The Dominion - poetry

Teenage Punk-Rock Vampire Novel & Prose Poetry on Plays

hillarybain — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:16:10 +0000

New works by Krilanovich, Ball

The Orange Eats Creeps
Grace Krilanovich
Two Dollar Radio, 2010.

The minute you tell someone you’re reading a novel about teenage vampires these days, you’ve got a lot of assumptions to recover from. Tell them it’s a teenage punk-rock vampire novel full of “narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads” and “slutty teenage hobo vampire junkies,” and then they might get an idea of what The Orange Eats Creeps reads like. This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. And that’s not to say Grace Krilanovich is simply out to shock, although she shocks in almost every paragraph she writes. The shock comes in equal doses of blood, sadness and Robitussin, as she chronicles a crew of vagrant vampire punks that kill, steal and fuck their way around the northwestern United States.

All this overlapping blood, sex and death becomes both unsettling and normal as you get fired through this short novel. The evocative prose keeps the gore constantly in focus, yet the teenage narrator emerges as a reflective traveler lost in her own thoughts, in her own flesh. Then, every few pages, she is almost irrevocably lost in someone else’s flesh: either devouring or being devoured, and finding affirmations of life somewhere below the skin. The vampire motif is a perfectly morbid metaphor.

Although it sounds like an elaborate teen-angst allegory, the endless creepy details of bodily destruction in The Orange Eats Creeps act as a warning against literary deconstruction. This is a vampire novel: an unapologetic, bloody and brutal vampire novel. But somehow it doesn’t matter if these kids are supposed to be real vampires, or if their death-obsession is a nightmarish reflection of their crumbling insides. The novel is also a well-crafted memoir of a punk scene that has never quite found a literary voice. Anyone who even vaguely encountered the punk scene rooted in Washington and Oregon in the 1990s will chuckle as Krilanovich recounts the unintentional hilarity of interwoven Krishna Punks, Rockabillies, and riot grrrls. The vampire punks are just another clan of kids heading to Oregon to find death or life or whatever they can find.

Krilanovich draws from these scenes to build characters that most other first-time novelists wouldn’t dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language that you wouldn’t expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. This nervy novel is emblematic of the work coming from the excellent Ohio-based publisher Two Dollar Radio. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation. It is also fiction that’s guaranteed to offend and alienate many readers, but I’m sure Krilanovich would be happy to lose those readers to an entirely different kind of popular vampire novel.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Clockfire
Jonathan Ball
Coach House, 2010

The actors reveal, for a small audience, the significant world events of the next fifty years. The audience listens, absorbs everything. When the play ends, all return home, silent. Now it is the audience's turn to act.

An exercise in formal cross-pollination, Jonathan Ball’s excellent new book of prose poetry describes a series of plays, theatrical experiences, and surreal art happenings that never (and in many cases, could never) occur in reality.

Written in weighty but never overly serious free verse, the book often induces a feeling of darkness and horror (“The play hollows them. What they once were bleeds out.”), and reads with a pleasingly antiquated tone, like a collection of literary feuilletons by Robert Walser or Peter Altenberg. The pieces are organized one per page, and the quickly shifting focal point of each poem—the audience itself, the strange happenings on stage, the effect produced afterward—is as stimulating as it is unsettling. If art is the result of the imagination’s confrontation with a series of material restrictions, what happens when those restrictions are lifted?

The actors improvise a scene. Then they improvise another. Until nothing is left to improvise. All possibilities are exhausted, put to bed.

Like the film Synecdoche, New York, in which a theatre project grows so large that its rehearsal period threatens to exceed the lifespan of its author, the poems in Clockfire find meaning in the gap between the practical realities of stagecraft and the infinite scope of what can be dreamed up on the page. Ball’s voice—peculiar, dark, and cultivated—is a welcome one.

—Robert Kotyk

Robert Kotyk reads and writes in Montreal. Shane Patrick Murphy co-edits The Dominion's Literature & Ideas section.

The Orange Eats Creep

Clockfire2

January Books

Kyle Hodnett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:00:00 +0000

New works by Nickerson and Bolano, and a collaborative effort by Campbell, Boyd, and Culbert

McPoems
Billeh Nickerson
Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver, 2009.

Sometimes I feel I’ve missed out by never working at a fast-food chain. Apart from the drudgery, exploitative wages, and perilous working conditions, these restaurants are so geared for mass appeal that they become rare meeting points for a wide range of characters and classes. With a quick eye for anthropological observation, Billeh Nickerson recalls his years as a McWorker in this short poetry collection. Cleverly divided into thematic sections reflecting the questionable quality, service, cleanliness, and value of his employer, Nickerson recounts the mixture of mundane and surreal moments at McDonald’s like a clean-mouthed Charles Bukowski. Characters almost unbelievably bizarre such as “the unicorn”—a customer who orders soft-serve cones to stick on his forehead, or the woman who eats lunch then purges in the parking lot show a grim side of the restaurant and the world it inhabits.

Accumulated anecdotes form a bleak picture, but Nickerson delivers observations with humour that sustained during his time in the trenches. "Daylight Savings Diptych" passes on a Zen-like maxim that when the clocks change in spring and fall customers will yell at you because they arrive too late for breakfast or too early for lunch. McPoems offers a smart and witty insiders view over the counter for those of us who’ve never asked, “Would you like fries with that?”

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Roverto Bolaño
Melville House Publishing: Brooklyn, 2009.

Despite dying nearly seven years ago, each posthumous Bolaño release further cements his reputation as a literary icon of the twenty-first century. Brooklyn-based Melville House Publishing gets in on the action with this collection of interviews Bolaño gave as he rose to fame in Spanish-speaking populations. These interviews attempt to contextualize the ongoing debate over Bolaño’s acceptance by North American audiences. Is it his romantic left-leaning idealism that strikes a chord, or do his stories play into preconceived North American perceptions of a Latin America preoccupied with sex, violence, and obscure literary movements? While these interviews provide depth to his character and motivation to write, they offer only a glimpse into Bolaño’s perception of his own fame. The most in-depth interview in the collection is taken from the Mexican edition of Playboy, and depicts Bolaño as jokey and self-deprecating to a fault. Interesting to ravenous Bolaño fans, the uninitiated would do better reading The Savage Detectives or Nazi Literature in the Americas—his fictitious encyclopedia of the right-wing literati.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

A Thousand Dreams: Vancouver’s downtown eastside and the fight for its future
Larry Campbell, Neil Boyd and Lori Culbert
Greystone Books: Vancouver, 2009.

A Thousand Dreams tells grim stories of missing women, sardine and cat food diets, epidemic illness and the crippled support systems that struggle to manage the situation that is life, and survival, on Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

Although they never lived in the neighbourhood of which they write, the book’s authors spent much of their professional lives in its streets, meeting its residents and uncovering its secrets. The team, consisting of a journalist, a coroner-cum-politician and a criminologist document work being done in the east end community. Careful not to overlook the positive, the book shines a light on successes like harm reduction and InSite, the supvised injection site that won a recent constitutional challenge over the Harper Government. However,the battles depicted here are largely bureaucratic, and power is accessed through political clout.

Much of A Thousand Dreams details the health and social services available in the community, yet it is not for residents of the neighbourhood, it’s an introduction for outsiders. Compelling to read but not comprehensive; the book uses case studies to illustrate how an individual navigates the system, telling stories of a few as seen through the eyes of community organizers attempting to support them.

Outside of these studies the vast majority of the east end’s poor, drug-dependant, mentally ill and desperate appear faceless in the book, shifting indistinguishably like clouds overhead. No doubt, an impression not intended, but A Thousand Dreams focuses on challenges understood by most Canadians—ineffective RCMP funding, back-room maneuvering, high-rise developments, Da Vinci’s Inquest—not cat food for dinner, a dirty needle for dessert or a damp parking garage for a bed. The remarkable stories are about the activists, writers, organizers and health professionals who fight for the future of Vancouver’s downtown eastside

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

December Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:32:43 +0000

New works by Hall, Rogers and With

The Certainty Dream
Kate Hall
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

I’m normally skeptical of a book of poetry containing multiple references to contemporary metaphysicists and epistemologists. Academic poets can be such stiff writers, getting stuck in a search for canonical purpose and intellectual weight. Their poems get “workshopped” until they are systematically drained of all their energy and inspiration.

This is not the case with Kate Hall, whose finished poetry sounds much more like Wallace Stevens than GWF Hegel. Some lines from the last poem capture the feel of this book as a whole:

“this became the dream his dream in which I did not allow him to speak
and the dream in which I imagined him speechless before me”

In Hall’s dreams, Thomas Aquinas is a self-help author. Hume is a tour-guide for bird watchers. Descartes is going to a Halloween party. Elephants and disembodied voices arrive in the mail.

The Certainty Dream weaves its way through absurdist outbursts and giddy indulgences of graduate-level philosophy while remaining rooted in the immediacy and, yes, the certainty of everyday life.

While Hall had me reaching out to Wikipedia to decode some of her academic name-dropping (I still don’t know if she means David Sosa, Ernest Sosa, or maybe Sammy Sosa), but she provides enough context and imagery to avoid turning her book into an academic in-joke.

Hall seems to be working in the same emerging style as her editor, Toronto poetry guru Kevin Connolly, whose Revolver was a Griffin Poetry Prize nominee last year. Like Connolly, Hall’s poems unfold with wit, colourful layers, and no overwhelming sense of ego or pomp.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Paper Radio
Damian Rogers
ECW: Toronto, 2009

If poems are word-compilations that broadcast music from the page, it’s hard not to like Damian Rogers’ idea of poetry as a paper radio. The former arts editor at Toronto’s Eye Weekly uses this musical metaphor to transmit a disparate set of themes, ranging from inter-personal and family tensions to a preoccupation with Shakers.

There are moments of genuine intensity here, but Rogers plays it fairly safe in her debut collection. Her clever quips are some of the most memorable parts: “Your problem is my problem—which is why I hate hearing about it.” Or, “No one tells the truth anymore and we’re grateful—though the lies bore us to tears.”

When Rogers sets aside her bleak humour, she earnestly shares intimate moments and everyday epiphanies through characters that remain silhouettes, without much detail to draw us close to them. And occasionally the Shakers, with all their dance-mad celibacy, sound like a poet looking for quirky inspiration.

But Rogers’ sense of humour and quick pacing makes this an upbeat, melodic, and highly-experimental debut. We’ll be looking forward to future work by Rogers where she’ll inevitably sharpen the tuning and crank this radio’s volume.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison
Cathleen With
Viking Canada: Toronto, 2009

Having Faith isn’t about trust, belief, or religion. It’s about a girl having a baby girl while in prison.

Trista is one-quarter Inuvialuit and 15 when she has Faith, a premature child who is deaf, brain-damaged and diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Born into a violent night following punches to her mother’s belly and the bloody death of a store cashier, Faith spends the first three months of her life in a juvenile detention facility before being shipped south to a foster family.

Her mother spends those same months deluded, detached or drugged. As Trista gropes through her days at the Polar Girls' Prison, each brings greater loss and self-disappointment as her plans for motherhood are dashed as quickly as her approaching court sentence.

As Trista draws further into herself, novelist Cathleen With is at her best. It’s unclear what Trista remembers and lets ruminate in her head and what she shares with the staff and other girls at the prison. These monologues can be disorienting, but through the course of the narration, they become more frequent, more confusing and we can appreciate Trista’s own bewilderment, loneliness and longing.

The author lived and taught in Inuvik and here builds an insulated world of snow drifts, ice roads, wolf trim on parkys and the dark, northern secrets of molestation, alcoholism, gambling and neglect.

At the Writers and Readers Festival in Vancouver last year, With said she has seen girls “just go sideways.”

“They would talk about their life as if it were going to be over by the time they were 30. Suicide. Drugs. Whatever. Better get on with life.”

Born to a 13-year-old mother in Jackfish Bay, a remote, fictional town outside of Iqaluit, Trista inherits a world where men slip little girls fivers to get them off.

“Sometimes you don’t even know what the sexual assault is,” said With in Vancouver. And speaking for the young abused characters in Having Faith, “Oh, that happened too. Maybe that’s why I can’t get my shit together.”

Trista’s voice is urgent and desperate and sometimes buoyant. With opens the door for her redemption, but this novel offers little reprieve. The prose evokes cold climes, ghosts that haunt and forgive, sunless days and frozen bodies in the permafrost, but With’s scenes foster a sense of faith—a confidence in survival, strong women, intuition and love.

Trista inherits aspects of her grandmothers’ cultural knowledge and skill—but barely. She cherishes their values and generosity, but doesn’t have the social support or maturity to embrace it. With has surrounded Trista in female role models who flash through the narration as potential futures for the inmates at the detention facility.

Having Faith speaks to trust and spirit, but Trista learns it’s also about having faith in family and the friends we chose as family.

With received acclaim for Skids, a short story collection about kids living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and again in Polar Girls, With brings us a harrowing and mesmerizing voice of a young Canadian fighting to survive on the margins of society.

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

Beat

Moira Peters — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000

beat_hmeek.jpg

October Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:02:42 +0000

New works by Holbrook & Holtz, translation by Rexroth

Joy is So Exhausting
Susan Holbrook
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

On writing humor, Dorothy Parker said, “There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind.”

Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting is a collection to make Parker proud. Tongue-in-check tart, Holbrook’s poetry is full to the brim with truncated aphorisms (invented) and the juxtaposed rhetoric of double-entendres: “Your First Timpani? Take a deep Brecht and relapse.” Her words play musical chairs and broken telephone at the same time.

While I’m less keen on the Canadiana in-jokes (Green Party, Conservative Party, Peter Mansbridge) and other CBC News refrains, I appreciate that even these dropped names exist in a galaxy far from purple.

Speaking of blue, Holbrook’s sexy lady-love responses to Lorca move liquidly, acting as a sort of Psalm and response style poetical liturgy. And “Poetsmart Training for Your Poet” is hold-your-sides hilarious. Show it to your scruffiest poet and get them in line already.

You’ll read Joy is So Exhausting with a dry pair of eyes; this writer’s whet her wit sharp.

—Melissa Bull

Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
New Directions: New York, 2009

At some point, most Canadian pre-teens gain a rudimentary understanding of Japanese poetry. Unfortunately my exposure to this tradition has never branched out from those unrhyming lines of five, seven, and five syllables I learned in grade four.

Given this limited exposure, I was excited to learn something from this short collection. However, this is far from an educational tool. Apart from the names and genders of the poets, and the dates they lived, no background information is provided. But this lack of supplementary material is only slightly disorienting. When confronted exclusively with the poems themselves, you can uncover a lifetime of visceral images in these succinct verses.

I keep returning to Masaoka Shiki’s poem, which reads in its entirety: “Frozen in the ice / A maple leaf.” Bare and direct, that maple leaf can spark deep imaginative involvement. Then again, it can be just a leaf in the ice. Stripped of decorative phrasing and emotional triggers, each re-reading provides a new response.

Packaged in a glossy black and gold jacket with ornate flowers and butterflies, this collection seems so much like a romantic gift that they could have published it on pink heart-shaped pages. Cynical as that might sound, it’s probably damn effective as such.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

This One’s Going to Last Forever
Narine Holtz
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

It’s one thing to look for love in all the wrong places; it’s another not to look at all.

Narine Holtz’s style cuts to the point and embraces our so-called sexual deviances, her characters share the same confidence to love and find love in the most unexpected places.

Take the sexy amputee who fulfills the fetishized desires of a man and wonders at the cosmic joke of “leaving her homophobic girlfriend” and finally discovering pleasure where she’d only known pain. The phantoms of her past disappear as “her cunt caramelized like sugar sweating in a hot pan.”

One of This One’s best lines is delivered by a middle-aged gay man who performs drive-through weddings dressed as Elvis. The words he speaks about his fag hag, Tracy, and the reasons he’s drawn to her eccentric drama, are among the most tender of this collection.

While the writing is not overtly sexy, Holtz delivers enough intimacy and eroticism to tease but not quite satisfy. This suspended gratification almost has me begging Holtz for a collection of erotic stories that fulfils the fill-in-the-blank anticipation of This One.

This collection of short stories is anchored by the central chapters, telling the story of Clara and her emerging politicization. If you weren’t a small-town Alberta lesbian coming out in Montreal in 1989, Holtz takes you there: “Even the meaning of the words the other students used—words like ‘colonialization,’ ‘hegemony,’ and ‘deconstruction”—weren’t clear to her.”

The greatest source of internal conflict for Clara is her sexuality, and despite her experience with men, she’d rarely known the pleasure of intimacy and love. Say hello to Gabby, who makes Clara blush when she says, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”

However, Gabby’s loyalty is to women, not to one woman. Here Holtz, who was awarded the Alice B. Award for debut lesbian fiction for her previous novel, channels Nietzsche: “In the end, one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.”

Clara’s sexual soul searching may not have been written for comic effect, but her insecurities and coming-of-age epiphanies rarely failed to crack me up. On one hand, her voice is prescient, endearing and sweetly pathetic. On the other, it’s self-absorbed and tedious. Her doubts also flit through the minds of many queer women; she’s not alone and she’s not original. Once between the sheets with her lover, her mind is finally put at ease.

—Megan Stewart

Melissa Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor, and translator. Her first collection of short fiction, Eating Out, was published by WithWords in 2009.

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

May Books

Moira Peters — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:00:52 +0000

New work by Connolly, new release by Green

Revolver
Kevin Connolly
House of Anansi Press, 2008

It’s painful to admit, but poetry can be pretty predictable. This is especially true for Canadian poetry that gets nominated for major literary prizes. A reader can usually expect some variation of contemplative, lovelorn verses building up toward a climactic, self-realizing epiphany. Kevin Connolly, in his new Griffin Prize-nominated collection, Revolver, is refreshingly aware of these conventions without falling victim to them. Instead of adopting a lone voice to examine a set of well-trodden themes, Connolly pursues a gamut of unexplored poetic possibilities. Nearly every poem touches upon a different subject matter and engages a different structure. Connolly rejects the role of the poet as sullen narrator. Disarming as it is upon an initial reading, there is no unifying voice, tone, or narrative in this collection. This is a poet clearly enamoured with poetry itself, making verse out of whatever sparks his gushing imagination.

The risk, and maybe the downfall here, is that Connolly’s collection can feel more like an anthology than the work of a single author. From the goofy to the downright depressing, Connolly bounces between the extremities of inspiration without any segue or transition. You can almost hear Connolly's muse asking: How about a nature poem? A love poem? Got any about sports?

What first strikes you as plain novelty and quirkiness gradually becomes endearing as Connolly's many personalities all carve out original and gripping poems. From the start, the book opens with a table of contents that lists the names of vaguely familiar rock songs. A turn of the page reveals that these are not the actual titles of the poems at all. We're left guessing whether this was Connolly's soundtrack while writing the collection, or if it's a poetic collage on its own. Once the poems get started, we are given one poem that sounds like a graduate-school admission exam from hell, one that parodies the catechism, and another that is composed of a few columns of disconnected words under the heading “Three Sonnets (Assembly Required).”

Connolly's inspirations are spelled out explicitly in his notes, ranging from Mark Twain, contemporary American poets like Charles Simic, and the Welsh noise rock band Mclusky. After taking account of his sources and then reading the collection a few times, Connolly becomes strangely cohesive and coherent. Even as the poems clash stylistically, his reoccurring preoccupations provide a tiny modicum of unity that gives this eccentric and disparate collection its own vitality.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Back
Henry Green
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

Back, Henry Green’s 1946 novel of wartime homecoming, is loaded with enough individual suffering that it could almost take place on the battlefield from which its amputee-protagonist, Charley, has been salvaged.

Charley returns home to England to find that his pre-war sweetheart, Rose, has died in his absence, while her look-alike half-sister, Nancy, remains tortuously close at hand. The novel’s chief complication arises here, out of the sad fact that Charley’s wartime trauma and accompanying waves of self-preserving amnesia bar him from fully absorbing the news of Rose’s death. In meeting Nancy, Charley incorrectly assumes that he’s being reunited with his departed lover. Moreover, when Nancy rejects his affections, Charley descends into a confused turmoil, at one point enlisting the services of a handwriting expert to prove that the two sisters are one and the same.

Just as Green’s more touted masterpiece, Loving, documents the hermetic world of a tightly knit group of servants in a secluded Irish castle, Back bends around the wounded psyche of its protagonist with engrossing singularity. In one passage, the setting perfectly captures the muddled roiling of Charley’s simultaneous grief over Rose’s death and his hurt over Nancy’s persistent brush-offs.

He fled Rose, yet every place he went she rose up before him; in florists’ windows; in a second-hand bookseller’s with a set of Miss Rhoda Broughton, where, as he was staring for her reflection in the window, his eyes read a title, “Cometh up as a flower” which twisted his guts; also in a seed merchant’s front that displayed a watering can, to the spout of which was fixed an attachment, labelled ‘Carter’s patent Rose.’

Green emphasizes the inescapability of Rose’s memory by using the past tense of the verb “to rise” (“she rose up”) in the very sentence that introduces the ubiquity of her namesake. And amid Charley’s solipsistic bewilderment, Green the master stylist is out in full force. Beautiful, simile-laden descriptions like “[s]he was crying so much it made her face look like a pane of glass in the rain” crop up generously, appearing in scenes filled with Green’s meticulous simulation of English working-class speech.

Back is newly available from Dalkey Archive Press with a brilliant afterward by screenwriter and academic George Toles.

—Robert Kotyk

October Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:29:14 +0000

New works by Bolaño, Lerch and Ohle

The Romantic Dogs
Roberto Bolaño
New Directions Press: 2008

Five years after his death, it’s hardly surprising that Roberto Bolaño’s name is becoming increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world. The lauded Chilean’s works reverberate with sex, exiled Latin Americans, literary obsessions, literary pretensions, violence, politics, and, well, more sex. While Bolaño is mainly known for his novels and short stories (The Savage Detectives being the best known), he wrote in prose only as a reluctant admission that, like many of his characters, poets earn one lousy living.

This collection of his poetry, the first to be translated into English, serves as an intriguing complement to Bolaño’s prose, but it probably won’t convert many readers who haven’t encountered Bolaño before. Although his romantic subject matter is well represented here, Bolaño’s novels are addictive largely because of the wild, ecstatic voices of his narrators. In his poetry, Bolaño takes on a more contemplative, detached tone that makes his poetry, if nothing else, less fun.

Most of the pieces in this collection are short vignettes that recall the loneliness and desperation of Bolaño’s formative years as an exile from Pinochet’s Chile. In front of this political backdrop, we find his preoccupation with love and literature. The short pieces give us some glances into Bolaño’s sense of black humour and satire: “Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals?” (from “Ernesto Cardenal and I”). But it is the longer pieces that allow Bolaño to really be himself. One of the longest, “Visit to the Convalescent,” gives us a youthful narrator who has escaped from a fallen country to run wild in Mexico City while “the rest of the world’s cities are drowning in uniformity and silence.” Such sentiments show Bolaño at both his best and most irksome. These laconic verses make it nearly impossible to determine the depth of his irony and naivety. Bolaño’s writing is impossibly cool to the point that we are never sure whether the author is laughing at himself or his readers. In these short poems, Bolaño still manages to draw us in with his wanderer’s tales. Then once we are comfortable, he offers the occasional stab to the rest of the world who sat at home while he spent his life drifting from country to country, book to book, and love to love.

– Shane Patrick Murphy

Witness and Resist
Marilyn Lerch
Morgaine House: 2008

The very first poem in Marilyn Lerch's Witness and Resist makes clear what the poet feels a poem should accomplish: “to witness for beauty and resist despair.” This is a collection that confronts the state of the world with all the compassionate empathy and emotional activism essential to giving the individual a voice and sense of importance within that world. Lerch boldly takes on a wide range of personalities: Chilean tour guide Maria Luz, who has flashbacks to being raped and seeing her baby burned alive; dead soldier Joseph Terry Riordon, who "dutifully toured the First Sitting Duck Gulf War;" and widely looked-up-to intellectual role model Dick Clapp, who became a small town judge and "put a bullet in his brain." Lerch ups the ante by assuming the viewpoint of a dying man whose black skin is “shiny on knobs of bone:”

My life,
like the diamonds and zinc and oil
that lay under those black voids
on the old maps,
is being taken from me.

This powerful New Brunswick poet not only plays the empath, but unashamedly includes herself in a universe of vulnerability with a ten-page exploration of and letter to her father: "Your absence was our intimacy, so/ how could I not believe/ this profound indifference to life/ included me?" Although the narrators' unselfconscious tales do at times get lost in obscure references that over-shelter the greater implications of the work, any confusion is quickly surmountable. Fearless of dealing in darkness, it is no surprise that this wide-eyed work also catches sight of the light: "Yes,/ always the dark and/ new stars in the making,/ the bombs will fall, compassion/ always possible.”

— Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

The Pisstown Chaos
David Ohle
Soft Skull Press: 2008

Whatever one might think of Cormac McCarthy’s father-son doomsday travelogue The Road, it is a novel that may present as doleful an elegy for the debasement of the American family as anything yet written this century. In a related (but different) vein, The Pisstown Chaos, the zany and strangely beautiful new novel by David Ohle, exhibits none of McCarthy’s penchant for scenes of sad kinship at the end of the world as we know it, even as it mines our cultural moment of extreme uncertainty in the service of a similarly apocalyptic mode. Ohle’s novel is a family dystopia in a more eccentric key: it whizzes between the radically divergent fates of its characters, the formerly wealthy Balls clan, with scatological merriment, from one depredation to the next, like some strange unproduced episode of Arrested Development collectively written by Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, and the Marquis de Sade.

In so doing, Ohle frequently opens up space for trenchant satire in the form of short news stories and community bulletins, collagistically laid out before each chapter. As one begins: “An imp herder working one of the Reverend’s meadows is fit to be tied. He found his most productive female dead in her pen yesterday. The belly was scissored open, the teats cut, the heart carried off. The herder wants to blame stinkers for the latest raid on his stock. The incident is doubly sorrowful, coming so soon after the same herder discovered the wings of his favorite banty imp nailed to the stump of an oak. Neighbors testify that he now spends his time stalking the reaches of the Reverend’s property, pistol drawn, so anxious to shoot a stinker that he has accidentally killed three of his best stud imps.” The bulk of the story pits ordinary citizens against the “stinkers,” a parasite-ridden lower caste of zombies, while the nation’s despot is a political bloviator and reverend seemingly modeled after right-wing American talk show host Bill O’Reilly. The result is a weird and precious addition to the growing literature of the gloomy. Bleakness has never looked so rich.

— Robert Kotyk

September Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:27:32 +0000

New works by Venart and Stiles

Woodshedding
S.E. Venart
Brick: London, 2007.

If her work is any indication, S.E. Venart’s poems are made up of dispatches from a writing life that is underway with admirable vigilance. Woodshedding, her first collection, ferrets out space for its intellectual labours around the contemplation of the ordinary, but time moves neither too fast, nor too slow; the poems emerge from life’s infrequent furrows of solitude with refreshing tranquility.

The poet shares this pursuit with bird-watchers, monks and joggers: inhabitants of what Venart calls “privileged openings,” pockets of inspiration that open up with circumstance (“There are sudden canopies/of silence between the low tones/of speedboats”), but which become worthy of safeguarding when the moment lingers (“Touch, I think, is mostly overrated.//It makes for only the luckiest/misunderstandings. I prefer the syllables of birds.”).

The full end-stop between the line about touch and the next reflects the exalted status that Venart affords to this sense of aloneness and sequestration, but the poems encourage a certain level of interior play even amid the hustle and bustle of one’s daily commute. This dual mode, mingling worldly tumult with the concerns of the self, can be heard in a line from “Sightings”: “I’m back in the city, stopped for a red light, reading the off-ramp’s/sprayed messages,” which echoes an earlier poem, “Lanes,” ending with “The sun overcoming me. . . /throwing light down on me as I bring/flesh and soul together, and fall/again into the moving traffic of myself.”

When a musician friend of mine makes a trip “out to the woodshed,” he means to remain there; anywhere, that is, so long as he cannot be reached by phone, e-mail, Facebook message, or any of the other brazenly intrusive gizmos of this early 21st century; for as long as it takes to learn a part on his tuba.

References to musicianship pervade Venart’s work-—her own epigraph invokes the improvisatory play of a jazz musician—-but as another definition of the collection’s title included in the epigraph attests, “woodshedding” also refers to the administration of a “sound parental thrashing.” Venart perhaps means that her work reveals itself only with the avoidance of easy pleasures and through an embrace of an ascetic self-discipline. If so, her collection reflects this principle with uncommon beauty and maturity.

– Robert Kotyk

Taking the Stairs
John Stiles
Nightwood: Gibson's Landing, BC, 2008.

Stiles' protagonist, Jarod, is a struggling writer whose phone is simply ringing off the hook with job offers. His friend Elliot wants to pay him exorbitant amounts of money to write a screenplay, and it's all Jarod can do to evade his would-be benefactor so he's free to endlessly re-read his abortive short story attempts and fret about his unfinished novel. High doses of implausibility and inaction can kill just about any novel and Stiles' choice of subject matter only furthers these problems.

The “writing about writing” genre is an extremely tricky one to make engaging and Jarod spends a tedious amount of time bellyaching about what a chore it is to stuff his work into envelopes and mail it off to literary magazines.

Although Taking the Stairs is written in the first person, Jarod's personality remains curiously opaque. He fights with his girlfriend; he works odd jobs; he holds circuitous telephone conversations with people he's trying to avoid. Stiles has included in Taking the Stairs several excerpts from Jarod's oeuvres, which are bad without being atrocious enough for comic effect and it's unclear just how much we are meant to sympathize with Jarod.

Stylistically, there's not much here to save this book from itself. “He says that when people jump off bridges, they land on their feet and their legs get jammed up inside their bodies and have to be pulled back out with a huge set of tongs,” is as interesting as it gets, unless you count the anatomical curiosity of the phrase, “She looks fine with her round spanish ass in a tight, tasteful blouse.” Must be quite the figure.

– Linda Besner

May Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:00:36 +0000

New works by Wickers, Vuong-Riddick, Boyko and Bryan

Stations of the Lost
Brian Wickers
Mansfield Press: Toronto, 2006.

This book offers readers something remarkable: the chance to engage with a captivating voice and enlist the experience and lifetime observations of an extremely erudite and affable poet. Here we have a complicated and finely textured emotional landscape of ex-wives and teenage daughters, elderly fathers and the children who look after them. There is a solid quality to the voice in these poems, a sense that the speaker has withstood life’s inclement weather and will live to withstand more. In addition to carefully wrought images and phrases, Wickers is adept with sound; in the lyric “A Seashell From the Seychelles,” the ‘s’ sounds mimic the sea, and the resulting miasma of sound and meaning is beautiful. Wickers shines when he’s being ostentatiously humorous, as in “Marginal Questions, Winter, English 101, Frost.” The poem riffs off questions a teacher might ask students – mentally and verbally – while teaching Frost’s famous poem: “Who owns the woods – in which of several senses?/ do you own property have you ever tended to animals.” These poems span the pains and joys of life while reflecting on what it is to be human.

--Matthew J. Trafford

The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam
Thuong Vuong-Riddick
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

As a child in Hanoi and later a student in Saigon, Vuong-Riddick witnessed Vietnam's turbulent changes in the second half of the 20th century. Historically under French colonial rule, Vietnam was occupied by Japan during World War II, then reoccupied by France, only to be split in two after Communist rebels led by Ho Chi Minh captured Hanoi. The Evergreen Country is Vuong-Riddick's vivid memoir of these times, brimming with historical, cultural and personal insights. The tone is straightforward: events are presented chronologically, with occasional welcome asides to describe relevant cultural details or social practices, including feet binding, teeth dyeing, betel chewing, and the use of the "shame pole" to punish immodesty. Vuong-Riddick casts both sides of the political conflict in a suspicious and violent light, and only hints at where her biases may lie. Vuong-Riddick is a likeable narrator, and we become interested in her personal growth and family, even as we're drawn into the larger historical narrative. Despite the ever-present tension of war, what emerges from the book is a colourful picture of a vibrant and dynamic country.

--Sam Fraser

Blackouts
Craig Boyko
McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 2008.

First short story collections often possess a restless quality, as the developing writer casts out his or her net as widely as possible to determine just what sits within reach. In Blackouts, individual sentences often show signs of overextension, falling into the kind of exploratory wordiness that signals a young writer straining to broaden or discover the range of his abilities. Occasionally this effect works: “It sounded like a word she’d borrowed from her husband, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, whatever.” As this sentence from “Black Ink” presses outward, each word becomes essential to one character’s conception of another: first a tossed off statement of designation, then a frustrated amendment, and finally exasperation. At other moments, the unchecked forward momentum weakens the impact of some of the poetic passages. Subtle differences between the modifiers notwithstanding, sentences like “Science pursues truth impersonally, dispassionately, disinterestedly,” from “In the Dark,” would benefit from greater concision. The stories in Blackouts are extraordinarily varied in style and subject matter. Given the ambition of this collection, it may only be a matter of more time spent in the workshop for Boyko’s trials to yield major results.

--Bob Kotyk

Gerbil Mother
D.M. Bryan
NeWest Press: Edmonton, 2008.

D.M. Bryan’s first novel is a marvel. From the first few sentences—“Take it on trust—the moment's a bad one. Not Greek tragedy, but ordinary doctor's office despair, regular as a diagrammed digestive system”-- the narrative voice jerks us awake. Bryan has taken a classic character—the harassed mother of small children overwhelmed with noise, sleeplessness and loneliness—and, with the use of a judiciously chosen device, both heightened and deflated its pathos. Gerbil Mother is narrated from the point of view of a foetus, which is unusual in itself, but Bryan has gone one better and made this foetus a bully. The foetus tells us from the beginning “I see at once what a bad mother we have,” and it takes us several chapters to realize how unreliable this narrator is. This judgement mimics the actual voice a selfish toddler might use were it capable of eloquent expression, and the effect is startling. Bryan's language is sophisticated and vigorous, and every paragraph pops with images like this one: “Ref in a dirty diaper, shaking the ropes of the ring. The crib.” A tough and imaginative debut.

--Linda Besner

March Books

hillarybain — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:25:30 +0000

New works by Trussler, Adamson, Snider, and Friedman

Accidental Animals
Michael Trussler
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

There's an openness to Trussler's stanzas that's oddly relaxing—his speakers seem willing to accept whatever comes, even defeat. The unabashed autobiographical bent of these poems provides continuity and context, which allow some of the most difficult moments to resonate. A recently divorced parent writes to his daughter about the mistakes made by “your Mom and Dad, and the other/big people around you—all of who/ will never touch who you really are.” Though this kind of pronouncement occasionally verges on preciousness, it's not all sentiment; there are also some great lines like, “My face sweats so much sometimes it's/ like snails are copulating on the lenses.” The engaging authenticity of the content allows the reader to look past some awkwardness in the form. Trussler uses devices that other poets have employed to great effect, but here the slashes and numbered stanza breaks that don't actually divide the poem feel like exercises. Trussler's meditations, however, feel fruitful, and the collection gives a refreshingly honest sense of reflection rooted in experience.

--Linda Besner

The Outlander
Gil Adamson
Anansi: Toronto, 2007.

The Outlander, set in the early 1900s, chronicles the adventures of “the widow,” a 19-year-old woman who has killed her husband and is now fleeing his vengeful twin brothers across Western Canada. Adamson has done a fine job of endowing the widow with a complicated character, giving her so many faults it's a wonder the reader manages to like her—but we do. The niggling technical question in Adamson's execution is a distracting inconsistency in point of view. The narrative voice stays, for the most part, fairly close to the protagonist, but occasionally bolts into startling omniscience, remarking, as the widow fails to recognize the edible plants surrounding her in the forest, “Abundance lay about her, but she starved.” This, paired with phrases like, “August dandelion seeds floated across their path, as if nature itself hoped to bewitch them from their purpose and dream them into the trees,” lends The Outlander a kind of Hardyesque grandiosity, at the heart of which is a ballad's tall tale of a love story. Gather around the campfire and listen to Adamson spin this one out.

--Linda Besner

On Performing
Bob Snider
Gaspereau: Kentville, 2007.

This is intended as a self-help book: Bob Snider, the Canadian folk musician, gives a series of tips for whoever, in his words, wants to learn to be “a ham.” Here's a sample of his prose style:

Timing is the art of saying or doing the right thing at the right time. Let's say you're standing one the street with a friend and you decide to tell a joke.'I always wanted to be a tree surgeon,' you say, 'but I faint at the sight of sap.' This is a good joke and will probably get a laugh or a smile. But if your friend happens to mention that he had some tree surgery done in his yard and you then tell him your joke it will benefit from the addition of good timing.

This earnest explication doesn't seem to match what most people mean by the word “timing” in comedy. There is a vagueness here that plagues the book from the outset, as Snider gives would-be performers generic, flatly phrased advice like, “Anecdotes are interesting and illustrative.” Snider may be an entertaining performer, but he's not much of a writer.

--Linda Besner

Long Story Short
Elyse Friedman
Anansi: Toronto, 2008.

The situations depicted in Elyse Friedman’s new collection of funny and often unsettling stories are mounted with droll, crisp dialogue. Particularly likable is the Journey Prize-nominated “Truth,” which imagines a dating world in which the commitment to spoken veracity (Him: “My self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny.” Her: “I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling self-destructive.”) exposes the everydayness of game playing and self-deception. While amusingly told, the collection’s novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” about a young man who befriends a washed-up sitcom actor for the inside joke-generating potential afforded by their taped phone conversations, is overlong and, in the end, verges on preachiness. Cruelty aside, doesn’t the occasional lending of a disingenuously sympathetic ear to a bad-tempered friend constitute a necessary, even quasi-noble component of lasting companionship? Friedman privileges empathy in the story, upbraiding a youthful culture of detachment, but her targets feel too easy here, straw men (boys, really) who never quite evolve out of a caricature of their videogaming demographic.

--Robert Kotyk

February Books

hillarybain — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:52:09 +0000

New works by MacArthur, Armstrong, McPherson and Glenn

Take Us Quietly
Tammy Armstrong
Goose Lane Editions,
Fredericton, 2006.

The poems in this book meander: geographically they cover Canada from coast to coast, as well as foreign locales like Spain, Guatemala, and Indonesia. While the range of content may be admirable, there’s a sense of something missing in this collection, and in the individual poems themselves—a lack of common purpose and cohesion. Take these two stanzas from “Mathematics:” “A cigarette mark/ burnt through a twenty-dollar bill/ into your forearm/ is my logarithmic reminder./ I’ve memorized them all./ When my sight is faulty tungsten,/ my fingers will read polysyllabic.// This rock and scald of absence blisters/ into Saturday morning:/ coffee, samosas, Globe and Mail,/ my feet tucked beneath the angles of your leg.” While the thread connecting mathematics, the number twenty, and logarithms is clear, the movement to chemistry (tungsten) and literature (polysyllabic) feels strange, not to mention the tangle of other images and allusions which are in no way accessible to the reader. Throughout the collection the poems seem to skim the surface of something beautiful, but never take the plunge into real depth or meaning. Take Us Quietly leaves the reader wanting more matter and more art.

--Matthew J. Trafford

Six Ways to Sunday
Christian McPherson
Nightwood, Gibsons, BC, 2007.

In his debut collection, McPherson conjures a gritty and colourful Ottawa, populated by addicts and losers, obsessives and gawky teens. In “The Plastic Garden,” the first and best story of the collection, a retired model-maker named Rumford feuds with skateboarders menacing a little girl’s garden. Rumford’s rage after the first failed confrontation is touching in its excess, and McPherson's other hapless characters are equally sympathetic: jazz-playing Two Seconds and Elvis-haired Squid seem to scrape by mostly on luck and pure gall. Occasionally, the plots beggar belief, or coast along the edge of an easy pathos. The intentionally silly “Chilidog Love” is playful enough to escape standards of believability, but it feels out of place among the darker stories. Where the collection falters is in the saggy dialogue, and also where the writing dips into weak similes, like Johnny’s father in “Autograph,” “scribbling away with the intensity of an accountant.” But McPherson’s endings, like the pool hustles, drug deals and long afternoon shags of these stories, have a nice way of leaving things open to the unexpected.

--Saleema Nawaz

Combustion
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Brick Books: Toronto, 2007.

Glenn's second poetry collection considers the big abstractions of connection, cyclicity, and death. Glenn's background is in ethnography, and her removed evenness of tone, which could have seemed clinical, here reassures the reader with its empathic solidity. Her first and second person narration feel both intimate and cautious, considering some of her explosive subject matter, like the true story of FBI investigators severing the hands of murdered M'ikm'aq woman Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Glenn shifts lightly and cleanly from physical and emotional detail to broader images and ideas. Addressing the title object in "Smooth Rock on Laurencetown Beach," she muses "memory / like you, is shucked from mystery, / rests snug in my hand." The changing moon is one of Glenn's recurrent images, her nod to a vaster perspective of time. Glenn's own perspective occasionally takes a wry turn into gallows humour, as in "Birthday in Middle Age," where she harrumphs, "So, each lacy card a shovel." Combustion is a surprising title for so steady and compassionate an exploration of what it means to watch and be watched. "The heart is a hymnal," writes Glenn, and indeed her collection is also something brave, to be read and sung.

--Jane Henderson

Isolated: Two Plays
Greg MacArthur
Coach House: Toronto, 2007.

Get Away and Recovery, the two plays contained in this collection, have a lot in common. Both storylines feature a nebulous epidemic—in Get Away, it's apathy and discontentment, in Recovery it's a vague, nameless drug— that engulfs society and leaves MacArthur's characters huddled on the outskirts, in outposts they like to imagine they've chosen themselves. Macarthur's characters, despite their slightly surreal surroundings, feel real, as do their interactions with each other. Garbo and Henry are a pair of teenage vagabonds; Leroy is a snotty Dutch teenager; David is a hopeful middle-aged man whose loneliness leads him to desperate acts. “What do they say?” is a recurrent line in both plays, an appeal to old adages and folk wisdom, neither of which can be marshaled to offer the characters much more than temporary comfort. Both stories play with the idea of numbness, and while both storylines unspool towards events that should provoke an emotional reaction, these stories occur in a kind of frozenness that makes them difficult to connect to. It's hard for readers to feel invested in characters who don't seem invested in themselves.

--Linda Besner

January Books

Stuart Neatby — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 05:23:38 +0000

New works by Dixon, Barlow, Moure, and Murray

The Girls Who Saw Everything
Sean Dixon
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2007

The premise is appealing: the members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club will act out The Epic of Gilgamesh. Not everyone who takes part is aware they’ve been given a role. And there’s a robot involved.
What happens when the Luna Cabal attempt to re-enact this epic poem is set alongside Runner Coghill’s story (parents and twin sister dead, surviving little brother) in the detailed account of two members of the Cabal. Because of this meta-fictional approach, the characters seem real and unreal, mature and immature. A quest, a parody, a mildly funny commentary on CanLit, as well as an earnest work of fiction, the book hovers between story and literary feat. Though Dixom draws clever parallels, from mentions of In the Skin of a Lion, which begins with an epitaph from Gilgamesh, to Fall on Your Knees, which examines the bond between sisters, this story’s construction may be too ambitious. The dualities add up to this human notion: “If you happen to walk past a room full of people in mourning, you should probably join them because they’re probably lonely.”

--Sheryda Warrener

Abode of Love: Growing Up in a Messianic Cult
Kate Barlow
Gooselane Press; Fredericton, 2006.

The opening chapters of Kate Barlow’s memoir read deceptively like C.S. Lewis. There are rich descriptions of aged aunts and childhood hijinx—climbing roofs and pilfering through drawers. You half expect the bored protagonist, on holiday from boarding school, to stumble across an old wardrobe. There certainly is a closet in the household, but instead of Narnia, Barlow discovers the remnants of her grandfather’s failed utopia, a messianic cult. Barlow’s childhood home was also know as “Agapemone,” an abode of love where aristocrats could await the resurrection, having relinquished their possessions to the group coffers. Scandals emerged when Barlow’s grandfather, who claimed to be a Messiah, took a “spiritual wife,” in addition to his legal spouse. Barlow skillfully juxtaposes slices of family life with the broader history of the cult. The information, however, is laid out in snatches that the reader slowly pieces together, as did Barlow herself. It’s a clever device, but it sometimes slows the pace unnecessarily. The level of analysis is faithful to Barlow’s age at the time, but this means a more adult critical examination is occasionally lacking.

--Claire Tacon

O Cadoiro
by Erín Moure
House of Anansi Press (Toronto, 2007)

O Cadoiro is a book of love poetry. Hard love. The unrequited kind. Moure writes, "I want to speak no ill of love / becomes I am rightly afraid of it." Further, she writes, "(my heart missing you / its own beast loses heart)." The poems in O Cadoiro are based on medieval Iberian lyric. Often they are presented as translations of Galician and Portuguese songs, but they are very much the "fount" of Moure's invention. In this book, she is consumed by language's failure to articulate emotional experience, by "...the nub of lyric poetry: that one thing can stand for another. Not as metaphor...but that concrete experience can distill to 'mere figure' or 'basal significant'." Moure tries formal structure, lists, concrete poetry. She mixes French, Galician, Portuguese, English. Throughout, she calls on the reader to witness her failure—which, it seems, is the point. She writes, "Where the lyric fails me, the poem." And asks: "Can you follow me in the markings we call / words through such liquidity?" In O Cadoiro, Erín Moure tells reader to suspend their disbelief, for, as she writes, "though poems recuperate, they do not solve."
--Ben Hart

The Rush to Here
George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007

This new collection of poems from George Murray contains something truly new; he has written a series of sonnets using an entirely novel kind of rhyme. It sounds unlikely, but the results more than justify the flouting of convention. The rhymes are sometimes based on sound (as in homophones), but more often centered around meaning – synonyms, antonyms, association, etc. To illustrate from a randomly chosen sonnet, “Lullaby”: Murray rhymes ‘utmost’ with ‘paramount,’ ‘receive’ with ‘tuned’ (think radios), ‘signal’ with ‘pulse,’ ‘light’ with ‘dawn,’ ‘time’ with ‘ancestor,’ ‘does’ with ‘execute,’ and ‘rage’ with ‘blaze.’ While some writers might be tempted to let the innovation carry the collection, hoping for an audience enamoured of formal poetry, Murray takes the time to craft each poem into something thought-provoking and beautiful, so that a reader unfamiliar with sonnets might still be enthralled. In terms of subject matter, Murray covers a lot of ground – from reflections on parenthood to the implications of quantum physics, from the sex lives of the Devil and the Greek gods to the annoyance of home renovations. The Rush to Here is worth rushing out for.

--Matthew J. Trafford

August Books

hillarybain — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:59:52 +0000

New works by Rhodes, Lebowitz, Henderson, and Nickel

The Bindery
Shane Rhodes
NeWest Press: Edmonton, 2007.

This third collection by Shane Rhodes is a declaration, a questioning, a conversation, and a language lesson, all rendered in the strong and unrelenting voice he established in his previous two books. The range of form is impressive: compare the contemplative open field style of “Portrait,” which examines memory and myth through the recollection of family figures and the national history of oppressive deceit, to the prose poems chronicling travels in Mexico, which celebrate foreign culture as seen through the eyes of the traveller. Compare again to the list poems “On Travel” and “To Elizabeth Bishop.” In each case, Rhodes marries form and content seamlessly. The eponymous “The Bindery”-- alternately funny, moving, and smart, this is Rhodes at his best-- uses original verse and found items (overheard snippets of conversation, literary quotations, signage, photographs) to create a constellation of images and moments. It's the poet who ‘binds’ all the pieces together – both in “The Bindery” as a poem and The Bindery as a collection – thus allowing for dialogue between the individual elements, the infusion of meaning, and a powerful overall effect.

--Matthew J. Trafford

Hannus
Rachel Lebowitz
Pedlar Press, 2007.

Lebowitz's first book is a creative biography of her great-grandmother, suffragist Ida Hannus, who moved to a Finnish socialist commune on the BC coast in 1901. The questions "what happened?" and "what was it like?" are answered from a range of documented and imagined perspectives. These voices blur, sometimes to the point of confusion. Hannus' mixed form includes photos, newspaper clippings, diary excerpts, interview quotations, Finnish literature, and government documents, into which
Lebowitz inserts poetic and prose commentary. The resulting collage is questioning, tender, and surprisingly reluctant to present or imagine its characters' personalities. One of the most effective poems is the simple "Grocery Shopping." It describes how "he launched the craft / pushed the boat into the waves . . . / We waited. / He returned with a lap organ. / 'But music,' he said, 'feeds our souls.'” The poem exemplifies Lebowitz' commitment to incorporating external sources, taking its first verse from a Finnish folk poem. Also, its eloquent placement after a section on suffering in the commune allows its unnamed characters both to represent the community, and to imply the developing relationship between Hannus and her partner. It's these compelling personal tensions which seem to be lacking in the work as a whole.

--Jane Henderson

yesno
Dennis Lee
Anansi: Toronto, 2007.

In yesno, Dennis Lee returns to the theme he considered in Un: the future of planet earth. These poems examine how the simultaneous forces of hope and pessimism interact to create an ethic that Lee sums up as "yesno." This is a new kind of eco-poetry. It rebukes and encourages in the same breath. In "dopey," Lee even issues a call to arms: "Dopey & grumpy & doc, just / truckin along – / here come chorale; / mind to the / grindstone, ear to the plough. / Hi- / hoein along with a song: / What home but here? Whose grubby hands but ours?" These poems, however serious in intent, are playful. Lee pairs words in nonsensical ways. He pays strange and wonderful attention to rhythm. In "forgi-", a poem about unforgivable acts, Lee scats, "blindblabbing our / gobshut, our / gutted-by-greenslag, our undisad- / missable burden". In "DNA", Lee writes, "No DNA for the crunch, we got / neural nothing. / No yesno receptors; no template for cosmochaos." In yesno, Lee seems intent on creating just that—a template. A means, as he writes in the title poem, to "habitate crossbeing. / To ride both reals at once."

--Ben Hart

Domain
Barbara Nickel
Anansi: Toronto, 2007.

Nickel has the ear of a violinist as well as a poet, and there is a trained lightness to her sense of the line and the phrase. Nickel uses parts of a house-- “Master Bedroom,” “Girls' Room,” “Living Room,” etc—as her section headings, and the most surprising and satisfying of her formal tricks is to begin each of these sections with a poem whose first line repeats the last line of the previous section's initial poem. These linked verses feel like generations of a family, each borrowing a starting point and then veering off somewhere new. The section on Catherine the Great contains the fierce and dreamy poem, “Woman on a White Horse,” in which the empress is a presence in a small Saskatchewan town: “She came from a blue half-light./ She was snow spun high off a drift/ by the wind, woman on a white horse/ on my way to school—there!--/ see her hair, sabre, a glitter in the air/cast orange by the lights of the arena.” The warlike figure of Catherine saves the collection from running too close to sentimentality in its domestic scope, and Nickel's precision does the rest.

--Linda Besner

June Books

hillarybain — Sun, 27 May 2007 16:33:04 +0000

A review of <em>Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid</em>

Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid
Simon Armitage
Anansi: Toronto, 2007.

Armitage's eleventh poetry collection first came out in Britain in 2006, where it was promptly shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Anansi's edition of this book marks Armitage's first Canadian publication; here's hoping it'll bring a wider audience into contact with one of England's greats.

The full range of Armitage's talents is on display in this work. He is at turns prophetic (“A Vision” claims that “the future was a beautiful place, once”) and historical (“The Bayeux Tapestry” is told in the ruthless, exhausted voice of William the Conqueror). He can be tender, as in a trio of quiet, elegiac poems in the voice of a son to a dead father. He can write sonnets that gently mock the irrelevance of both aging squeegee kids (“The Clown Punk”) and poetry itself (“Poetry”); in the latter, the writer's chosen genre is likened to an amazing but sadly overlooked ornamental clock hidden away in Wells Cathedral. Most memorably, Armitage can be funny. His humour is wry and bleak, and never cheap, even with the four-letter words and scatological references. In “The Six Comeuppances,” a man in the throes of an epic mid-life crisis says: “I was all over the place, like the shit / of a mad person.” A punchier simile is hard to find outside the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel.

Armitage takes one of poetry's riskier gambles; instead of using an elevated diction to make poetry out of small things, Armitage takes large, sometimes ambiguous and unsettling ideas and serves them straight up. Aside from some colourful slang new to these eyes (notably: “hoik” and “shonky”), all of Armitage's words come from familiar territory, and you won't catch him relying on polysyllables or fancy word choice to get at his themes. The brand of English here is warm and solid and reassuringly unpretty. Reading these poems, you can almost hear them pronounced in the round, lackadaisical accent of Armitage's native Yorkshire. This is most true in a suite of poems called “Sympathy” (quite possibly inspired by his stint as a probation officer in the 80s, before he became a full-time poet). Each part tells the story of a “case”—some unfortunate victim of violence, economic hardship, or plain old bad luck—and reiterates it through the voice of the perpetrator, in full-blown accent: “Anyways, on t'morning after t'party, / I trogs downstairs, still bolloxed, and gives t'pantry / t'Hans Blix, lookin' for brain-numbin' drugs.” The voices are vengeful, regretful, and above all, human; despite belonging to society's 'misfits', they cut straight to the reader's sympathy.

This isn't to suggest there isn't plenty of bold, inventive language here—there is. In more than one place, Armitage employs slant rhyme to push slightly unnerving poems over the edge into eerie, trading on that sense of something not quite right. In “The Perverts,” a creepy, insinuating quatrain:

We cornered one coming out of the gym.
Now everyone feels a whole lot better.
We held a buttercup under his chin,
made him kneel, asked him if he liked butter.

Armitage has been called the Philip Larkin of his generation; brief, haunting lines like these make this conparison seem particularly apt.

Mid-way through the book, the reader comes across “Surtsey,” an arresting pair of poems. The first, “Genesis,” riffs on an island formed off the coast of Iceland by volcanic activity in 1963— also, we're told, the year of the poet's birth. Armitage recounts the rapid development of an ecosystem as observed by avid scientists: “And the liquid stone / had barely set when a microbe blew in, / press-ganged by a wind squeezed out of the west[.]” Eventually this new land gets its own “brainless” deity, in the form of a fishing float washed up onshore. The creation of life, and of myths, is on fast-forward in this accelerated, artifice-heavy world. In the companion poem, “Where Are They Now?” the island is a haven for “a waist-high mob” of forgotten child stars and whiz kids, among whom the poet feels, oddly, at home.

Tyrannosaurus Rex includes a sample of Armitage's ambitious translations—portions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Odyssey bookend the volume, and they're surprisingly fresh for two of the most dreaded college literature class staples. If the excerpts are any indication, Armitage has breathed new life into Odysseus' swagger (“And I was the last man to escape, suspended beneath / the cockiest ram of the lot”), and infused Sir Gawain's gore with appropriately English matter-of-factness (“his bloody neck still bled”). Whether interpreting old work or creating what's new, Armitage never backs away from what's hard to hear, or tell.

Rex

May Books

dru — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:40:58 +0000

Plays by Amiel Gladstone, poems by Susan Elmslie, Tanya Chapman's King, and Creamsicle Stick Shivs by John Stiles

Hippies and Bolsheviks (and other plays)
Amiel Gladstone
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2007

It’s refreshing to read drama with a minimalist aesthetic in this era of over-used pyrotechnics and arty projections. A pity, then, that the minimalism here extends to plot and character development. What is interesting and successful about these plays, however, is Gladstone's play with time: each play is like a closed tank in which the events of the characters’ lives slosh back and forth between the present and the past, resulting in something rhythmical and cyclic. Lena’s Car, a short one-woman show, takes place solely in the front seat of a car, but moves from a crumbling marriage in the present to a past crisis of innocence lost. The Wedding Pool, by far the most ambitious, speculates on what might happen when three unhappily single friends decide to contribute $50 per month to a pool, to be collected by the first one to get married. The title play, Hippies and Bolsheviks, examines the consequences of free love through an unlikely love triangle in 1960’s Vancouver. Together, these three plays make a lively and entertaining read.

--Matthew J. Trafford

I, Nadja, and Other Poems
Susan Elmslie
Brick Books: Toronto, 2006

One of the first things to notice about this collection is how sensitively juxtaposed the poems are. The first poem, “Pomegranate,” though unrelated to “Felicity,” the second, sets up the tone so well that when we reach the phrase, “peerless alexandrine,” it sounds like an unfamiliar tropical fruit. Elmslie moves back and forth here between the sensuous and the hilarious, from “collarbones, knobs of the locked armoire of his heart,” to “rapping out blurbs a la Don Pardo/ for unlikely TV pilots:/ She's a hard-nosed Wall Street lawyer;/ He's a displaced Eskimo woman. Together/ they're Fishing for Clues.” The book's five sections focus around a few specific areas of concern: “femininity,” violence against women, physical objects, and illness all pique Elmslie's poetic interest. Although the “Nadja” poems—a suite of poems exploring the real character of the Nadja on whom Andre Breton's novel is based— are meant as the book's centrepiece, and while they bring the historical context of Elmslie's thinking more sharply into focus, I actually preferred the sections in which Elmslie speaks in her own voice. It's an intelligent and original one.

--Linda Besner

King
Tanya Chapman
Coach House: Toronto, 2006

This is a strange and endearing book. The protagonist, who calls herself Hazel, is a girl from an upper- middle class family who has moved to a trailer park and shacked up with King, the eponymous mixed-up rock-star-cum-layabout she's fallen in love with. It both is and isn't the usual story of a woman living in a trailer park and being abused by her beer-swilling partner; although a beer bottle does at one point bounce off Hazel's head, King has none of the melodrama you might expect. Hazel, who narrates, does so with an amiable fuzziness that makes her sound always slightly buzzed . She tells us about the flower seeds she's scattered over the grass around her trailer—“You have to walk right through the flowers to get to the door—I never thought of a path”—and the fearlessness that makes King so special—“King's very existence would terrify my dad and my dad's dad and a hundred dads before them.” The split, when it comes, is remarkably understated and spoils none of the sweetness of the book's first half. Though the story is simple and somewhat repetitively structured, Hazel is worth getting to know.

--Linda Besner

Creamsicle Stick Shivs
John Stiles
Insomniac Press
2006

Stiles' second poetry collection travels from Nova Scotia to England by way of Toronto, and its three sections reflect these phases. Stiles delights in dialect, humour, and narrative and uses colloquialisms to put poetry in the mouths of those who wouldn't call it such, like the rogue romantic begging: “But Jesus girl, wouldja take off / yer goddamned top en let that stunning church of a tit / fall out yer blouse, so we can turn our heads en waltz / like two goddamned lovestruck swans cross the rooftop / in this glorious Halifax snowstorm?” Constantly self-satirizing, Stiles is cheeky, neurotic and occasionally poignant as in “Felt Like Cryin,” or “Oh, About the Money.” His narrators make characters and caricatures of those around them, be they strangers, coworkers, church fellows, or devoted life partners, and the satiric humour is well supported by soundplay. The richest stories and language play are in the first section, Halifax Snowstorm, and for this alone the collection deserves attention. Frequent shifts of person, usually from first to second, mostly work well to involve the reader and multiply perspectives, but can occasionally blur the story to confusion.

-- Jane Henderson