Love, Death, Disability, and Deer
The Reign, Shane Neilson. icehouse poetry, 2025.
In an epigraph to his new poetry book, the Ontario-based, New Brunswick-born poet Shane Neilson draws on Geoffrey Hill’s 1971 Mercian Hymns: “Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings — I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.” It’s both a grand and a desolate connection. Mercian Hymns juxtaposes the poet’s strange and lonely boyhood with the life of a ninth-century king, Offa of Mercia, whose traces suffuse the 1940s Worcestershire where Hill grew up. The Reign is another emphatically situated poem, wading with both affection and outrage into the solitudes that make an unvalued province, an expropriated town, an ignored life. Meanwhile it has an almost cosmic flair for inclusion. It may be an event for poetry in Canada as strangely comprehensive as Hill’s book was in England half a century ago.
The Reign is Neilson’s seventh trade volume of poetry (he is also a physician, literary critic, and scholar in disability studies), and his first sustained fictional narrative in verse. In the real-life town of Enniskillen, New Brunswick, now abandoned after forcible expropriation to make way for a Canadian military base, remains one man, the elderly, intellectually disabled Willard Mitchell, who has refused to leave. Willard is a gifted carpenter and has some sort of supernatural ability, never explicitly addressed, to see remotely through doorways he has framed throughout the town. Now, in the last days of his life, Willard has a love affair, alternately mystical and quite graphic, with Casey, a figure who is in part the real New Brunswick tycoon K.C. Irving — a robber baron the poem shows exploiting and dominating his province — and in part a rutting buck deer.
How to make sense of all this? Allegory and polemic often go together in animal stories. The “Buck philosophy” articulated by Casey before love changes him is a familiar macho capitalist will-to-power. Willard’s ability to peer into interiors could say something about the understanding of private lives. Could something on queer rurality be extrapolated, or something about erotic love and capitalism? And then there is Willard’s abandonment itself. Neilson has written frequently about his own autism in recent years, and it is almost inevitable we think of Willard as a figure for autistic exclusion and resistance. Such a figure should be particularly compelling for Canadian poetry in a moment when the US secretary of health proclaims that children with autism cannot be poets.
Neilson has already been polemical on this terrain. In his 2016 chapbook New Brunswick, parts of which reappeared in a full-length book of the same name in 2019, declamatory evocations of squalor and political neglect conceal something more intimately painful in the speaker’s loss of his mother, a subtle, almost unstated self-reproach for having left. Willard has lost a beloved mother too, but The Reign is not a vehicle for his lyric self-disclosure. Though the poem touches powerfully on how autistic people are ignored or misunderstood, Willard is not a secret to be unpicked. Readers may find a strange duality in the sections spoken by Willard, who can describe himself as an “anti-Quixote” (that is, one whose contrariness has led him to stay put rather than to wander) in his monologue to readers, but whose diegetic speech is mostly limited to machine-gun monosyllables: “deerdeerdeerdeer” or “nononono.” Is the point here that the outside world misjudges Willard by focusing only on misleading exteriors and neglecting his rich inner life? Not exactly. People do neglect his inner life, but that doesn’t make the monosyllables less real or important. They stab across the page with an interruptive ferocity Neilson seems to love.
This is a poem in different voices. Alongside sections spoken by Willard and Casey, parts of The Reign are spoken by the forest itself, a narrator omniscient in the literal, all-inclusive sense of that world. The forest wants readers to see what is real, it tells us. At one point it opposes this effort to the turn-of-the-century New Brunswick poet William Bliss Carman, whose idealized descriptions of nature it roughly corrects. But Carman is not entirely unforgiven, and his words, too, become part of the forest. “I want tell you green,” the forest says, tapping into an old philosophical problem about the relationship between words and things. Here, speech does not point offstage toward reality but instead exists as part of it. At the textual level, Neilson plays with sources from Presocratic philosophy to George Oppen (another poet sensitive to deer) to Tom Waits. He also finds fortuitous verse forms for this commitment. Neilson has often been a poet of emphatic long lines — New Brunswick, for instance, has an expansiveness of gesture that could recall either Milton or Ginsberg — but here there is an almost subjectless musicality: open, but not prosy, somewhere between alliterative verse and the projective work of Charles Olson.
There is a second sense of “reign” — not only a word for the exploitation and misrule that Neilson finds everywhere in the governance of his province, but also for the land itself, the setting embraced by Willard, like Hill’s Offa, a spectral king who bleeds into his landscape. If the first sense gives us Neilson the polemicist, the second bespeaks something more promiscuous in meanings and affections, something less assimilable into set frames of interpretation. Autism has become a popular self-diagnosis in recent years, while its official recognition, and the accommodations to which this recognition gives access in some industries, remain inaccessible to many, offered on condition of expensive assessment. In The Reign, disability is not a state of exception, a case for special pleading, but a challenge to the way a society conceives all of its subjects. The word “autistic” never appears in this poem, and this is not coyness or irony on Neilson’s part (for all The Reign’s delight in strangeness and disquiet, I do not read anything about its objectives as ironic). Rather than any statement about himself, Willard’s most memorable word is “no.”
— Alastair Morrison is a physician, psychiatry resident, and poet living in Ontario.
Read this review and many others in Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution. Order the issue now:
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