Pearl Pirie reviews Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

Andy Weaver teaches poetry and creative writing at York University and has published three books of poetry, most recently this (Chaudiere, 2015). I feel I’ve read Andy Weaver before, or maybe I only saw him perform. Or I’ve read so many reviews with excerpts by rob mclennan that I am familiar his work that way. From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.

I recently reread ligament/ ligature by Andy Weaver (Model Press, 2022). ligament/ligature, his previous and longer chapbook, used space and line breaks enact the physical space and the leaves in the mental tree turning, and controls pacing.

That chapbook is a poetry not much more of quotidian observations but meditating on our individual responsibility to create love and tenderness and connection. They don’t feel didactic so much as being let into a secret room of the head without social filters, some showmanship caper. The reader is given a chair as an equal, rather than a back seat in the lecture hall.

The Robert Duncan at Disney World has something of the same convention of adding space to the poem. The poems take up the amount of page it needs rather than be tidily obedient to the left margin. They are not built up as a prose argument of a stone house but more of a metal framed glass structure. The air in the poems signal the reader to slow down but the ideas being digested are heavier but on a comparable tack.

The poems are starting with a thesis of what-if to explore if Robert Duncan were dropped into the commercial epicentre of branding, what would he think and by extension, what might we if we paused long enough.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series. That aesthetic may be an influence given his references to other Japanese practices throughout the work. In section 4 of 10 (p.4) the imagist of “childhood snow/forts to escape/into blazing sunlight” with the volta that surprises, not to escape into snow forts, but what is built is escaped by returning to sunlight.

He floats interesting concepts, such as in the same section above, abundance as the blind spot with the continuity effect perhaps bridging gaps between negative content.

In a way, I’d like poetry to be transmitted like a Ted Lasso script hyperlinked to all embedded references so I could chase every tangent, to lazily help me unpack a phrase such as “a fordist/ assemblage of hope” but I guess I know what he means of the shallowness of modernist capitalism doing pre-fab assembly line work for identity, like Ford’s practice aimed at Manifest Destiny of patriotism. We are in a system we can’t control.

His criticism of the distraction/entertainment era, the rides (literal and figurative) that make for a collective screaming, “terror’s new grace note” has not so much cynicism as a call to do better as individuals and as a society, to dig deeper. He does so in lovely language and with a love for language “the ichor oozing from heel blisters/an anchor”. Who knew there was a word for that translucent stuff in blisters except water?

To chime it off anchor is rather sublime. Our pain is what can ground us to meaningfulness, to a sense of significance. If it is not a threat, or trauma, if it floats without repercussions, we can safely turn off our critical faculty. When amusement dominates, that evasion becomes a Trojan Horse, he seems to say earlier but by section 8 makes more explicit.

Overall the chapbook is thoughtful and considered and makes space for us to interrogate what a considered life of our own would look like, rather than let ourselves be railroaded by urgency of marketing and frenetic clickbait of news and the Muchness of Paying Attention to Everyone.

The poetry demonstrates a slowing down, a coming around to make the world we would choose to live in.