Degan Davis' What Kind of Man Are You

Reviewed by Joseph Schreiber

Brick Books, 2018

We are at a unique moment in the ongoing conversation between the sexes where tides are shifting, fueled by newly framed questions about expectations, responsibilities and equality in a climate where gender identities have become increasingly fluid. Femininity and masculinity are being redefined, but the process is complicated. For men, negotiating the space between archetypal male roles and the range of contemporary possibilities can be liberating or disconcerting, or both. It is within a new context, then, that we now ask: What are we really talking about when we talk about being a man? And what place is there, if any, for something like poetry in that conversation?
 
What Kind of Man Are You, the debut collection from Toronto-based poet Degan Davis, turns on this theme, drawing its strength from his own uniquely defined perspective. He comes to these meditations in mid-life, as a Gestalt therapist and the father of a school-aged daughter and infant twin boys. A listener by profession, he brings an intuitive ability to step back, notice the small things, and capture the nuances that colour the interactions of boys and men with each other and with the world around them, infusing his poetic reflections with humour and heartache. His heroes are earnest, flawed, and human.
 
Divided into five well-framed sections, What Kind of Man Are You Opens with “Speak,” a selection of poems that address some of the common images of masculinity one might anticipate: the childhood ritual of sharing blood to secure a bond, spirited public rowdiness, the time-honoured formula of the action film, and even an ode to  Edward Snowden which imagines the whistleblower reaching a breaking point as he confronts the tragic absurdity of monitoring drone footage of destruction while watching emerging life on his sister’s recorded ultrasound images. Davis, as the poetic voice, relates and recognizes himself in the scenes he crafts, implicitly or explicitly, as in “Pugilists on Toronto Island,” where he watches two men take their intoxicated conflict into the waters:

They are in their forties or fifties
or sixties: drink or poverty or chronic
you-name-it
 
has worn them ageless. They shout,
careen, lunge, and pull each other
down, wiry  bodies dripping
with lake water.
 
In my loneliest hours
I too have a need to be consumed
by another, to be held so tightly
I might not notice the drowning.

The second section, “Shoebox,” unpacks a set of melancholy poems, sharing dated epistolary titles—postcard, letter, or postscript—but varied in style and form. The themes addressed are personal, historical or speculative in nature, yet it is Davis’ father, a man who came to parenthood later, in his fifties, who holds the strongest presence. In “Postcards, 1980s: From a Red Diaper Baby,” we are told, “My father distrusted God, / their relationship / broken / before I could walk. // Marx we read with / bowed heads at breakfast. He lurked / through supper arguments / like a lost saint.” This is a son’s ode to a complicated, mysterious man whose own turning from faith inspires an adolescent search for God. If God is to be found, the poet decides, it is in music—and it is against this backdrop that Davis is able to most freely riff on less conventional images of masculinity.
 
Musicians take centre stage in the third section, “Where There Is Music,” leaving just enough room to slip in the necessary nod to hockey in a Canadian collection about manhood with an otherwise minimal sports focus. Davis’ heroes here—Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker and Beethoven—are men, often damaged, who faced challenges with stubborn persistence, if not always grace. Which begs the question about expectations, and how the measures of toughness and worth in a man shift with perspective. “Courage is the shoulder of jazz,” sings the prose poem “Calling,” which recreates Louis Armstrong’s slip into scat singing during a 1927 recording session, a sentiment reinforced later with an evocation of Chet Baker’s return to the trumpet more than a year after an attack made a mess of his mouth. Davis passes no judgement, but his respect shows through. Fortitude can be found in the smallest, most unlikely moments, even when avenues to expression are blocked by accident, injury, illness, or a pawned saxophone.
 
When it comes to dealing with emotional pain and loss, modern men are often encouraged to demonstrate greater honesty and vulnerability, but for many of us, our fathers and male role models were ill-equipped to set a healthy example. This, then, is the question explored in the fourth part of What Kind of Man Are You, “The Blues.” This segment features a number of pieces that address the end of a marriage and the early, disorienting weeks and months that follow. The incongruent sentiments experienced as one’s world falls apart are well reflected in the opening poem, “Vertigo”:

Brain, you sit so high above the heart,
cradled, throned as a mad king
gazing inward as if nothing else mattered
but you. You dream the world cold:
blood to logic, bone to souvenir.
You want the stars tamed
and broken like a dog at the breakfast table.
I love you despite the way you hang me
without breath, once, twice, three times
daily. You want love from theory and I’ll admit
to a psychologist’s bent: perhaps childhood fell
into the space
between stars: the iciness of a fear-filled home
measured in immensities, like dizzying minuteness
of cells or the simple
terrifying distance of the galaxies.

The redefinition of existence after the break, is echoed in the simplest moments—washing dishes, the sounds of a new neighbourhood, stepping out with nowhere in particular to go. Davis is not afraid to acknowledge an aching insecurity and emptiness in his own loneliness.
 
Finally, the book closes out with “Love Songs,” a set of assorted poems that, in some ways, set the course for discussions to extend beyond this poetic endeavour, including the powerful meditation that lends the collection its name. Here the masculine energies converge. The physical, the passionate, the proud, the exposed. The son recognizes the reckless bravery of his father, the heartbroken man learns to trust in love again, and the internet offers a forum for rephrasing the boundaries of the question offered at the start of this review: what are we really talking about when we talk about being a man? The anaphoric poem “Facebook / Open Group for Men” presents a series of challenges to an anonymous audience—“Click to register Amélie levels of mawkishness. / Click to say, four pints in, I love you, man. / Click to express undiluted wonder.”—you know, guy stuff. Or not. It is here among the suggestions that I finally find mention of men like me, those who were not born male, with a reference to a truth that I, in my belated second puberty, learned well: that first course of testosterone radically alters one’s world and engagement with other bodies. Masculinity in the modern era is a newly expanded reality that will also have to be recognized in a fully meaningful conversation.
 
As an examination of the tensions between the traditional mythos and the current expectations facing today’s men, What Kind of Man Are You represents a cracking-open more than a working-through. By engaging with imagery drawn from nature, family, memory, music, divorce and love, Degan Davis demonstrates that poetry has much to contribute to the exploration of both the subtleties and the complexities of masculine experience. It can stand back and ask:

What kind of man are you
if you can’t be both stern
 
and tender. No matter
the arresting act, the vastness
 
of the imagination—the pose,
the brief vacation into pain, that shiver
 
         which is the body’s yes.

​But, most importantly, this is a rich and rewarding collection in its own right—raw, honest and affecting. As a debut emerging at this point in the poet’s life, and presumably drawing together pieces crafted over a number of years, it is well-timed to meet a critical subject with wisdom and confidence. It will be interesting to see how Davis continues these investigations in prose form.

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Joseph Schreiber is a writer based in Calgary, Alberta. He is Criticism/Nonfiction editor at 3:AM Magazine. His reviews and essays have been published in a variety of literary sites and publications, including Numéro Cinq, Quarterly Conversation, Minor Literature[s], and RIC Journal. He also maintains a literary site called Roughghosts and tweets @roughghosts.