A REVIEW OF AMBER MCMILLAN'S 
WE CAN'T EVER DO THIS AGAIN
BY SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI

The Rusty Toque | Issue 8 | Reviews | Poetry | June 30, 2015
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We Can't Ever Do This Again
by Amber McMillan
Poetry, Wolsak & Wynn, 2015
In the “Cover to Cover” feature for the March 2015 issue of Quill and Quire, designer Natalie Olsen discusses her struggle to create a cover for Amber McMillan’s debut book of poetry, We Can’t Ever Do This Again. Olsen says: “I still haven’t figured out why this collection of poems was so difficult. […] I realized a few things: I misconstrued the tone of what is actually a pretty dark and somber work; […] My solution was to simplify things.”

Olsen’s final judgment is spot on. We Can’t Ever Do This Again derives its strength not only from what is being said but from how it is being said. This defining subtlety is further energized by an intelligent and self-aware speaker who stresses the importance of the how--the tone.

As well, Olsen’s decision to simplify is wholly in line with the tasks of McMillan’s poems that work toward confrontation, catharsis and acceptance. We Can’t Ever Do This Again is divided into four parts. The first half shapes a psychological landscape of taut interiority and silence, and is populated by family members and close friends. The second half moves outward into an engagement with grief and family history.

The Agency of Imagination

In the first poem, “Peace,” McMillan sets up contradictions that characterize the rest of the collection. By embodying contradiction in “Peace,” the nuanced complexities of thought, perception, and of life are captured:
I can hear the blown-out tire on the 401,
the coon fight where the smaller one
lost an eye—the good one—the renovations
on the neighbour’s upstairs rental unit
For a poem titled “Peace,” the first and subsequent lines clearly don’t evoke peace. The incongruity between the title (which typically sets up the “aboutness” of the poem) and the hectic aural observations is jarring. This incongruity builds into the personal when:
into one another, into the street, into the air,
your voice, “I meant what I said,” three times
in three minutes, I heard you, but you mistook
the silence for peace (either mine or your own)
“Peace” here is a state of misunderstanding and frustration. The speaker’s loneliness, clear from the first three lines where the solitary number “one” repeats three times, is echoed in the direct speech above uttered three times by the “you” of the poem. The automatic reaction would be self-pity, and the speaker knows this. She doesn’t fall into it because her acute judgment of a neighbour who hangs his guitars on a wall “completely visible / from the street as if he isn’t inviting jealousy, / alarmed when he is robbed” allows her to project and form a question for the hypothetical situation: if she expressed herself then would things change for the best? She does not think so. Instead, she reveals  
                         that my grandfather
is dead, died in the spring, eaten by a cancer
of the body—not the other kind—for a year
he was dying, and then finally he did, left his wife,
his kids, left his house, left me—the trick
is the shift, progress, otherwise the whole thing,
this and everything else is a disaster.
This revelation shows the potency of memory and hindsight in self-judgment. She decides to remain quiet because it means moving forward and staying together. Now the simplicity of “Peace” (in its conventional and accepted definition) is a future state that has a chance to exist.

Self-awareness that allows re-visioning and reshaping is central to the speaker’s life. In “The Dramatist and His Dialogue with the Devil,” she begins by instructing: “Imagine we ran ourselves right off the road / […] that you thought you had been winning all along, / imagine you weren’t even close.” By beginning with the verb “imagine,” the act of holding a thought, a propositional future in mind, is galvanized. The agency of this imagining is evident in the last line, “Imagine this as a punishment from me to you.” A sense of justice and revenge is achieved, closing part one.

Discovery as Witness

Despite the speaker’s reasonable silence, her capacity for varied responses vivifies We Can’t Ever Do This Again. In “The Wager,” in 1949, developmentally challenged students are fed radioactive oatmeal. The poem is then brought into the present: “the all-inclusive stadium / tours in Nevada where the cost of a pair of sunglasses / bought you an unobstructed view of above-ground / weapons testing, of peaceful nuclear explosions.” Once again, peace loses its given meaning when danger becomes fodder for spectacle and entertainment. By remembering and writing about the Massachusetts state-funded experiment of 1949, McMillan responds as witness. Bringing the event into the present by means of association reveals discovery to be at the core of responding as witness, allowing McMillan to open the question of the future without didacticism.

In the poem that follows, titled “Sonnet XXII,” for her daughter, Finn, McMillan hears her daughter in search of her at five in the morning. With fluid simplicity and details that only generosity can bear (and which I will refrain from describing because I think this poem needs to be read widely), McMillan holds her breath as she waits for her daughter to find her. Here discovery is two-fold: her daughter finding her in the room, and her daughter finding in the future this sonnet written for her, discovering the attentive love her mother held for her at that very moment. Witness, for McMillan, is the shaping of discovery, the impulse of which carries a spark for the future.

Ways of Knowing

In part four, McMillan travels into her family’s past, beginning with “Hongerwinter,” the Dutch famine of 1944, which her grandparents experienced. In tightly controlled lines, McMillan describes in the third-person, the experiences of her grandfather and grandmother, keeping intact her role as storyteller, using imagination to give witness. 

In “Forward,” the second person lends urgency to the telling of the tale by addressing the reader, inviting involvement: “Did I ever tell you the one about TB? / None of this is unfair nor is it surprising, / but there he is, sheltered from the hard / ruby sun.” McMillan tells the reader the way her grandfather told her the story of how another man caught Tuberculosis:
                   She’s coughing and it’s
hot, and phlegm is collecting and spilling
from her every opening: Do you have TB yet?
He shakes his head no, and with that she
gathers up and spits out her next mess
of human mire, aiming as close to the mouth
McMillan’s spare description and masterful manipulation of the third and second person shapes the reader’s complicity, creating a disturbing and vivid poem.

In “Bread at Augustfehn, in memoriam Paul Van Veen,” McMillan returns to her role as the poet-storyteller whose task is to imagine fully enough to remember. She asks the reader to imagine her grandfather hiding bread under the rocks and having it stolen by a traveling companion. She also asks the reader to imagine him at the relief tent where nurses wash him down with soap and DDT, and where
he was given new clothing to continue the walk
from Assen to Hasselt to Zutphen, crying in now

uncontainable joy, and soon to be reunited with
his family, as skinny or skinnier than he.

These are some of the stories he told me when
I was young, and in more detail as I grew older.

He asked me once to take his notes, written in bad
English, and to put those years together in some

order so everyone would know, but that was before
he died and when I didn’t know why he’d asked me.
McMillan’s role as a poet takes on greater significance as the sense of duty and responsibility is italicized in the last word, the pronoun, “me.” She retains loyalty to her grandfather and his past by keeping the knowledge of the answer with herself, prompting the reader to ask questions about the purpose of writing. By recognizing this instance of event-specific knowledge, the poet’s task is anchored and invigorated even further; she embodies the realization of her task by creating another opportunity for event-specific knowledge as in the previously mentioned “Sonnet XXII,” written for her daughter, Finn.

When I first read the epigraph from “A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert, I thought I recognized a sense of fatalism in the lines: “To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat / comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth / all the years of sorrow that are to come.” However, revisiting the epigraph after reading the book, I recognized a form of anticipated knowledge, not fatalism. The thin line between these two perceptions is explored in the first half of We Can’t Ever Do This Again, and resolved in the confident and humble reimagining of memory in the last half. It is no surprise then that, in general, I felt the need to refer to some poems in parts one and two as having a “speaker,” while being comfortable with interchanging “McMillan” and “the speaker” in the latter half. 

We Can’t Ever Do This Again is one of the few books of poetry I’ve read in a while that did not feel like a “project.” The poems in McMillan’s debut hold a marvelous balance between the shaper and the shaped, effecting recognition and arrest at their best. McMillan writes with purpose, even when she chooses to keep the knowledge to herself. It is hard to categorize these poems as anything other than poems that matter, poems which will be remembered. We Can’t Ever Do This Again is an enduring and luminous debut.
SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI writes and edits in Vancouver. Her writing has been long-listed for inclusion in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology and has recently appeared in Frog Hollow Press’ Vancouver anthology, Lemon Hound, and Canadian Literature. She received the inaugural Yale Road Scholarship for The Writer’s Studio 2015 where she is pleased to be mentored by Meredith Quartermain, whose latest book is I, Bartleby.