Regardless of whether the poet would identify it in these words, there is a strong current of What the fuck running through many of these poems. Many lament an everyday Newfoundland way of life that no longer exists, one of little shops, clubs, medicinal plant knowledge, and straight-dealing democracy: “myriad modes/of coherence, communion—/all vanished.” This type of writing can easily veer towards idealising, away from historical accuracy. It’s up for debate whether the province’s democracy was really much more honest while Ray Guy had his daily column. But Dalton hits upon the indisputable feeling that something irreplaceable has been lost, and much else misplaced, shelved, mostly forgotten. The Alba poems that close the collection best express the awe and anger essential to a true eulogy. Alba is a prim old woman, with no patience for the new foolishness of the “Facebook-/addled” age in which “[w]ords are worn thin” and even the old truisms have changed meanings: “[p]ractice, it would seem/doesn’t make perfect” and “[a] stitch in time/allows in the gremlins.” Sociologists call this shift the shrinking half-life of knowledge. Everyone else calls it WTF.

One of the dangers about writing about the collective past is that other people remember things differently. Contrary to “The Naming,” which begins by insisting “Not store…It was the shop,” everyone I know who shopped at Hawcos’ says they called it a store. I wouldn’t bother to nitpick, if only the poem weren’t expressly about “get[ting] the names right.” Some of the “shop” poems are over-wistful for the good ol’ days when the price of a very large apple was eight cents. True, if you get a Honeycrisp for less than three dollars these days, it’s because you stole it at the self check-out. But on the plus side, Flynn’s sells avocados now. And coffee beans.

Despite the quaint rural scenery and the master class on whimsical Newfoundland English, Interrobang has blessèd little in common with the saturated blue skies of an NL Tourism ad. The series responding to Scott Walden’s photographs from All the Clubs from Holyrood to Brigus not only offers a tour of half-cute, half-decrepit watering holes; the poems also catalogue the places where life may be lost, slid off an icy cliff or sucked into the VLTs. What you don’t necessarily see in the photos, and what you’ll never see in those commercials with the breezy pitcher plant (“call Joan”), is that not everyone makes it back to a cosy clapboard at the end of the night. Mary Dalton’s formal powers come to the fore here. These poems are remarkably true to the images, and some are even truer. The photo of dart players shows only one instant of action. The mildly psychotic repetition of the villanelle “Darts” shows the players’ elegant skill and matches the repetitiveness of the game and its brief, glamorous alternative to reality.

As you might expect from a book that travels from Holyrood to Brigus and back, Interrobang abounds with different characters. Alba has been mentioned, but species of roadside flora also get to say their piece, as do all kinds of everyday objects in the sections “Waste Ground” and “Waste Ground: Riddling.” With these, Mary Dalton plays with the identity-themed confessional lyric so fashionable right now. Identity is certainly at issue—how could it not be, once “coherence and communion” are out the window? But a riddle is at once confessional and the opposite of a confession: the game is to reveal the speaker’s character at the same time as hide it. Some of the answers are easy to guess, whereas with others I’m not so confident. In this fog, we hit upon the rhetorical questions at the heart of Interrobang: who am I? And if you don’t know me, then who the hell are you?

Mary Germaine is a PhD student at the University of New Brunswick living in St. John’s. Her book is Congratulations, Rhododendrons(House of Anansi Press).

November, 2024