Paul Vermeersch's ​Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy

Reviewed by Amy Mitchell

​ECW Press, 2018

Paul Vermeersch’s Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy is in turns wry, funny, horrifying and incisive, with the collection as a whole unified by its mournfulness for both the absurdities of human existence and our penchant for self-destruction. It is also a deeply intelligent collection that uses its interest in form to contribute significantly to the thoughtful arguments of its content. It both delights during a quick read and rewards careful re-reading, and I highly recommend it.
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“The Country of Previous Enthusiasms” (the first portion of the collection) sets the stage for everything that follows. This section is a weird combination of fifties-era futurism, the lessons we’ve learned from dystopian fiction, and the extreme long-view of massive swaths of historical time. In the eponymous poem, Jetsons-style nostalgia is undermined by humanity’s dubious insistence on progress, with disturbing implications:

Their designers were philosophers. Ours,
engineers. In their country, with its globular buildings,
and lanky, finned automobiles, the people
might have been happier, but we
have more efficient use of space.

The process of transcending current (and flawed) arrangements of human society simply ushers in further unease and disconnection, rather than so-called progress. From “Without Architecture”:

There would have to be another vision for occupying space,
new rituals for sitting and standing, for the physical interruption
of the planar world. No longer would we distinguish
between exist and inhabit. No asking where we live.

Or consider the following from “Without Transportation”:

Experience is always nearby. The world is the world
as far as we can see it. There is a word for the distance
a person can walk in a day, but it was passed down
so long ago it needs to be remembered. Unneeded words
are forgotten. It is common to never see a friend again.

As history teaches us, certain fundamentally human problems will never be solved or even changed; Old Rome and New Rome (with the eschatological connotations of that second name firmly in place) will in some respects feel the same:

… When Rome
was fresh in its marble and cement,
 
the old Republic was bound together
with complaints about its breaking points,
and New Rome will be no different. It will
suffer equally from the breakthroughs
 
in its walls …

(And because Vermeersch loves to geek out in his writing—witness the author photo on the back cover complete with a plastic laser gun—I like to think that “the old Republic” also resonates beyond the poem itself to the various Star Wars videogames).
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This section closes with the horde of human history’s various prophets asking a far-distant, future humanity whether their prophecies were right:

Was it all as we envisioned? Were we even close?
We presume one day you will discover
the means to answer us, but our vocabulary
is already too primitive for you to understand.

In the end, there is possibly no way to meaningfully bridge such a large gulf of time, a phenomenon which might render even the most pressing of our current prophecies (e.g. catastrophic climate change) ultimately irrelevant.
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The kind of loss and fracturing of meaning is a theme that recurs throughout the entire collection. The most unsettling examples of this theme are likely the poems that make up the section “Nu---- Rhymes for Nuclear Children.” These poems have the rhythm and style of children’s nursery rhymes, with the content focused on horrific material from twentieth-century history, such as the use of the first atomic bomb, the terror of the Nazi regime, and the ever-larger and ever-more-absurd weapons that fascinated world leaders. In the following, “Ronny” is Ronald Reagan:

Ronny loved his jelly beans
for all their lovely colours.
Ronny built a laser beam
that cost a billion dollars.

These poems, however, have words, lines, and sometimes entire sections redacted, with ominous streaks of solid black regularly interrupting them. The redactions make even the most innocuous poems threatening and emphasize the nihilism that undergirds these kinds of historical events.
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But it is not just in large ways that we are disconnected from or slightly sideways to reality and its ramifications; these issues permeate the everyday, too. The narrator of “Detroit” recounts the wide-eyed voyeurism that many Canadians who have lived near or driven through it will uncomfortably recognize:

There was always far more money
there, and far less. On paper,
at least, the cylindrical high-rises
heralded rebirth, and the nachos
were better. Coming as we did
from nowhere, it was easy to be
fascinated and still feel superior.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Our gelid
skins tempered us against the poor.

(I essentially grew up in Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit, and Vermeersch gets these details exactly right: the gawking at the poverty in Detroit proper and at the excessive wealth in Grosse Pointe, the naïve romanticism of getting a taste of a Big American City, and the incessant claims in Windsor that Detroit’s Mexicantown does indeed boast nachos superior to those anywhere else—or at least anywhere else in southwestern Ontario or the American Midwest).
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Additionally, all of us at some point have realized the bewildering smallness of contemplating the individual in the enormous sea of humanity, a phenomenon captured beautifully in “The Failure of the Human Body as an Art Form”:

Blue eyes. Brown eyes. Leopold. Leopold. Leopold. Leopold.
The repetition of the words has the same effect as the
repetition of the eyes. And this is the failure of the human body
as an art form. Human bodies are repetitive. Genes are clichés.
The work is always limited by the medium—two eyes,
four limbs, ad infinitum …

And then we try to assert our uniqueness through silly rituals like the trick photograph, a staple of social media life in the twenty-first century and the subject of the poem “Standing In Front of Antlers Mounted On a Wall So It Looks Like They’re Growing From Your Head.”

Complementing the thematic content, Vermeersch sometimes achieves a quietly uncanny effect through his use of form, as in the all the poems in “Leviathan,” the final section of the collection. The focus in this section ranges from our fears about the natural world (from the justifiable to the imaginative/imaginary), to our attempts to make philosophical/spiritual and religious meaning of our lives, to how we relate to the ultimately unknowable. On the one hand, these poems are all very contemporary—“The Constellationification Effect,” for instance, considers the consequences of distributing human consciousness over a network: “the Constellationification Effect / will convert the human form into a trillion / pings of light that can enter over twenty / billion optic nerves at once …” “Repeat After Me” moves from “a home / legal will kit” to “Can anyone / out there hear me? C’mon. C’mere. Meme me.” On the other hand, the poems in this section all quietly adhere to the 14 lines (either for the poem as a whole or 14-line sections within a larger poem) of the historical sonnet. The traditional rhyme scheme is dropped, but the basics of the sonnet form itself—and the weight of history behind it—quietly hover in the background of all of these poems, emphasizing the continuity in human concerns and meaning-making over time, and the likely extension of these issues far into the future. It is true that for both today’s suburban humanity and Shakespeare “It is not the animals in the wilderness that lure us / to the wilderness, but the animals we imagine.” There is both a wistfulness and a wry humor to the realization of this continuity, and the form of the poems reinforces the overall message.

I have painted a rather dark picture of this collection, but it is also shot through with humor: the human condition, when viewed from the correct angle, is deeply funny, and our attempts to navigate the world can be delightfully ridiculous. What is possibly the best example of this humor is “The Modernist Canon,” which, as the notes at the end of the book explain, “is composed of whole-poem anagrams” based on three famous Modernist poems by William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. The results straddle the boundary between nonsense and not-nonsense, and they are so well-executed that, for anyone familiar with the source texts, the explanation at the end of the book is completely unnecessary (I’m a modernist by training, and as I started to read this sequence, I wondered “Is he doing what I think he’s doing …? He is!!!”). Once again, from the right perspective, our literary canon is both ridiculous and funny, as are many of our conventions, and this sequence drives that point home.

Furthermore, the humor extends into the wonderfully absurd illustrations throughout the book, also created by Vermeersch. They are hilarious mash-ups of things like biohazard/radiation warnings and “LASERGNU” (yes, it is indeed the outline of a gnu with a laser mounted on it, under a caution symbol that is also sprouting horns—and if anyone would like to get me the T-shirt for Christmas, I wouldn’t say no). The illustrations punctuate the poems with striking visuals that do not merely illustrate, but enhance the text as a whole.
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In short, Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy is perceptive, carefully-crafted, melancholy and funny. The simultaneously critical and wryly amused attitude of the collection is perhaps the only self-defence that we have against time and the monsters of our own creation.

Amy Mitchell is The /tƐmz/ Review's social media editor (as well as a writing editor) and a college professor. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Western University. Her reading tendencies have been described as "promiscuous"; she is interested in a wide range of fiction and poetry, and particularly enjoys finding new and interesting works in translation.