Guy Elston's ​The Character Actor Convention

Reviewed by Kathryn MacDonald

(Porcupine's Quill, 2025)

​The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston brings together sharp, edgy, quirky voices in which the actor/poet speaks for the historic and the legendary, for a songbird, oxygen, and a board of directors. On first reading of Elston’s collection, thoughts of lad lit, then theatre of the absurd surface (Six Actors in Search of an Author), but these poems are neither superficial nor existential. A second reading challenges the first impression of witty lightness. The poems imagine; they reimagine; and they question. Elston’s voice is clear, clever, and has something to say.
 
The collection’s initial poem, “The Stake,” begins, “The night before, / and Joan is certain. As ever.” Like the absurdist existential authors of the 1950s, the ending mirrors the beginning: “Oh, I’ll burn, Joan laughs. / I do every time. Your move.” The magic lies in the couplets between. The chess-playing voice asks, “Do I want to make her wonder?” In the fifth couplet Joan asks, “How can these cassocked frauds judge me, / Joan sighs. Are you like them?” The voice watches a spider. Chess: a suggestion that life and death are a game? The spider: an allusion to spider-wisdom à la Charlotte’s Web? There’s also a “fallen bishop” and much else to ponder.
 
This prologue poem introduces key themes that thread through The Character Actor Convention. Thoughts of dying and death subtly weave through the poems, as do games. The bishop (religion) and judging also thread through the collection, as they do in “St. Helena”, where the voice plays cards with Napoleon:

​St. Helena
 
I’d sit with Napoleon in exile
and chat casually.
 
There are more variants of Patience
named after me than any other man,
 
he’d mention, casually. He had a habit
of counting waves and cheating
 
every time we played cards.
The money meant nothing to him,
 
less than nothing to me.
You do know that nobody
 
who joins me here may leave?
he sometimes asked, while watching
 
the distance for sails. I dug a little hole
in the sand with my left foot.
 
All summer, I never told him
we don’t even have God in the future.

​Joan and Napoleon aren’t the only characters that confront death. In “For a Good Time”, fishfly larvae “die within days.” Elston refers to other historical personalities who meet death: “eight / dead Philippes. Eleanor of Castile, / of Provence, of Aquitaine…Joan of Arc…the dead Louis’s.” But I’m struck by the fish flies – hundreds gathered on outside furniture this spring and every light-coloured surface in my river town, crunching underfoot as I walked on downtown, stinking. What inspires Elston to combine fishfly larvae with these historical figures? His vision is playful, unique, and surprisingly perfect. He draws us in with the whimsy and stops us with insight and the juxtapositions of his subjects. Life is brief for both the larvae and us. Life is so brief, the voice “stop[s] gunrunning, / start[s] writing poems.”
 
The title poem falls mid-collection. Like all the poems, it has been carefully, intentionally placed: 

The Character Actor Convention
 
We don’t identify as attendants,
those appendages to our own images.
In the crowds, ‘we’ and ‘they’ blend.
The snacks table thrums with hey, that guy faces.
The keynote speech is a cameo, and introducing –
imitable, inimitable, same thing.
Characters move through us, inhabit our dreams of screen.
We applaud, but it could be an act.
For us, living is the most important thing.
If not marquee, perhaps gazebo names.
At the fin I pocket my lanyard, picture you,
front-centre on a billboard, and sigh performatively
while fading to black.
I had a final line—I forget.
The convention closes, as ever, on a question:
Are we nearly them yet?
​

​When I read through the poems the first time, I soon realized that I read superficially – read them as witty and quirky, read the voice as chameleon. But the voice steadily scrutinises its investigation into our short lives, our touchstones. From the title on through the collection, the poems elicit questions. What is a character actor? What happens at conventions? It’s metaphor and more. Elston offers a critique of history and of our social selves today: “Are we nearly them yet?”. My first impressions were wholly wrong. The Character Actor Convention can, of course, be read on the surface, and the poems dance, but those who take the time to delve deeper into these carefully crafted poems will be rewarded.  I think a thesis or two could be written on this first extraordinary collection.

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Kathryn MacDonald’s poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland and India. Her reviews have also been published in journals across Canada and on her website (https://kathrynmacdonald.com). Her newest poetry collection, The Blue Gate, will be published by Frontenac Press, Spring 2026. She is a co-author of Liminal Spaces (Glentula Press, 2025) and is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon (Glentula Press, 2024), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (HBP, 2011), and Calla & Édourd (fiction, HBP, 2009).