Dementia Americana is my only book of poetry so far. In 1995 the League of Canadian Poets awarded it the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry published in Canada. There’s a good description of the book on the Ronsdale Press website:
“As the title implies, Dementia Americana is about the craziness of America. In what he describes as ‘the most personal writing I have ever done,’ Keith Maillard meditates upon the implications for private life of the two most bizarre wars of our time: the Gulf War and the Vietnam War. Working within traditional closed forms, but stretching them to their limits, Maillard recreates the effect of the past and the persistence of dream in the public arena.
“The book concludes with a long poem in verse about the first of America’s enormous, spectacular murder trials: the Thaw trial of 1906. Each of the protagonists speaks directly to the reader: Stanford White, the murdered man, Harry Thaw, the murderer, and the eerily beautiful Evelyn Nesbit who was the ‘woman in the case.’ Through his recreation of the trial, Maillard reveals America’s dark obsession with youth, purity, style and violence. His presentation of the past within the present (and not passed over) creates a possible overcoming of the darkness.”
Reviews & Awards:
Winner of the 1995 Gerald Lampert prize for best first book of poetry
“In Dementia Americana Maillard puts the emotional extremes of America under the knife. The surprise is the song, an icy mountain stream of language that spills through forms as old as Ovid and Petrarch: it is human, sorrowful, cruelly acute.”
—Marilyn Bowering“Maillard’s poetry documents loss of innocence — personal, in the collage of his own past, and cultural, in the moral ambiguities of a scandalous murder trial. While hinting as the possibility of a perfect order and simplicity, Millard never reduces the fullness of life remembered or recreated.”
—Derk Wynand
Excerpts from Dementia Americana
Here are two free sonnets from the sequence that opens the book, “The Intervention of the Duke.”
23.
A medieval map invites you in. Come wander. Those trees?
Each branch, so neatly labeled, is an Art, and you’ll be taught
how all the world compounded is of earth and water,
fire, air. New songs of Courtly Love are sung, and one
may learn to be a perfect gentle Knight. A Lady
named Intelligence rides her horse into the stream
that flows from Life; four quiet scholars study here:
they’re Gentile, Moslem, Christian, Jew.
Time Magazine offers us a pull-out map showing troops, tanks,
artillery, Scuds, chemical and biological warfare factories;
turn it over, see the Allied and Iraqi troops, armour, and artillery
all drawn to scale—Oh, wonderful! Before the map
can be of use, we see the slaughter on the news.
Angels, give us in our dreams the map to take us home.24.
There’s plenty to do without the Ninja Turtles. It’s better
to be out of work in Moundsville, West Virginia, and bored,
than to be a soldier in Baghdad and owe your life to the whim
of some miserable little turd—and American skies still bleed
beauty down the sunset over the puzzling flatness of North Dakota.
Even now, the night is preparing a single, perfect
diner in Georgia where everything will be revealed.
In a tender moment, thin as a dime, all American boys and girls
are brave and beautiful and true; angels with bent, grey wings
enfold all roads that go nowhere. Now you can forgive
each other, and neither you, nor anyone, anywhere, will ever again
be slaughtered in your beds. Learn to be harmless, for those at war
reflect each other. There’s plenty to do. Don’t trust the word
of men who stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord.©Keith Maillard, 1994