Susan Briscoe’s poetry is one of telling details, subtle hints and indications. The Crow’s Vow, her first collection, follows the slow breakup of a marriage as it is reflected in the passage of the seasons around the couple’s cabin in the woods. What most readers in our story-based culture would expect to make up the central plot – the scenes from the marriage – is reduced to a hazy, thinly evoked background, while what normally would comprise the background becomes the poet’s chief focus: the trees, the garden, the foxes and mice, and hints of happiness, resentment and tensions as projected by her states of mind. More →
yet spruce almost black
against the whitest greys.
We wake to a field mouse,
soft brown fur and clean white belly.
I could skin the whole family,
stitch pretty mittens.
Ed. note: This is supplementary material for this review in The Rover. Briscoe's collection is comprised of ten-line poems that go untitled -- except in the table of contents, where they are indicated with first lines between quotations.
Angela Hibbs’ poetry is one of leaping semblances, wry cleverness, and urgent, dark confessions. Wanton, her second book, is actually two lengthy chapbooks sewn together: the first, a pastiche of dark, edgy poems mostly concerning an ill-fated love or oppressive father, the second, a long series of linked verses concerning unseemly goings-on in an imaginary [...]More →
The bright yellow paint is chipping.
The inmates do not share the time of day
or even the most casual of glances.
We've less to speak of
than you can imagine.
The clock is the book most often referred to.
The Reader's Digest books
may well be rigged. We swallow pills
and eight cups of water
and three square meals
from clock-shaped plates
with hour and minute hands for fork and knife and clatter
a little too loudly.
We observe the trolley
enter at eight, twelve and five.
Turns are taken
at bemoaning the chill
the food caught on the journey
from a kitchen we've never seen.
Within the reserved room
is the room to which our smoking
is reserved. Weeping is welcome everywhere.
I was told he was working on a book called E=9,
the hopelessness of its completion
was grounds for his admission.
My ingrateful dozing through breakfast
makes them hope
I'll vacate soon.
Have been ridiculously busy the last couple of weeks -- making and marking exams, doing an extensive translation, and helping my mother move into a new condo. I also wrote this review, which appeared this weekend in The Rover. It looks like, though, I've freed up some time at least for the time being (non-being?)... so expect a run of more frequent posts.
Letters to a Stranger, by Thomas James, Graywolf Press
by Brian Campbell
21.03.2010
In January, 1974, Tomas Edward Bojeski, aka Thomas James, put an end to his life by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. He was only twenty-seven, and had just published his first book, Letters to a Stranger, which would receive one disdainful review describing him as a “pale Plath.” But Letters would acquire [...] More →
In the same issue of the MRB, a review by yours truly of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy by Yves Engler. This book ended up being shortlisted for the QWF non-fiction award. For those interested in the Canada's international behind-the-scenes machinations -- and they are non too pleasant look at -- this one is an eye-opener.
Monday, November 16, 2009
My review of Sina Queyras' Expresswayis up at The Rover. It's been nominated for the GG; tomorrow we'll find out if it's a winner. If she wins, I feel it'll be richly deserved, although not having read any of the other books on the short list, I can't claim this to be an unbiased opinion.
Some weeks ago, I posted Creeley's poem, "Sad Walk", from his posthumous collection, On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay; I also referred to it in my Rover review on that title. I just got a comment from the editor Sirena, a literary magazine, filling me in on what spurred that particular poem, which it pleases me to post here:
So that you know the context of this poem: when we were preparing a special issue of Sirena: Poetry, Art and Criticism, in honor of Bob Zieff (composer of many of the pieces played by Chet Baker), we sent Robert Creeley the music score of Zieff’s “Sad Walk”, along with a CD containing five variations of the same piece, and asked Robert to write a poem in reaction to what he heard; Creeley’s “Sad Walk” is what came out of it.
My review of Shannon Stewart's Penny Dreadful and Phil Hall's White Porcupine is up at The Rover:
With the momentous recent political and economic news, it maybe all too easy to overlook what Ezra Pound called the “news that stays news.” Poetry has never pretended to be breaking news, but well executed, it can revive old verities with an immediacy that surpasses any reportage à la CNN.Read on…
Under a Holstein coat teats drip perpetual maternity. In other lands I am worshipped, painted, wrapped in silk. Not stupid at all, but Bovine – Mother of Milk.
II. Slut
Because I fuck and fuck well. Because one is never enough. Because I prefer not to wear undergarments or keep the prim protocols of ladyhood. Yeah, I’m a slut. No if, and or – Nice butt!
III. Cunt
This grunt of a word you cast at the end of your line. Look what comes up from the sea; purple, wet and manifold. Get down on your knees and kiss it better.
IV. Bitch
If she’s strong, smart, thin, vocal, rich – she turns canine, all paws and itch. Not so long ago, burned as a witch.
V. Whore
You tell me what isn’t for sale. I’m one letter away from whole. Take that R and rent yourself a rope. See what’s happy when life’s lost hope.
-- Shannon Stewart, Penny Dreadful
Me & Morisseau were both abused as kids both ran by rotgut then sang by hand of a Canada that deplorably survives high in the clawed glistening air
our giant muskrat soul kept falling apart into butchered townships aflame with primal colour & the spit of the grease was the shared song of the brush & the pen slicing through forgiveness
-- Phil Hall, from White Porcupine
Norval Morisseau is one of Canada's great aboriginal artists... for more on his art, here's a link.
NB, this is supplementary material for a review of Shannon Stewart's Penny Dreadful and Phil Hall's White Porcupine, soon to be posted in The Rover. My compliments to Shannon Stewart and Signal Editions (imprint of Véhicule Press), and Phil Hall and Book Thug.
A prose poem of mine got published yesterday in Eclectica. This one is also forthcoming in my collection, Passenger Flight, due out in April. The first draft I wrote quite a few years ago -- in fact, I now realize, almost two decades. I revised it just months ago. You can read more about what went into that poem by clicking on my byline.
AS EARLY AS 1807, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH LAMENTED, “The world is too much with us.” Now it is always with us, in its richness and calamity; we can’t get away from it; frequently overwhelmed by sheer superabundance, we can feel paradoxically diminished, cut loose, cut off. Read on…
Tuesday, November 11 at 8 pm Poetry Plus, Arts Cafe, 201 Fairmount W. (corner of Esplanade), Montreal
John Fretz, the organizer, just contacted me with the actual order of featured writers that evening:
Julie Mahfood Brian Campbell Carolyn Marie Souaid Jocelyne Dubois, launching her chapbook Hot Summer Night (Sky of Ink Press, 2008) Steven Manners Perri Ravon (open mike) Music, etc.
On stilts in the metro of a Friday
morning, he plays to no one but the station’s
dally: the piper draws us out.
We scatter asunder our cloaks, our half
hearted aubades, and give over our
mourning to play with the station’s
indoor birds, blurs of yellow and red
scattered asunder. He wields the half-cloaked
promise of foil balloons, their silver sides
winking light: the piper draws us on.
The tune he plays is not yet invented.
A heart’s murmur, it doesn’t offer
the name of this mountain,
nor does it pledge return in silver-sided balloons
drawn by birds of red, yellow.
We have chiselled ourselves,
with grief no one wanted,
like fingernails or glaciers over
this mountain we called nameless.
We gnashed our way across jealousy,
as if we could claim birds, claim red,
claim yellow. And the piper brings us out
from the mountain he scattered us under.
With his fingers of silver he cracks
the rock where the light gets in and we follow
on stilts from the metro the Friday
on the eve of return to Hamelin.
-- a poem I very much liked in Katia Grubisic’s What if red ran out. Part of the reason may be very personal: I, and many Montrealers, have seen this man who, dressed in rainbow colours and standing on tall stilts (and wearing extra-long flowing pants to cover those stilts, and maintain a wondrous illusion), played the flute in the Metro, silver balloons floating in the air beside him. What a beautiful evocation of this memory! (Why didn’t I write a poem about him???) Notice the pantoum-like repetition of "birds", “yellow and red”, “scattered asunder/under”, variations of "silver" and “silver-sided”, “stilts”, “metro”, "mountain", "draws us out" , all interlaced in a soothing musical fugue.
This is very much a Montreal poem – Montreal, like Hamelin, has its mountain (see here to read up on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the legend which, of course, very much informs this poem), and that man epitomizes a certain Montreal verve and style (one need only think also of Cirque du Soleil), shared perhaps only with Quebec City and Paris.
If I have any criticism, it’s that the writer dwells on the “we” too long. If I were to revise this poem, I would possibly strike out
We gnashed our way across jealousy, etc.
… and maybe work in the reiteration of colourful birds somehow else. The reasons? She already refers to "giving over our mourning" to the piper; I'm not sure the jealousy she speaks of applies; besides, I want to go back immediately to the flute man on stilts! Readers of this blog might know how allergic I am to this indefinite "we" – and here, too, as so often happens in that person, the writer pontificates just a bit too much.
Be that as it may, it’s still a remarkable poem.
I wonder where that man is now? I never see him anymore. I also don’t take the Metro nearly as much as I used to. In any case, here he is, in this poem.
NB, this is supplementary material to a review of Katia Grubisic’s What if red ran out and David O’Meara’s Noble Gas, Penny Black, soon to be posted in The Rover. My compliments to Katia Grubisic and to Goose Lane Editions.
