Product Description

I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel is Jennifer LoveGrove’s second book of poetry. This collection reflects and examines the culture of panic that infuses contemporary life, while relentlessly employing strange and startling imagery. These unique poems are preoccupied with moments when the expected goes amiss, when your reality suddenly shifts into an unfamiliar realm - physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise. I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel is populated by a phony plastic surgeon, a gang of suicidal ducks, a seven-armed boater, a hostile pair of jeans, skydiving incisors, and a bizarre assortment of creatures eagerly transcending the often-menacing banality of the North American present. These poems seem friendly - frolicking at your heels like lost pets - but ultimately, they are not to be trusted. Look closely, you’ll see them foaming at the mouth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1791798 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .23" h x 6.34" w x 8.52" l, .24 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 72 pages

Books in Canada
"There is at the heart of metaphor a delicious amoral joy." So blurbs Don McKay on the back of Karen Solie's new book Modern and Normal. It's an intriguing thing to say of Solie, and perhaps of her interesting young colleague Jennifer Lovegrove, whose second collection, I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel, tills similar artistic soil. Both are observant Canadian women whose sense of morality appears bruised by the jittery, elbow-throwing era we live in.
And yet this proposition of McKay's, about the conscienceless savour of metaphor, seems foggy. Why is it amoral to enjoy poets like these, poets who can fling a simile? To take McKay's meaning fully, you must consider the matter in a more scientific light-as his own books often do. The job of comparing unlike things is a primal human function, isn't it? Metaphor must predate language, since unlike animals we've always had to classify everything somehow. Metaphor-making is omnipresent in human cultures, and must be hard-wired into our primitive brains.
So the blurb's probably right for both of these writers. Metaphor is so central to human experience that it can't contain morality, any more than our need to eat can. It's just that good poets (and maybe scientists, and chefs) make metaphors feel so ethically crucial, as well as tasty.
Solie and Lovegrove are honourable poets. Neither ever flags in her search for the ingredients of fine verse: the gorgeous phrase, the rhythmic statement, the definitive metaphor that exactly signals the thing being talked about. Can you ask for a better work ethic in poetry?
Maybe not, but you can ask for literary success at least. "We live on a fat red lifeboat," writes LoveGrove, "on a geyser of melted gold / siphoned from the veins of the dead." How's that for a violent metaphor which is also a strange pleasure to encounter? Then there's this: "Zack slips me the tongue,/ intent and probing, a hungry eel." Uh-oh. LoveGrove is a poet whose many powers sometimes get out of control.
Part of the problem is the cloak of mystery, verging on obfuscation, that hangs over the weaker efforts in her book. There's some stuff about pigeons and depleted uranium in the puzzling "Box Office Manager". You can admire the play of vowels in this poem: " . . . 'Candy is extinct,'/ Blinks the pigeon-I know/ Morse code", but you feel frustrated. What does this mean? The characters are artists in the theatre of life, or something.
I Never Should Have Fired the Sentinel is, on the whole, distinguished by its mix of autobiography and audacity, and two or three nifty pieces where Lovegrove's intelligent formal artistry connects with earned emotion and pulls you in. "The New Mayor" is best:

The town is a banquet of winking adulterers,
Several municipal cover-ups and a back-alley
Stabbing blamed on the suicide note . . .
Rows of children sob as their beach balls hiss.
Mismangement dessicates the turkey farm,
The hockey team, the pickle factory . . .

There are a couple other poems here you could return to, or anthologize, but "The New Mayor" is irresistible. The controlling metaphor in it serves the best insight into I Never Should Have Fired the Sentinel: corruption is a banquet, and it is delicious.
Jennifer Lovegrove who, though her talent is comparatively raw, really cooks from time to time. Of an embittered Third World cosmetic surgeon watching her clientele totter toward her in "The Beauty Killer Poems", Lovegrove writes:

They hurtle down sidewalks,
a wobbling stiletto panic...
I offer the end of a rope.
A doorway. A promise.
That heads will turn -
and fall into their laps.

Later in the same sequence, a Lovegroveian child observes "A town stifled / into rows. Hats perched / on heads like heads on stakes." On some level, a reader might reasonably feel a little coarse, a bit amoral, for enjoying imagery as grim as that-and of course the metaphors of loss and melancholy does dominate the poet's books here, and Canadian verse as a whole. (Hell, our culture in general is not a very cheery one.)
But the pleasure of a really clarifying metaphor doesn't depend on whether its content is dark or light. Our response to metaphor is more instinctive than that, and more mysterious. We need metaphor and this need is so complex and urgent, it makes all of psychology look simple. Perhaps this is the "amorality" McKay speaks of. If it's indeed a "delicious amoral joy" then let's have a few more servings, please.
Lyle Neff (Books in Canada)

About the Author
Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of The Dagger Between Her Teeth (ECW Press, 2002), a collection of poems that features female pirates. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction has been published in Now Magazine, Queen Street Quarterly, and Taddle Creek, and has been aired on CBC Radio 1. In the mid-1990s, she founded wayward armadillo press, which publishes dig, and various literary ephemera. She lives and works in Toronto.