Prelude to the Bacchanal

Lemm’s Prelude to the Bacchanal, his third collection of poems, often takes an autobiographical turn. Perhaps his best-known collection, it won the 1991 Canadian Author’s Association Award for best poetry book. It is a frank exploration of family and war—war on the homefront as well as in the larger geopolitical sphere. Detailing domestic abuse, mental illness, murder, racism, and several wars including Vietnam, these poems are dark yet display a touch of humour, though not the more explicit humour of Four Ways of Dealing With Bullies. Instead, they delve into serious issues, sometimes through the naive perspective of a child who has grown up and is remembering something like a murder in "First Blood." The collection begins fairly prosaically, with a more casual and narrative delivery that depicts troubled events in relatively straightforward denotative terms, but as the collection progresses, the language becomes more textured and figurative.

The collection begins with poems of family, most of them detailing secrets in a brutally confessional fashion. The speaker in the opening poem “Star Light, Star Bright” describes abandonment by his mother: “When mothers go bad and implode / when they go absent without leave / from the known sky of the crib.” The star is the dominant image throughout the poem, ending with his mother's stay in a hospital called “The Northern Star,” which positions the realities of mental illness against the view that mothers are the centres of their children’s universes. The collection also looks at domestic violence. The speaker in “Eavesdropper” watches as his grandmother is abused by his grandfather downstairs: “Look, she says in the morning, sad and almost / serene, look at these bruises he gave me.” The understated language of “First Blood” makes a murder seem more innocent than it truly is, until the speaker admits to nausea caused years later by “dropping a jar of canned tomatoes, / boys throwing water balloons." The murderer is a woman, and the speaker’s grandmother says, “He must have done something / to deserve that,” which, in light of the experiences of the women in this collection, may have been domestic violence or some sort of mental illness.

The politics of family battles contrast with public battles like World War II and Vietnam. A native of Seattle, Lemm left the United States during the Vietnam War. In the poem “Combat Zone” he details how men lied about their age to enter the conflict, sometimes to escape family wars, as suggested by lines like “Shrapnel of home. My mom / on the floor, drunk, bleeding.” In “Smart” the speaker projects a sense of ambivalence as he politicizes emigration: “My major political statement was coming to / Canada, imagine that.” Similar themes of desertion and morals are addressed in “Deserter” and its stark italicized line “Even our captain’s ashamed of this.” Though Vietnam is a recurring theme in Lemm's poetry, the collection reflects a wider range of political concerns. “More Than You Care to Know” criticizes the Mexican Federales as they take a bribe from a photographer who is touring the country. A frequent setting of his poems, Cuba takes centre stage in “Riding Into the Sierra Maestra” as the speaker and a trail guide discuss the differences between Batista’s and Castro’s Cuba.

The politics of love infiltrate some of these poems, especially those in the fourth section of the collection, which deals with a cycle of relationships. “Before the Revolution” details the speaker’s infatuation with a black woman, a relationship that can never be consummated because he is white and fears the words that would come from the neighbourhood kids “if I stretched out, lowered my head, / drove and scored / so far from white.” A sense of shame arises from looking at a work by political painter Leon Golub; the speaker in “Inquisitors” is ashamed for his eroticizing of the woman in the portrait who is bound and being abused by two men in uniforms. The speaker in “Revisionist” is aware of the politics surrounding previous lovers and their impact on immediate relationships: “I did not have to say / you are far from the first / woman I’ve driven along this lake.” In “Red Volvo Wagon” a car that is the symbol of happy middle-class lives measures a marriage’s duration, as Volvos are built “to last / longer than marriages.” Further images of everyday relationships gone awry figure into unhappy nights in “After You Left,” as “All night / the feathers in the pillowcase / grew wings, a sharp beak, feeding.” These poems of the politics of relationships contrast with the politics of the state, and perhaps link back to the idea that family politics are just a reflection of those of the larger society.

The title Prelude to the Bacchanal indicates movement towards revelry. It takes its name from a poem in the collection detailing how a husband allows the speaker to make love to his wife, because he has the power "to grant you one night with a mortal." Perhaps it also reflects the Renaissance painter Titian’s painting Bacchanal (1518) which has been suggested as detailing different stages of life, similar to the poems in Prelude to the Bacchanal, which trace out the development of children with wayward mothers and ends with a tribute to two people who use canes and end their lives together. The speaker still pictures them as “Two canes swinging forward, pushing / down, back, lifting, like oars.” While these poems often depict devastation, the collection ultimately offers hope and redemption.