Choosing a demographic

Night Moves: The Street Photography of Rodney DeCroo
by Rodney DeCroo

Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2025
$40 / 9781772142396 (paperback)

Reviewed by Sheldon Goldfarb

*

Rodney DeCroo is branching out.  The poet/songwriter/playwright is trying his hand at street photography, and the results are intriguing.  Not that he’s given up on poetry; amidst over a hundred photos in this book are fifteen poems in DeCroo’s inimitable confessional style, complementing the photos and creating a picture of the loneliness of life on Commercial Drive.

It’s a loneliness he sort of likes, though.  He’s lived in the area for decades after growing up in Pittsburgh, and his one moment of dread in one of the poems here is that the developers might move in and transform the neighbourhood so it wouldn’t feel like home anymore.  But someone says, “Go f— yourself,” and he feels at home again.

Clearly, he likes a sort of rough, not to say bleak neighbourhood, where most people are single and – well, what are they?  He shoots lots of pictures of people walking down the street, heading for the store or the bank, and at first I thought, They all look grim or serious, sad or mad.  But then I began looking at the people in other neighbourhoods walking down the street, and they look the same – unless they’re conversing in a couple or a group.  Then they might smile or at least be animated.

But DeCroo’s people are generally not like that.  They are intent.  Some are intent on their phones, the modern malady, but others are intent even when just pulling their little shopping carts, the seniors’ badge – and a lot (not all) of DeCroo’s subjects are seniors.  Also, most of them are white, which surprised me till I checked the demographics for Commercial Drive: it is one of the least Asian parts of Metro Vancouver.

So older white singles.  You might say that’s just the demographic, but DeCroo chose his demographic; he mostly avoids families, couples, groups; he focuses on individuals on their way, sometimes walking right out of frame; they are going who knows where.

Some, it’s true, are performers, performing for the camera, like the young woman who smiles cheerily on one of the first pages.  Then there’s the man who seems to be conducting a symphony in his head and the one standing on a chair holding an umbrella.  There’s also the kid looking quizzically at a dog, who looks quizzically back, and the guy with Vulcan ears and black fingernails next to a food truck saying “Changing the world one chickpea at a time.”

There are lots of signs in the book, graffiti and street signs and posters.  Some are slogans (“Respect China Town”), but most are just reflections of life on the Drive, the names of stores (Rufus Guitar & Drum, Joe’s Cafe), or just announcing that you’re on “The Drive.”

But mostly we see people alone, like the guy sleeping in a van or the haunting shot of two young women divided by a bus shelter pane, each intent on their phone.  Why are we so alone, DeCroo’s poems wonder, and in one of them he hopes he will find a face that will provide the answer.  Another poem depicts a friend with a radio, who curls up with it like a security blanket to ward off the dangers of the night in the city where we are all strangers.

DeCroo’s poetry creates interesting effects.  You might say it’s hardly poetry at all, just prose-like accounts, but try changing even one word, and something seems off.  The one exception, “The Green Night,” begins like what you might expect in a poem, cryptic comments about the green night of the fox not resembling us, and you think, What does that mean?  But mostly the meaning is very clear, at least the surface meaning: what it tells us about The Drive or DeCroo is something else.

If you try to trace the biography of the speaker in the fifteen poems, you find someone who used to drink too much, who mostly lives alone, though he sometimes gets roommates; at one point he is even married, but his wife says something disdainful about Kurt Cobain, so he throws her record player out the window, smashing it to bits.  She looks up at him in dismay, and cries; he cries too.  And that seems to be the end of the marriage.

In another poem he’s heard that a woman he used to see has died.  He used to drink with her but found he drank too much, so has been avoiding her, and now she’s dead.  Guilt seems to linger under the text, and the speaker ends up crashing at the apartment of a former alcoholic, his sponsor, amidst the smell of pipe smoke and sobriety.

In another poem, from before sobriety, he trashes the house he is taking care of for a rich friend who uses it for trysts with a mistress.  You should be ashamed of yourself, the friend says, and our hero also seems to be ashamed of himself for kicking a chair across a diner when told not to put his feet up on it.  He ends up friends with the disapproving waiter, though.

And he recounts his first arrival on The Drive, fresh from Pittsburgh, where they don’t have pineapple pizza or Christmas lights hanging in May.  And he listens to Russian poetry being recited, and he seems to really be enjoying himself in this environment, bleak though it sometimes is.

And then after all the photos of lonely people, or at least people alone, we end with a poem about drinking in a bar with an English prof who likes to slum with “alcoholics, junkies, crazies,” and who stands up to pronounce in a mocking tone that Rodney DeCroo is the People’s Poet, leading Rodney to punch him in the face.  My finest poem, he says, so beware of condescension and slumming.  I hope he doesn’t think I’m slumming now, but I did really enjoy this book.

*

Sheldon Goldfarb is the author of The Hundred-Year Trek: A History of Student Life at UBC (Heritage House, 2017), reviewed by Herbert Rosengarten. He has been the archivist for the UBC student society (the AMS) for more than twenty years and has also written a murder mystery and two academic books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. His murder mystery, Remember, Remember (Bristol: UKA Press), was nominated for an Arthur Ellis crime writing award in 2005. His latest book, Sherlockian Musings: Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories (London: MX Publishing, 2019), was reviewed in The British Columbia Review by Patrick McDonagh. Originally from Montreal, Sheldon has a history degree from McGill University, a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba, and two degrees from the University of British Columbia: a PhD in English and a master’s degree in archival studies. [Editor’s note: Sheldon Goldfarb has reviewed books by J.A. Weingarten (ed.), Catherine Lang, Reed Stirling, Bill Arnott, paulo da costa, and Chris Honey for The British Columbia Review. He has also contributed a comedic poem, “The Ramen,” based on Poe’s “The Raven.”]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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