BookThug, 2006

Read by Maria Giuliani

A work in five parts, Lisa Robertson’s The Men is a thick exploration of men in social, gender, psychological and philosophical contexts. It is also a comparison of the narrator’s role as a woman in personal, professional, and sexual situations, illustrating the men through the confidence, or lack thereof, of her own sensibilities.

Each of its five parts adds a comprehensive layer to the complexity of these female-male relations, as the narrator moves from insecurity to stout lobbying, answering her question of what it means to enter a man’s world, both literally and figuratively. The sections read as continuous lyrics, purposefully and thoughtfully dissected over their consecutive pages. But the language itself, contained within these lyrics, is at all times intelligent, humourous, and compelling, as the words create motion between the carefully stylized ups, heavy in poetic linguistics, and the seemingly carefree downs, morphing into loose yet synthetic prose:

I want to speak about their sentiment as a secular event.
The weather is as it looks, framed in nostalgia and
money. The fall of the light is the fall of the secular. The
men are a house inside out.

Robertson interlaces all of the parts with consistent themes and terminology, such as metaphors on the presence and absence of light, which intertwine with the narrator’s respective viewpoints, surmising her men from outside their circle and in. Perhaps the most alluded to theme is that of poetry itself: of language, of mutual understanding and misunderstanding, and of being unable to read one another. Robertson also uses language to play with what the men represent — as people and as a collective idea — by alternating the narrator’s references between “the men,” plural, and “he,” singular. Similarly, she alters the narrator’s self-references between the fluctuating “I” and the solidarity found in “we.”

As The Men is 69 pages in length, Robertson is able to offer a study on a timeless topical issue, quite successfully, without losing the originality of her ideas and the strength of her poetry. From the anecdotal to the refrained, this wonderful grouping of lyrics is a pleasure to read.