The packaging of Virginia Konchan’s Hallelujah Time may suggest a wild romp. The cover is a cheerful, sunshine yellow — an unusual shade for a collection of poetry. On the front, there’s a candy-colored explosion of crumpled fabric, which at first glance looks like tissue paper. It’s a celebration! Then you realize the tissue paper is actually a tangle of plastic bags, teetering on a small, silhouetted head like the wig of Marie Antoinette. The back cover describes the poems of Hallelujah Time as “decadent confections.” Sure, if you like your confections with a healthy dose of existential despair. For all the razzle dazzle of its packaging, Hallelujah Time is a deadly serious collection of poems that asks us: what do we do with our desire for beauty and art in the face of climate apocalypse? The razzle dazzle isn’t a ruse, it’s a staging of that question.
On the one hand, Konchan makes this desire out to be absurd, bordering on the grotesque. Here, what we understand as beauty is actually a concept made empty by capitalism’s world-ruining system of commodification. Outside of that, Konchan asks, what kind of value can we find in beautiful art like cinema, opera, and, of course, poetry? The collection features a good mix of high and pop cultural references (a small sample from the poem “Mata Hari:” “I, Robot. I, Claudius. I bow”), but Konchan’s elevated diction and frequent mention of opera suggest her affinity for the high arts. And although high art like opera and poetry are relatively valueless as commodified forms of beauty nowadays, Konchan plays on poetry’s obsession with flowers to accentuate how it still structures our sense of what we find beautiful in the world:
I have been told no fewer than 11 times
to enjoy all that is good and wonderful
left in our one ravaged planet, while
that same day, the Indochinese tiger
was declared to be extinct, 137 women
were killed globally in acts of femicide,
and flash floods took 150 lives in Iran.
Still, as my neighbor points out to me:
the dahlias are in bloom.
What good does it do to see the dahlias as beautiful, when the dahlias will soon be ravaged by the same system that exterminates people and animals each day? Sunny skies aren’t enough for the speaker anymore: “The plain evidence of daylight’s dynasty / isn’t enough to render this day beautiful: / like a lizard, I can sun on a rock anywhere.” Instead, the speaker flips the equation of value, finding beauty in the valuelessness of grey skies: “Thank you, cloud cover. You add up to nothing. / You have no shelf life, nor skin in the game.” So in the end, the poem avows what is beautifully valueless in the world and in itself. While this avowal may help us reassess our capitalism-induced impulse to commodify beauty and art, it can’t fundamentally resolve the poem’s initial preoccupation, namely how capitalism ravages the world.
On the other hand, Konchan asks, what if we can’t stop the ravaging? Why shouldn’t we take the time to find beauty in flowers and grey skies? What harm could a little artistic hedonism do? While Hallelujah Time speaks to immediate climate apocalypse, the collection also takes the End of Days as humanity’s inevitable conclusion, be it through Christian eschatology or the eventual heat death of the universe. The collection’s titular poem, “Hallelujah Time,” espouses a fatalism bordering on Calvinist predestination:
It’s hallelujah time, and I’ve come
to be healed from narcolepsy.
We wave palm fronds while waiting
to be claimed, like airport baggage
circling, indefinitely, a terminal.
It’s hallelujah time! Our faces
are creased with worry and
our knapsacks carry weeks
of provisions, should the journey
prove arduous. Who is in charge?
The de facto pastor mops his
sweaty brow. He has grown old
on hallelujah time, is unsure
he belongs at the millennial prow.
Our pedigrees are irreproachable,
but that won’t get us into heaven.
I can’t stencil a blueprint of home.
It’s like a pop vocalist’s key change.
It’s like being consumed by desire.
It’s like dedicating yourself to a life
of works, to be saved by grace alone.
Ironically, the poem can’t quite decide if it believes in God. “Who is in charge?” the speaker asks, then immediately minimizes the pastor as “de facto.” Konchan almost makes hallelujah time seem fun, here, as she infuses apocalypse with the giddy relief of an exclamation point, of a pop song, of finally arriving at your destination. But the poem never quite makes it out the airport’s exit door, and just leaves us going round and round the terminal without anyone to claim our souls. The final two lines of the poem do return to an idea of God, but it is mediated by simile. Regardless of whoever or whatever oversees the End of Days, “a life / of works” won’t be enough to save the speaker.
In another End of Days poem called “Eschatology,” Konchan’s speaker seems suspicious of any attempt to sum up a person’s worth or value. (As an aside, Konchan’s titles are playfully on-the-nose, but just shy of being too obvious.) Value can be marked down on a whim much like a “clearance item,” so instead she emphasizes the fact of our bodies, which are little more than perfumed sacks of meat:
We’ll be remembered
by our good deeds
or lack thereof,
when reduced
to clearance items
in the eyes of the other:
piles, however fragrant,
of flesh and bone.
Hallelujah Time is notable for its acrobatic language. Konchan’s poetic voice is dazzlingly witty, zipping from reference to reference in extravagant leaps and turns. But the point of the spectacle isn’t beauty: it’s existential despair. Maybe one could say it’s about finding beauty in existential despair, but beauty feels so uncertain in these poems, it’s hard to know where we stand with it. For example, let’s return to the trope of flowers. At one point, Konchan describes being “freed for the burden of being oneself” as a “joy rarer than orchids,” which makes orchids seem like a relatively stable, positive image. So how much should we trust this stability, given what we see of the dahlias in “Beautiful”? In a later poem called “American Pastoral,” Konchan exaggeratedly mocks the lyricization of flowers: “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming / just beyond the camera lens.”
Because Hallelujah Time is relentless in its irony, it’s hard to find solid ground within the collection. Images and themes shift so frequently that reading these poems may feel more like tumbling through them, towed by the “siren song” of Konchan’s magnetic voice. Like any good siren, she beckons us towards our apocalypse, without providing solutions for how to save ourselves, let alone save the earth. Does that feel like enough, given the urgency of climate change? Maybe not, but Konchan is not in the business of creating art that wholly satisfies her reader’s expectations. As she writes in the poem “Hard Night:”
We ask from God what we ask
of art: to be changed. We ask
to be more than frantic bleats
enduring a steady rhythm of whips.
Wake up, sheeple!, Konchan doesn’t say here. But she does invoke the language of shepherding, as though we’re sheep being urged toward a cliff’s edge. If that’s a troubling thought, it should be. But Konchan withholds catharsis from us. The path to salvation, if such a thing exists, lies outside of this text.
[Published by Véhicule Press on September 15, 2021, 107 pages, $14.95 US, $17.95 CAN]