David White's Local Haunts

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

(Pedlar Press, 2019)

Local Haunts, David White’s follow up to his 2017 debut collection The Lark Ascending, is an extraordinary book. As its title suggests, it is grounded in the local, in London, Ontario and the Lake Huron shore northwest of it, and White’s regionalism is at once intimate and capacious, weaving a lifetime of deeply personal moments together with the manifold, sometimes barely remembered, histories of Lambton, Middlesex and Huron Counties. The book is divided into three sections that progress roughly through time, from the 1960s to the present: “Port Franks, Looking Towards Kettle Point,” “Days,” and “Sunrise on the Coldstream Road.” And the poems track White’s development from the traumas of his childhood to the loves and friendships of his adult years while remaining alive to the complexities of the broader socio-political context in which his life is embedded.
 
In the first section, difficult but powerful poems about his father’s abuse of his mother and the sexual abuse White himself suffered at the hands of a family friend simultaneously interrogate London’s history as a military town. In “The Armories: Men’s Canteen, 1961,” White writes about being sent by his mother to retrieve his father from the bar in the basement of the Armories. It is worth noting that this local landmark is no longer a military building, but has been preserved as a hotel, and will be instantly recognized by anyone familiar with the city. White writes: “Horses housed in darkness. / Watering hole for militia men.” The horses, a military anachronism kept for show, gesture towards the, at this point, more than a century old military presence in the city, and the juxtaposition of the two lines in a couplet suggests both the dehumanisation of the militia men, White’s father among them, and the embedding of that dehumanisation within the longstanding patriarchal institution of military masculinity. The poem proceeds from the father humiliating his seven-year-old child in front of his drinking buddies to the inevitable conclusion of the day:

this evening
 
will end with mom’s body
sprawled
 
across the basement floor
at the bottom of the stairs,
 
and no one,
not even her parents—Sunday morning
 
driving us to Church--
will say anything at all
 
about the all-too-obvious bruises.

Notice how the poem moves outward from the brutality of the father’s violence to the broader community that licences it by looking away. Although it offers White’s mother’s parents as a pointed example, the “no one” indicts the community at large. I write “indicts,” and there is most certainly anger running through this and other poems in the book, but there is just as often the quiet sadness one sees in these lines. These are poems that mourn the hurts of the past as much as they rage against them.
 
Many of the childhood poems in this first section feature or refer to the beaches along the coast of Lake Huron to the west of London. The multi-section poem in which White documents his abuse and meditates on it’s effect on him, writing poignantly “It will take me over a decade / to find my way / back to Gay,” is set at a Ipperwash beach, and the abuse takes place in the water. The beach is a site of personal trauma, but the book does not shy away from taking up the lands expropriation for use as a military base and the tragic confrontation between the Indigenous owners to whom the land rightfully belongs and the government in 1995. In “London Delta Armouries Hotel, 1978,” White reviews the changes to the locales of his youth, writing about the aforementioned transformation of the Armoury into a hotel among other transformations, and includes the appropriately cutting and direct lines

but the excursions continue
to Ipperwash Beach,
 
where children are taught how to kill
on expropriated Indigenous land

And, in “Occupation,” he writes specifically about the confrontation and the death of Dudley George, juxtaposing his own experiences spending summers during his undergrad working at the Officer’s Mess at the military camp with Mike Harris’ infamous statement “I want those fucking Indians out of the park!” and George “fall[ing] dead / on Lake Huron sands.” The poem’s ending is at once unsettling and powerful:

And the sands of August
blow through the waves of September,
twist into knots the winds of October,
November’s protocol:
close up the cottages.
December’s desolation
leeches through the year,
infesting Spring and Summer,
ravaging the joy of beeches,
 
hardening all our hearts.

It would be correct to say that Ipperwash, like all of the places in the book, is haunted by its histories of interpersonal and systemic violence. But it would be more correct to say that the book itself haunts the places of its poems, refusing an easy silence, consistently bringing to light and grappling with their difficult pasts, their troubling and complex contexts.
 
In the later sections of the book, White turns his eye towards other aspects of his life and the city in which he has lived it. There are poems addressed to friends, mentors, lovers, and peers in the London literary community. These sit alongside and/or belong to what can be best described as a queer archaeology of London: he writes about “heading out / of the city for a Gay farmer’s hoedown” in the 1970s, about the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community, about Greg Van Patter, a “Gay farmer” who died of the disease, about the secret “’A-List Gay part[ies]” that were held by the London Museum director at Eldon house, a historical house and museum, and about young gay men cruising by the tank in Victoria park. These poems chart a rich, sometimes garrulous, sometimes mournful history that cannot be found elsewhere in any form, and, because of that, are as necessary as they are skillfully executed. 
 
One standout poem takes up the legacy of Dianne Haskett, the mayor of London from 1994 to 2000, who is best know for refusing to issue a Gay Pride Proclamation in 1995, and being found by the Ontario Human Rights Commission to have discriminated against the Homophile Association of London, Ontario. White is uniquely positioned to write about Haskett. As a gay man living in London during her tenure, he was one of the targets of her homophobia, but he also happens to be the same age as her, and to have sat behind her in his grade five class. “An Open Letter to Dianne Haskett (Days of 1995)” begins:

I hope you don’t remember me
the elfin child who sat behind you
 
in Miss Hallman’s class,
grade five

The poem recalls the bullying White received for being effeminate, and, with a generosity that she has emphatically not earned, Haskett’s smile when she talked about becoming a photographer before following her transformation into a “demagogue / in a Billy Graham style.”  White concludes by noting that Haskett emigrated to the USA, and closes the poem with a brief celebratory description of a Pride Parade, sketching the very people Haskett attempted to marginalize striding down Queens Ave. in the heart of a city that no longer welcomes her. It is a moment of triumph, of, as White puts it, “The Survival of the Fabulous,” but a moment that comes only after working through the difficult personal and civic histories that precede it.
 
This is typical of the collection: it’s poems are simultaneously affectionate and unsparing. London has recently seen a small literary resurgence. True crime writers, such as Vanessa Brown, have begun to write about some of the more brutal crimes that checker the city’s past, and there have been a number of books of poetry that take London and its history as their subject. Not all of them have been good. Penn Kemp’s Local Heroes, for example, begins with a racist appropriation of Indigenous voices by its white author, engages in a lengthy and largely uncritical celebration of a colonial explorer, and includes several poorly executed encomiums to local figures, such as Tessa Virtue and Scott Moire. White’s book stands as a welcome corrective to Kemp’s clumsy propaganda, showing that it is possible to be invested in a place, to celebrate it even, while at the same time wrestling with the complexities of its history and addressing one’s position as a setter on Indigenous land.
 
White has poured a lifetime of experience and all of his substantial abilities as a poet into this book. It is a genuinely extraordinary achievement, essential reading for anyone with any connection to London, and a book that will reward anyone who spends time with it regardless of whether they know the region or not.

Aaron Schneider is a Founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, and Long Con. His story “Cara’s Men (As Told to You in Confidence)” was nominated for the Journey Prize by The Danforth Review. His novella, Grass-Fed, was published by Quattro Books in the fall of 2018. He has a novel (Crowsnest Books) and a collection of experimental short fiction (Gordon Hill Press) forthcoming in 2021.