When ‘we cultivate the Lucifer/inside’

Pole Shift & Other Poems 
by Sean Arthur Joyce

Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2024
9781771715560 / $23.95

Reviewed by Joe Enns

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Pole Shift & Other Poems, the seventh collection of New Denver-based Sean Arthur Joyce (Blue Communion), is a book about social ethics and outrage in the shadow of history at a galactic scope. Joyce attempts to intersect sociology with cosmology, astronomy, mythology, and ecology all while posturing himself as the proverbial tortured artist (“the lonely poet flicker’s out,/a pinched candle stub”). 

In Pole Shift & Other Poems, the poems are set in four parts with corresponding front and back matter to contextualize the poems. Joyce includes an “Introduction” where he explains the premise of the book and makes an argument for his poetry considering past critiques. After the poems, Joyce includes a “Notes on the Poems.” There, he spells out the volume’s mythological or historical reference. Then there’s an “Appendix: Scientific References,” where Joyce quotes literature about Earth’s pole shift. Finally, Joyce includes “Endnotes” that clarify citations made in the poems. I mention all this because the extensive material show what Joyce is trying to do with this book and how he views the reader. It’s similar to explaining a joke before you tell it. Sure, the audience might learn something, but the joke loses its impact. In the same way, Joyce subverts any sort of discovery or insight the reader might have on their own by assuming the reader won’t see his references otherwise.

Joyce’s premise: not only is the Earth’s magnetic field shifting, but that shifting is increasing, and at times in history the polarity completely flipped. Does this underlying change in the magnetic field account for a drastic change in human behaviour? Much of Joyce’s poetry Pole Shift resists concrete sensory imagery, and relies instead on abstraction and aphorism as he describes the world not as a physical thing, but as a field of mindsets in the same way the magnetic poles underpin the Earth. The world is continuously reborn as part of a cycle, and humanity is “birthed in light, to baptize/a drowned world.” Joyce uses the baptism symbolism throughout. 

The last time I saw my family doctor, I was surprised to see a large pink crystal on his desk. Then he told me I could just google my health issues. The modern question: science or pseudoscience? Joyce’s poetry reminds me of the crystal on my doctor’s desk. The interchange between physics (and metaphysics) and social ethics confuses me in Pole Shift. Joyce illustrates the evils of human nature, the predatory elites, and social engineers (“ersatz divinities in lab coats/shred life’s blueprint, reaching/for eternity, ignorant of the field/strewn with prestigious corpses”) who control the “weak-spirited” masses through cultivated micro-divisions. 

But what exactly is Joyce’s virtuous, hyperbolic ranting aimed at?  

Joyce describes a “full spectrum dominance/the doctrine of devils whose/gnarled humps hunch over chessboards/in the grand game of Holocaust.” But if “errant” human behaviour is part of a repeating cycle, the Wheel of Fortune (assuming society is near the bottom of the “Wheel” right now), and that cycle is caused by innate and immutable astronomic forces, what is Joyce reeling against? One only needs to watch the cycle turn back up towards the positive, until we’re reborn or baptized again. Although even the baptism symbol becomes muddy. Baptism generally represents a change in the convert, but in Joyce’s poetry, the world is reborn, and mankind revolves alongside (“roll with the compass”). From COVID-19 to Gaza to Julian Assange to Silent Spring, in an effort to create a “poetry of relevance,” Joyce isn’t a rebel without a cause, he’s a rebel with every cause.

The first section, Pole Shift, composes about half the collection and is what the “Introduction” refers to. Joyce pays close attention to phrase and sound, each line concise to phrase length of five to ten syllables with full use of assonance and alliteration always grasping for the profound. The early 1900s register mixed with modern diction purposely creates a biblical voice, an Old Testament prophet or preacher set on his soapbox: “when we cultivate the Lucifer/inside, elevate ourselves/to be the “Shining One”/at God’s right hand.” In terms of form, many of the poems are free verse, or set in tercets or quatrains. “Seed of Life” is made up of tercets with repeating lines similar to, but not as strict as, a villanelle or pantoum. The poem represents a pattern of three, like the vesica piscis (referenced in an epigraph): two overlapping shapes that create a third shape. I know this because Joyce poetsplains it in an endnote along with a link to a “sacred geometry” website.

Joyce begins the book with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke that talks about breaking down the walls between us with a cry. In the “Introduction,” Joyce says that “society is more divided than possibly any time in history.” But throughout the collection Joyce sentimentally exaggerates the hypothetical Us versus Them mentality. God and Lucifer. The working class versus the greedy corporate elite (“the prayers of billions/try to lift the dead weight/from our brows, to no avail”). The tortured artist versus the mediocre. Pole Shift & Other Poems attempts to show a directional spin (“you don’t know one hand/from the other. Left is right,/right is left) and a disorientation of social ethics. 

The collection also posits a certain optimism, of society returning to the light (“let the sky regain its sanity in its own time”); this hopefulness is often embedded in closing lines and is overshadowed by the “Lake of Fire” and “demons of ideology.” Joyce also meditates on a love for nature in the second part, Odes to the Earth II, which changes the tone and contrasts from the Pole Shift section. The final part, House of Blues, contains many of the strongest poems, such as “Look Ma, I Saved the Flowers,” an ekphrastic poem that effectively uses the imagery from a painting to evoke the much broader and complex notion of futile acts in relation to a calamity. 

While Pole Shift & Other Poems is an ambitious work that takes the heaviness of world events on its shoulders, Sean Arthur Joyce undermines the epiphanies through poetsplaining and posing himself as the modern-day biblical prophetic speaker (“Courage! No demon exists/beyond dogma’s hypnosis,/the shrill bleat of a shocked herd”), which often comes across as condescending. Or maybe I’m just weak-spirited.

Joe Enns is a writer, painter, and fisheries biologist on Vancouver Island. His writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, FreeFall, The Fiddlehead, GUSTS, and Portal Magazine, and book reviews in Event, Malahat Review and The British Columbia Review. Joe has a BA in Creative Writing and a BSc in Ecological Restoration. [Editor’s note: Joe has reviewed Cathy Stonehouse, Clint Burnham, Nadine Sander-Green, Spenser Smith, Rodney DeCroo, Barbara Pelman, Karl Meade, M.W. Jaeggle, Ali Blythe, Emily Osborne, Will Goede, and Evelyn Lau for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online 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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