The Perfect Archive by Paul Lisson
A Throwback Thursday Review by James M. Fisher
Paul Lisson’s The Perfect Archive is an unusual work in that he uses his professional skills as a librarian and archivist to create a work of mystique that is strange and darkly foreboding.1 The unnamed archivist in question is “reviled for the careful cataloguing of our atrocities; condemned and forgotten.” Yet the archivist – in a notes section, we are informed that the personal archive is written by a Dawson Birk, DPhil, Director of some assumed Fascist state – has left behind poems, marginalia, sketches and other ephemera all ‘carefully catalogued’ as per his training. Nevertheless, it does tell a story of a man on the run, then incarcerated (his surrender was “unexpected and unwanted”), and lastly dying.
Having sketched the frame for The Perfect Archive, we can now delve into Poems (Part 1), Marginalia (Part 2) and (again!) Poems (Part 3). I will linger with a sequence called “The Inevitabilities” because it is particularly poignant and accessible to the casual poetry reader like me. They primarily document the downward spiral of life toward death, such as this tersely constructed excerpt from The Eighth Inevitability:
Man gave me a shave. Dressed me in my clothes, Powdered my nose. Put me in a box.
Aside from “The Inevitabilities,” the poems in The Perfect Archive are in blank and free verse format, interspersed with some brief archival instructions that read like strict laws. (See “The Station Guard.”) Other personal favourites of mine were the nursery-like rhyme of “Will Not Wash,” the screaming of “Winter,” and the “forgetting and lost remembering” of “Plateau.”
The text is interspersed with several deliberately out-of-focus black and white photos that add to the mystery: perhaps these are images of the Archivist in exile? Simply put, a wonderful and inspired work, and although confoundingly cryptic at times –no doubt there are some professional “inside jokes” inserted among the dense archival language – The Perfect Archive will hold your interest throughout its 90+ pages.
About the Author
Poet, archivist, and librarian, Paul Lisson was born into a family of union card carrying steelworkers who played in bagpipe bands. Paul has twice been the recipient of the City of Hamilton Arts Award--for visual art and literature in 1997 and for arts administration in 2017. He received the Rand Memorial Prize for accomplishment in print, established by the graduating class of 1898, McMaster University, and the International Merit Award for poetry from The Atlanta Review. He is the Founding Publisher / Editor of Hamilton Arts & Letters. The Ontario Arts Council says that HA&L has the "distinction" of being the first online magazine they have funded.
About the Reviewer
James M. Fisher is the Editor-in-Chief of The Seaboard Review of Books. He resides in Miramichi, New Brunswick, with his wife, Diane, their tabby cat, Eddie, and Buster, their Border Collie. Although retired, James still works as a “casual” MRI technologist at the Miramichi Hospital.
Book Details
Publisher : Guernica Editions
Publication date : Sept. 1 2019
Edition : Illustrated
Language : English
Print length : 110 pages
ISBN-10 : 1771833726
ISBN-13 : 978-1771833721
I am by no means a poetry reviewer, and this review will bear that out. I wrote this back in 2019 for Hamilton Arts & Letters. Guernica did post a pull quote from it, so it couldn’t have been that bad!