Puneet Dutt, The Better
Monsters (Mansfield Press Inc., Toronto, 2017)
$17.00 (CDN)
ISBN
978-1-77126-156-2
68 pages
Review by Jade
Wallace
To be among the
poems of Puneet Dutt’s The Better Monsters is to be in a kind of desert. At first glance,
the landscape appears sparse. The book is less than 70 pages long and words dot
the blank expanse of pages like scant plant life. “We Built No Gardens,” for
instance, is 57 words, all held at a distance
from each other as Dutt makes liberal use of line
breaks:
limbs and blood
scatter
go there there
there
but not here!
it is us again
seeking place
Despite its
meagreness, “We Built No Gardens” is nevertheless readily sufficient
to invoke a narrative of diaspora, of alienation from the homeland by violence.
This efficiency is characteristic of collection as a whole— the near-barrenness
of Dutt’s text belies the same sort of complex ecosystem
that hides in a desert’s shifting dunes. The observer, looking only casually,
could readily miss the animating rhythms of life at work in the poems, but they
go on existing regardless.
That Dutt’s poems manage to convey meaning so succinctly is not
merely a feat of technical prowess, for her style seems carefully chosen to
complement the over-arching thematic concerns of the book. In the opening poem,
“Speak American,” Dutt implies a line connecting
capitalism to state violence:
have we lived American until
we’ve held the clip of a
Nerf gun
dreamt in shots
paid for the fantasy of elimination
in movie theatres
Here, Dutt subtly suggests how commodity fetishism can be part of
a nation-building campaign that relies on the normalization of adversarial
conflict. The symbiosis of capitalism and state violence is brought up again
later in part VII of the suite “Over Whiskey and Cider in Hotel Rooms”:
in bombing campaigns
farmers would say
compensate us
you’ve killed my goats
In both “Speak
American” and in part VII of “Over Whiskey and Cider in Hotel Rooms,” Dutt cynically points out how money, how products, can be
used to bring war’s destruction within the acceptable purview of daily life. In
“Speak American,” children’s Nerf guns make violence familiar and mundane, while
in part VII of “Over Whiskey and Cider in Hotel Rooms,” monetary compensation
mitigates the damage of violence and renders it transactional and banal. Rather
than revolt, the figures in Dutt’s poems are
frequently resigned to the terror of war and do their best to survive in spite of it.
In this context,
the Joycean “scrupulous meanness” of Dutt’s poems
acts as form of contrarian aesthetic resistance. Rather than romanticize,
valorize, or normalize capitalism and violence, the stinginess of Dutt’s language works to contradict the imperialistic,
acquisitional logic of both systems and is thereby able to lay bare their
ugliness. That this act is a significant coup is made clear by the titular poem
in the book. In “The Better Monsters,” the speaker says:
we
didn’t have
the
better monsters
[…]
at
Pershing Field
children
disappear
hopscotch
chalk
smudged
behind
In this poem, the real
horror of being on the losing side of violence is the way that violence
obscures its own consequences. Death is of course tragic
but it is disappearance, erasure, inscrutable loss that constitute the more
frightening and grotesque side of war. Such erasures are a recurrent motif in Dutt’s poems, the most overt example being “Blanks”:
________ providing support to the
________
troops
battling
________ extremists
in_________
and _________
_________
could be the next
a game-card history
The parallel here
between waging war and playing cards offers a biting critique of the nihilism
of state-led campaigns of violence, which treat peoples and communities as
interchangeable, as mere permutations within a framework. The erasure of
individuality, idiosyncrasy, nuance, is shown to be an essential affront to the
humanity of those against whom war is waged.
Meanwhile, in part
X of the suite “Over Whiskey and Cider in Hotel Rooms,” one of the speakers
defeatedly observes:
can’t say i
ever killed a man
but can’t say
i didn’t
This
Baudrillardian statement on the unknowable reality of war and its consequences,
even to its closest observers, illustrates another way in which erasure and
obscurantism are at the crux of what makes war so devastating. The poems in The Better Monsters thus make visible
war’s acts of obliteration and attempt to reincarnate some vestige of what war
has tried to make disappear. In Dutt’s hands, poetry
is a kind of political monster that subverts the successes and excesses of
violence.
If there is any
criticism that I can make regarding the effectiveness of The Better Monsters as a work of poetry, I would only suggest that
it could be more audacious in its propositions and provocations. The final poem
in the book is “Reasons to Throw Stones” and it ends with a question:
now i
arrive in Canada i don’t know what to
do immediately when i arrive to Canada what
to do immediately?
The last gesture
in the book is therefore one of uncertainty. Though of course none of the poems
in The Better Monsters are facile
enough to draw neat, moralizing conclusions, there is an element of hedging weariness
present not only in this poem but also observable in others in the collection. However justified this hesitancy may be, I wished at times
for the poems to be bolder, pushier, to move beyond question, reconnaissance,
and appraisal of problematic systems, and to explore alternative realities.
Having said that,
one must keep in mind that The Better
Monsters is Dutt’s poetic debut and if the poet
is at all reticent here it is perhaps because she is preparing us for her
sophomore work, pointing us toward a line in the sand that she has future
intentions to cross.
//
Jade Wallace is a
writer from the Niagara Fruit Belt, currently working in a legal clinic in
Toronto, Ontario. Their poetry, fiction, and essays, have been published
internationally, including in Studies in
Social Justice, The Antigonish Review,
and The Stockolm
Review. Their most recent chapbook is Rituals
of Parsing (Anstruther Press 2018) and their most
recent collaborative chapbook, under the moniker MA|DE, is Test Centre (ZED Press 2019). They are a collective member of Draft
Reading Series and one half of The Leafy Greens, a band whose music has been
incorrectly described as “psychedelic stoner metal.” <jadewallace.ca>