's pretty much untranslatable. Still, there's the music of it. His "Rough Transitions from Deity to Theory" probably works anywhere. I can picture the poet working his jaw around the sounds:
dee aw-dee
tee aw-dee
thee aw-dee
thee-ah ee
theeyah-ee [4]And as might be expected from a poet who's also a composer and musician, melodies weasel their way into the work. A song I'd thought long-buried in my brain conjures itself into consciousness at the poem "We Are Rowing Back to Hera." My brain insists on saying the words to the tune of "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder." As for "I Love a Metazoan," try your best to ignore the song that comes to mind; it's one of those dratted ear worms--you've been warned.
The book's title poem sees Jesus coming down from the cross, reversing the beatitudes so that "the rich shall inherit the earth" [3], and then moonwalking "rapidly / Out of history" [4]. Yet for all its apparent silliness, the poem holds a tenderness about it, and closes with these lines: "For a while there is a star / That hovers / Then that too is gone" [4].
A number of other poems also play on reversals. Some of these, as the book's title suggests, undo biblical events. Others offer new takes on contemporary life, as in "Here in Backwards Land," where "we get to vote / but the winner is the loser // when we love one another / that's the worst" [13].
Clearly, love is anything but 'the worst' to Priest: "The sail cannot deny / The wind / How can I deny / My love" [85]. Some of his love poems bend to the universal ("Love Is Bigger Than Me"), while others celebrate his long relationship with the love of his life, Marsha.
Whether their subject is love or physics or headaches or even a cough, Robert Priest puts his own spin on poems. How apt that this collection should open with a piece called "The Code" and then play at whirling the vinyl backwards, finding the secret messages that have come to seem hidden in the dogma of Christianity. Reading the Bible Backwards is a collection where the poet serves as meme to his own name: he is Robert Priest, priest. And now and then, like a priest in a church, he can sometimes go on a bit long, as I suppose this review probably does. But his preaching isn't preachy; in fact, it's celebratory. To use a phrase he might come up with, the poems are wholly holy.
The newly released Verse Map of Vancouver (edited by George McWhirter) contains a poem by Heidi Greco.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.