Many will see the protagonist of O’Neill’s narratives as perhaps the last real hero in a world devoid of value, but they are wrong. There is nothing romantic or attractive about being so constipated from dope that you seriously entertain disimpacting yourself with a coat hanger, watch someone shoot up and turn blue, or regard the ravages of your body in indifferent surprise as you cheat death for the umpteenth time. Perhaps the closest O’Neill comes to romanticizing the role of the poet is when he writes:

poetry, once was the voice
of the dispossessed, the outsider,
the drunken car mechanic
reduced to mere cerebral masturbation
for subscribers to “Poetry” magazine
and tenure seeking English professors

‘Songs from the Shooting Gallery’ work best in their entirety since the poems are largely lyrical narratives of O’Neill’s life experiences from his most down and out period, to finding love in England, and his move to New York where he now lives, writing and raising his daughter with his wife, Vanessa, the “secret hero” of these poems who gives Tony a reason to live and return to life. Rob Woodard of Burning Shore Press has done an excellent job of editing and collating these poems, placing them in the collection in such a way that the narrative moves forward yet is circular at the same time. What makes this so is the pervading theme of addiction and the drugs that are never far from the poet’s consciousness. It serves as both a reminder of the horror he has lived, but also as a testament to the humanity he has discovered in that very gutter. O’Neill warns his readers that complacency is largely fed by society’s attempt to present our lives as a perfect continuum and the picture perfect illusion of happiness, promoted by the media. It is for this reason that the poet recalls the hell of his past as a touchstone, a reminder of who he was and who he, or anyone for that matter, can be:

but I visit there often
late at night, drunk,
when I catch sight of myself in
the mirror
looking too healthy, too
smug; self-satisfied,
content.

No one is above suffering, he tells us, and no one is a hero.

In his collection, O’ Neill pays tribute to his poetic predecessors: Bukowski and Ginsberg, among others. People will recognize much of Bukowski’s lyrical/narrative style in the form and shape of the poetry, and O’Neill even pays homage to Ginsberg’s great poem “America,” mimicking the bardic tone in his poem “America (A Love Letter)”. Like Ginsberg, he ridicules the American Dream as “…a fraud/a line in bullshit laid on thick and heavy/as convincing yet empty/as any old junkie’s sweet con.” The blame, O’Neill suggests, is on society for driving its poets and rebels to the “purity” of junk. Almost casually, O’Neill reminds the reader of the opening of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” written some fifty years earlier: “I have seen the best minds of my generation…”

The best poems in this collection, though, are his two elegies to fallen “comrades” in his magnificent “Hey Randal,” a tribute to a dead friend who had kicked the habit, regained his health, yet was killed, ironically, in a motorcycle accident where in death he remains: “perfect/ageless/reckless and beautiful/forever.” And not only in death, but in this wonderfully moving poem. The other, “1319 Iris Circle #3” is a tribute to a woman he loved who ended her life in despair, dying of her habit, and “who dug the hole/I’ve been trying to write myself out of/ever since.”

Another poem that stands out is “Don’t Take it Away,” the story of his first time with wife Vanessa where O’Neill cleverly personifies love in all of its guises and concludes by writing:

love is as messy and beautiful
and bloody and raw
and ugly and amazing
as the rest of our lives can be.

And the rest of his life that has opened up to him is that of writer and father, but, never forgotten, also former junkie. While the poet in him recognizes that his former hell is, paradoxically, also his inspiration, he finds through his daughter Nico the purity and wonder of a love that is beyond words by which he is “forced to doubt” his “previous conclusions/on the existence/ of higher powers” in his poem “23-10-03,” the date of his daughter’s birth.

Finally, this collection bears witness to the author’s belief in redemption achieved not through a 12 step program, but through creation and the affirmation of our shared humanity, punctuated by despair: his and ours. From the very heart of this despair, he asks us:

do we follow the script
and spin off into our private miseries
or do we take this pain and rottenness
and build a cathedral from it?

In ‘Songs from the Shooting Gallery’, Tony O’Neill has built a magnificent cathedral, complete with saints, sinners, gargoyles and all.

Zsolt Alapi was born in Budapest, Hungary and grew up in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, where he now lives. He is the former editor of the little magazine, Atropos, (winner of the Pushcart Prize) and has published poetry and fiction in various magazines in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, most recently in Front and Centre. He recently published a chapbook of stories, ‘Three Stories,’ (Mercutio Press, Montreal, Quebec, 2004) and is editor of the anthology 'Writing at the Edge' (Siren Song Press 2007). Zsolt teaches at Marianopolis College and Concordia University and has completed a Ph.D. at McGill University (Montreal) on Robert Creeley and Postmodern Poetics. He also edited a collection of poetry and short fiction, ‘Vistas’ and has written on the poetry of Pound, Williams, and Olson. To read a selection of Zsolt’s fiction on the showcase section of this site, click here.