tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57052121290436040022024-03-14T01:22:05.876-07:00Brian PalmuPoetry, Fiction, and (occasionally) non-fiction reviews, every Friday.Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.comBlogger504125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-706134028070712192020-03-14T12:30:00.000-07:002020-03-14T12:30:19.180-07:00Another HiatusRegular or casual readers of this blog, I've decided to take another indefinite hiatus. I have several competing writing interests on the go, and despite the technological wizardry our excited futurists provide, none have yet managed to move the diurnal needle from 24 hours to, say, 24:30. Thank you all for reading, and many blessings.Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-53727816281965973492020-03-06T00:16:00.001-08:002020-03-06T00:16:25.582-08:00Phoebe Wang’s Admission Requirements<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
A. E. Housman, in his poetry, was consistently despondent. That
emotional tenor was balanced wonderfully by a savvy musicality that
acted as bouyant counterpoint. No such luck while reading Phoebe Wang’s
collection of poetry,
<i>Admission Requirements</i>. The despondency on display in poem after
poem over the course of one hundred pages is unrelieved by any variation
in alternative mood and, more importantly, by any prosodic stickiness.
The words evaporate.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
Another reason these poems don’t remain with the reader is the narrative
verbosity. That phrase may sound redundant. After all, narrative tends
toward explication, plentiful description including mundane detail, and a
pile-up of supporting list-like metaphors,
extended or ragged. But Wang’s efforts have the demerits of bad
narration in verse: prosiness without vivid or arresting .... well,
stories.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
A familiar – indeed, insistent – approach is to lay out a desultory
geographical scene, one often static, though ostensibly real, as in a
Russian peasant painting composed in March. A building, unpeopled, sits
darkly by a river, there’s a forbidding escarpment,
and the poet/narrator ends the consideration with a bleak-but-fuzzy
takeaway: “I long to lie atop rapids/that can outrun change, lashed/to
that promise of future returns.”; “no matter how far we trudge/on the
tide flats, that temporary country,/the rooms we
covet remain cut off.”; “There’s no end to the work I began
alone/making meaning where there’s none.” The final-lines quote from the
last citation is in “The Pre-Existing Structures”, a particularly dour
poem which also contains, “I look for some great/design,
and find only carillon regularity”. I could always use some carillon
regularity, or, more specifically, carillon transcendence. But then
whatever we hear is a reflection of our current emotional state, indeed
our spiritual condition. I immediately recalled
Hart Crane’s great poem, “The Broken Tower”, which contains these
brilliant lines: “shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway/Antiphonal
carillons launched before/The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s
ray?”.<span>
</span>One immediately feels Crane’s polyvocal pain and joy, his wise
encapsulations of different moods and flavours. With Wang, even a
carillon is flat, affectless. And the language enhances that state.
Contrast Crane’s “shadows” with – again, in this poem
– “ Here shadows aren’t perturbed/by questions of their source and
agency”. The nouns come from a numbing sociological primer. The final
line from Wang’s final lines also “make an inadvertent memory universal
and prescriptive”, to quote Mary Kinzie’s warning
on the dangers of assumptive transference.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
Despite the above aversions, I like the gambit Wang shows of using
geography, especially architecture, as a means of tracking emotion. But
the metaphorical equivalents are poorly, even haphazardly, handled. (The
sky is, in different poems and by turns, a “grey
parachute”, a “split screen”, and an “allotment”.) </div>
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</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
It’s usually a mug’s game to guess future talent based on book one, but Wang’ll
have to harness the nuts and bolts of craft before having a chance at
transmitting any aesthetic wonder from her interesting approach.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
</div>
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-23972484970702990102020-02-28T00:47:00.000-08:002020-02-28T00:47:07.865-08:00Alden Nowlan's Collected Poems<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="Standard">
In the past few years, as many young and not-so-young poets
exhibit their narcissistic doldrums or ideological accusations in volume after
volume of insufferable verse, it's timely – and about time – that Alden
Nowlen's <i>Collected Poems </i>(2017) arrives 34 years after his death.
Biographically and aesthetically dense, editor Brian Bartlett's lengthy
introduction takes pains to present Nowlan's personality, life, and poetry in
human terms, whether the concerns are spiritual or social. He also lays out the
Collected in the appropriate manner: all of Nowlan's volumes are titled in the
index, and appear in chronological order, against the (sometimes operable) maddening
tack of presenting a Collected thematically.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Nowlan has sometimes been accused of composing off-hand
homilies and anecdotes lacking prosodic sophistication. Though Nowlan at his
worst is, at times, indeed indicted on that count (the man simply wrote too
much, and there's nothing like a doorstopper Collected to bring that point
home), his seemingly dashed-off personal studies often reveal much more than a
fleeting first reading may lead a reader to see. For every “Letter to a Young
Friend”, in which “[a]n aging freak,/for whom there was no choice, wishes you
strength/to bear it should you find that which you seek”, there are many more
succinct, emotionally devastating, direct entries like “The Factory Worker's
Poem” where “I am as limp as a puppet/from which the ventriloquist/has
withdrawn his hand” or fearless investigations into personal weakness from
“Hide and Seek” wherein</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
if I believed</div>
<div class="Standard">
in God</div>
<div class="Standard">
would ask</div>
<div class="Standard">
him to</div>
<div class="Standard">
forgive me</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
for being one</div>
<div class="Standard">
of those</div>
<div class="Standard">
who know</div>
<div class="Standard">
how to hide.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Another misconception, by some at least, is that Nowlan's
unruly personality spilled over into his poetry so that not only wouldn't he
write a more or less 'accomplished' poem, but that he couldn't. Here's a
wonderful sonnet, perfect in its execution, and wise in its understanding of
others, and oneself in relation to those others. This is “Golf”, in full:</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
My friends believe in golf, address the ball,</div>
<div class="Standard">
however bent, to an appointed place.</div>
<div class="Standard">
Newtonians, convinced no orb can fall</div>
<div class="Standard">
out of the numbered course of time and space.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
But I, from clumsiness or pity, drive</div>
<div class="Standard">
balls out of bounds and into woods and traps,</div>
<div class="Standard">
my knees and wrists vindictive in their love</div>
<div class="Standard">
for dark and tangled places not on maps.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
“Golf's not your game,” they say. But I persist.</div>
<div class="Standard">
“Next one goes straight ...” I promise. Oh, they're fooled</div>
<div class="Standard">
right cunningly by my secretive wrist</div>
<div class="Standard">
that treacherously lets the world go wild.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Let them attack the green. As for myself,</div>
<div class="Standard">
I pitch into the darkness, like a wolf.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
There are too many facets of Nowlan's poetry, too much
diverse subject matter, too many astonishing nuances and ambiguities within
lines of poems – indeed, within phrases and even words – to do justice to them
in a short review of a Collected by a major poet, but the beauty of Nowlan's <i>Collected
Poems</i> is that we now have that evidence in a one-stop book which, at least
for this reader, deepens and stamps with awe the experience each time the poems
are returned to.</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-12256053095554659702020-02-21T03:33:00.000-08:002020-02-21T03:44:14.791-08:00I Tweet, Therefore I AmFor some, life is most vividly experienced in the pages of a book, or, to update the gathering repository, on the metastatic lucubrations of the interweb. Take the backlash on poetry reviewers.<br />
<br />
Jacob McArthur Mooney, a subdued contributor in the tempest-in-a-shot-glass backs-and-forths over a decade ago during the arguments re negative reviewing, has, last week, scattered his twitter buckshot about like Rooster Cogburn coming off a three-day bender while attempting to ride a bronco down a sixty degree rockstrewn wet creekbed in interlocking shade and chasing a single hare. This reaction to his reaction of a reaction of two reviews proceeds into the deep canyons and crevices of twitter's deep web of stertorous borborygmi, exploding dragonflies, and cloudy oysters disguised as literary argument.<br />
<br />
The origin for this Chinese puzzle is Alden Nowlan's <i>Collected Poems</i>, released in 2017. Shane Neilson wrote an essay-response to two of the resulting reviews, one each by Trevor Cook and Richard Kelly Kemick. This appeared, with the title "We Shall Know You By Your Reviews", in the Miramichi Reader, and is available for perusal online. In it, Neilson takes to task each reviewer for what he calls the sins of a new reviewing phenomenon, the moral scolding by New White Male, whose response is always through the lens of the supposed power imbalance which inheres with the evil White patriarchy. Neilson is singing to the choir here as to this reviewer's stance, though, before turning to Mooney, I'll take minor issue with the label in Neilson's premise: the New White Male is not always New, not always White, and not always Male. Some now forgotten female academic waited, gutlessly, until Irving Layton was addled in his eighties before skewering him in a particularly petty, poetically ignorant, illogical, stumbling, personality-driven, exhaustive review of his entire corpus. There were many others, but that takes care of parts 1 and 3. As for 2, Mooney's own champion as counter-example to Nowlan (gawd, I can't believe I'm juxtaposing these names), Gwen Benaway (I'll come back to his twitterism later) covers that, along with, lately, 3. Now to the tweets.<br />
<br />
“You might be as pleased as I was to learn this was the preamble to a defence of Alden Nowlan against a reviewer who noted he was problematic in 2019. It's like a Rex Murphy column's comment thread came to life and turned its attentions on Canlit.” -- JMM<br />
<br />
Anyone not well-versed and up-to-speed on the tactics of progressive priests would obviously be baffled by the simile. Remember, Neilson is critiquing the two reviewers, Cook and Kemick. There are many ways to approach a review of the prodigous output of a major and complex Canadian poet, but Cook and Kemick both saw fit to emphasize Nowlan's “latent chauvinism” (Kemick's words), and “vulgar content” (Cook's words). In other words, what Mooney slyly doesn't tell his followers is that identity politics were introduced methodically into the springboard and guts of the review. A reviewer commenting on these reviews would be remiss and cowardly if he or she <i>didn't</i> bring up the political slant. But when you're serenly confident that your side has not only won the argument vis-a-vis moral purity vs hidebound 'soft' racism, sexism, or the other ten or so reflexive -isms and -phobes, there's no need to even entertain flat out contradictions, lies, and spiritual hypocrisies prevalent in that 'approach without reproach'. Even more baffling is this facile confidence when what we're discussing is the complexities of a worthy poet, where quality is almost always tied up in ambiguities, ambivalencies, and, most certainly, moral shortcomings. (We'll leave aside poetic personae, though some wokesters are so ideologically brainwashed or cynically power-mad, they'll even leap on those fictions as evidence of evilthink.) It's a testament to Nowlan that he had the guts to reveal his inner life honestly, however unfashionably and unsexy it unfolded. But poets now must either take on the roles of saints, or present as victims who would certainly be saints if it wasn't for the cis-gendered, heteronormative, White patriarchal colonial male.<br />
<br />
<br />
“Stuff like this is a symptom of the decline in paid poetry reviewing. Who, demographically, has yime to write 1000 word reviews of 40-year-old Alden Nowlan poems for no-ish money? What are their aesthetics and politics? Do they fear the contemporary? What axes do they grind? Etc.” -- JMM<br />
<br />
At a time, and increasingly so, when poets are desperate to get any reviews of their poetry at all, even embarrassing ones in a huge backlog of 100% guaranteed raves from Michael Dennis, the few intrepid souls – and Neilson is certainly among them – who take significant time out of their busy lives to think and write creatively and honestly about <i>all kinds</i> of poetry releases, often for free, should be afforded, if grudging respect or thoughtful debate is too much to ask for, at least silence. Most poets cry about not getting reviewed. What they really mean is that (in most cases) there were one or two reviews (and what more can you hope for when book publication far outstrips demand?), and the reviewer didn't recognize their obvious brilliance sufficiently. <br />
You may notice, dear reader, that I've ceased to spend any time on Neilson's essay, or the words of the two original reviewers, or of Nowlan himself. That's because Mooney thinks his dismissal of Neilson by scary, ominous, but not-quite-clear labels is enough. No content necessary. “[D]emographically”, “40-year-old Alden Nowlan poems”, “no-ish money”. Astounding. Neilson shouldn't have written in support of Nowlan because he's ... well, in the so-distant past, who really reads him any more? So much for every single poetry great. Once they've got a few reviews written about them, especially by the likes of Cook and Kemick, then it's on to that younger “demographic”, because that's what the community is currently reading, and if it hasn't come out in the past ten years, and especially the past year, it's not worth remembering, and certainly won't cross-help with promotion. One may think I'm exaggerating, setting up a straw man. But Mooney has admitted that he doesn't read any book more than once. Firstly, that immediately disqualifies him for the reviewing of any book (not that he's interested in reviews, anyway, the few he's penned having more to do with advancing the community than detailing a poem's inner workings). Secondly, how revealing that a poet who's also at the forefront of poetry promotion doesn't care to read a book more than once. The passion is for politics, for reflected feel-goods, not for poetry. As to no-ish money, again, I can only commend <i>any</i> reviewer or commentator who spends time discussing poetry in the public sphere out of a sense of mission first, not bucks. Of course it's good to receive a small cheque for one's work, but if that's your inspiration, you're not too good at economics as it relates to the value of labour. “What are their aesthetics and politics?” Why is that important? Of course non-ideologues are wise to you by now, because as good children of Foucault, every exchange is really only about power. Who has it, who doesn't have it that needs it. What a grim, cynical, simplistic philosophy. But “we shall overcome”! You might want to go back and take in the many different upbringings (and bourgeois lifestyles) of those French structuralists who want(ed) to stick it to the man. And <i>hell</i> yes, I fear the contemporary. I'm formulating a long essay on that very topic right now, although fear isn't the exact word. More like sadness. Now, as promised, back to Greenway.<br />
<br />
“This is how very contemporary-facing books like Gwen Benaway's last one can win our grandest national poetry prize and get maybe 1 substantive review but apparently this Collected Alden Nowlan now has eight (8!) and counting. It's not a coincidence.” -- JMM<br />
<br />
What does winning the GG matter? Seriously. Because one or two or three poet-judges anointed Benaway's book (often times it's through compromise) means that it has to be sprung to the top of the “to read” pile for the rest of us? Isn't the 25 Gs enough of a reward for now? Shouldn't those who “lost” have a more legitimate argument for review seeing as to how they need the attention more than the immediate cachet, and positive advertisement, such an award confers to Benaway? Mygawd, Nowlan's garnered eight reviews of his Collected! The socialistic imbalance! Formalism's winning. Call Zhdanov! I'm having fun teasing with the hyperbolic political references, but I kinda like doing that once the opposition has already set those terms, even though Mooney's too coy to come out and actually go into more concrete detail about it. As to Benaway's politics? Well, I haven't read her book, and wasn't that impressed by her reading of several poems from it on youtube, but I did note her smug (much giggling in the audience) and often repeated (throughout the first few minutes preamble) frank hatred of cis-gendered heteronormative colonial patriarchal men -- “shitty White cis-men” were her words, and stated theme of the book. She followed up that promising opening by saying (exact quote): “my own personal shitty White cis-men, but I think they're all pretty much alike”. How much self-hatred does a White man have to harbour to not only give her the time of day after that, but to actively promote her book? Between two of her poems, she said that if you (any, or collective) cis-White men wanted “to get me, you can probably track me down pretty easily in these shoes, but I have a knife in my bag, so fair warning”. But of course I'm just being overly sensitive about that, it's just a joke, right?, lighten up. If a White man said the same words, with the reverse labels, about a First Nations transexual, not only would the poetry community permanently shun him, he'd be charged with hate speech. Uh, yeah, I, for one, am probably not gonna review her book any time soon, but that's OK with Mooney, he doesn't want carefully assessed reviews, he wants promotion.<br />
<br />
“Anyway, Alden Nowlan is fine. Read the books that call you.” -- JMM<br />
<br />
In other words, “Ha ha, just kidding about everything, you can read Nowlan if you want to.” I don't know what I'd do with my literary choices without Mooney's permission.<br />
<br />
““Aesthetic excellence" doesn't have any meaning outside of the value system and relative merit weighting of the critic.” -- JMM<br />
<br />
Only someone disingenuous or historically stupid would say such a thing. Every poet, in his or her own way, argues for, or reveals their own version of, aesthetic value, unless you're either cynical or completely uninterested in poetry while professing to write it. There are both objective and subjective standards that anyone can use. Both are important, but the former wins out. All one can honestly request is to know where the critic or reviewer is coming from. Sometimes, those aesthetic hierarchies will become muddied, even shift. Such a statement from Mooney exonerates a reviewer from making an evaluative judgement on any poem, book, or artist. All's relative, and all assessment has its own equally valid terms. We're already forehead-deep in those kinds of reviewers. They're more properly called descriptive blurbers. If there's any evaluation, it's always, always positive.<br />
<br />
“The value of those voices lies in their ability to confront, expand and deny received aesthetic systems. Valuing them only for excelling within them isnt enough, it's just colonialism in the end.” -- JMM<br />
<br />
The verbiage above sounds like the hurried student cribbing straight from a cultural studies prof. <br />
<br />
You'll have noticed, still, that Nielson's essay, the two reviewers who stimulated his response, and Nowlan himself have faded away in a miasma of social justice jargon, thanks to Mooney's using those entries to stoke his own obsessions. But I'll quote here what may seem, at first glance, a rather innocuous sentence. Here are Neilson's final words, which occur in footnote (3):<br />
<br />
“Embarassing too to point out that the best we can get from the New White Male (and many of his “modern” ilk) is thematic criticism utterly devoid of a discussion of metaphor, metonymy, sound, you name it.” -- SN<br />
<br />
Doesn't that just about say it all? Instead of contending with the many delights contained within this fat Collected, Mooney would rather wave it off in a “whatever”, and instead promote a hate-filled poet who fits the most important bill in current poetry – identity politics. <br />
<br />
Fortunately, Mooney, as said, has given me permission to engage with Alden Nowlan. I've been sitting on his Collected for too long. Time for a soon-to-be-released Nowlan review #9!<br />
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<br />Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-22382297486412354382020-02-14T13:05:00.000-08:002020-02-14T13:05:52.507-08:00 Pino Coluccio’s Class Clown Pino Coluccio’s <i>Class Clown</i> is a competent volume of poetry. I mean that in senses good and bad. The iambs bop along like a crisp military parade; the rhymes arrive with metronomic regularity. But admirable prosody can only take a poem so far. Especially with the staggeringly fecund repositories of hard formal verse, a poem – even a stanza – set to that tune better have a twist or ten in its concomitant content. In <i>Class Clown</i>, the concerns (regret, aging, loss, failure) have been handled – from Hardy to Larkin – with far more nuance and complexity. The poems’ sonic wellsprings, then, emit only surface echo, and are quickly folded back into their sources.<br />
<br />
Surely, the reader may say, there are many exceptions and surprises. This is only apparent. Take “A Toronto Bike Courier Foresees His Death”, the last stanza of which is repeated below:<br />
<br />
I tallied every big what if.<br />
It was a quick and easy math<br />
to pedal from a beta’s life<br />
towards an alpha’s metal death.<br />
<br />
Tough fate, no? But the click-and-clack pattern works aside the neutral tone to create an emotional effect as tragic as a ripped cuticle. This is mild entertainment, accomplished, more wit than passion, ultimately a series of exercises plotted and filled in. The narrator, despite various personae, houses a consistent personality, and is of the light ABAB world-weary wisdom-dispensing type. The theme is the trampled one of regret for risks, even modest actions, not undertaken in youth, and, with that, a depression over old age and an unlived life: (“To a happy past and sad,/and to one I never had.”, from “Bow Tie”). A book to appreciate, not one to get you to think too much or to feel too intensely.<br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-26319949956108087392020-02-07T00:33:00.000-08:002020-02-07T00:33:49.931-08:00Arleen Pare’s The Girls With Stone FacesArleen Pare’s <i>The Girls With Stone Faces</i> is a loving, creative, historical tribute to, and adoration of, Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, Canadian sculptors and lovers. Throughout the poetry collection, the focus is on the artists’ work, a welcome approach where much creative biography instead teases out speculative explorations, psychological fantasies that illuminate more the authors' obsessions than the mysteries of the artists under study. Pare enjoys the symbolism of both women shaping and refining their visions through the transformation of gross materials into spiritually revealing products which retain the earthiness of the source material. “How much a pink marble mouth/must lift at the left corner,/almost into a smile”, the concluding lines to “Technicalities of Neoclassical Sculpture in the Beaux Arts Tradition”, is particularly effective and suggestive. Much of Pare’s other material, though, is less subtle. From the same poem: “Point, line, and depth: these form the dimensions of sculpture”. The short sentence fragment and the frequent space-pauses create an additive effect which work when outlining the sculptors’ tools of the trade, and how those resources are marshalled for work. Elsewhere, however, the clipped approach irritates by leaving either a scattered or faux-heightened effect, i.e., “The northern lights. The thought of. Violet/and shape-shifting green.”<br />
<br />
The biggest flaw in <i>The Girls With Stone Faces</i> is the project itself. We’re inundated with poetry collections that have a unifying theme or narrative. In rare cases, a gifted poet can carry the subject along by exploring many facets (different voices, complimentary interlocking stories, tonal shifts, a resulting speculative future, etc.) of the material, but in almost every instance, an elevator pitch, grant-friendly proposition like this will include a lot of weak and redundant poems. Pare’s volume is no exception. Here’s one example I’ll include for illustrative purposes because of its brevity. In full, this is “The Mothers”:<br />
<br />
there were mothers<br />
one for each girl<br />
Frances and Florence<br />
each in their place<br />
but<br />
there was no poison there<br />
at least<br />
not enough<br />
<br />
Now in the context of the book as a whole, this poem isn’t egregiously bad because it keeps the narrative clicking along. But divorce it from its nesting place on page 21 and thrust it into a journal, or read it to someone on its own, unenhanced by its backstory or surrounding associations, and it sinks like shares in a junior mining start-up after the CEO appears in handcuffs on an MSNBC perp walk video clip. Nothing even slightly interesting happens in those twenty-four words, whether in diction, rhythm, lyricism, structure, voice, emotion. Again, you could become as near an expert on these two lives as is Pare, but that in itself would only (and only possibly) create some biographical interest. A poem’s responsibilities lie elsewhere. I harp on this point because the book-length study is now endemic in CanPo. Poets defend the project-book with the argument that the ‘process’ is more important than the individual poem. But a poem is an individual unit. (Pare’s poems are separate entries, each with its own title.) Poets try to get around this by eliminating titles and linking ‘entries’ by double spaces, a series of dashes, ‘part thirty-eight’, or epigraph interruptions, to name only a few ploys. There’s a long history to this, of course. But for every Whitman, there’re a thousand Olsons.<br />
<br />
Pare could have pared and sculpted a lot of clay from this volume, and the reader would have been left with a half-dozen fairly good poems. And maybe that’s more than could have been expected anyway, given the subject’s constraints.<br />
<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-77881608948816768522020-01-31T12:46:00.002-08:002020-01-31T12:46:59.843-08:00Carmine Starnino's LeviathanCarmine Starnino’s <i>Leviathan</i> explores familiar ground for the poet, that of paternal identity. Here, it’s not only the father that’s studied, but also the father’s son, also a father. Other men – strangers – fill a few pages, perhaps also fathers. An easy synopsis would indicate that the poet is determined not to repeat the mistakes of his forebears while co-raising his own children. But that surface narrative’s been ploughed through so often and thoroughly, another chapter could be akin to showing up in Barkerville in 2019 with pick and pan, expecting to find more than a flake or two of gold.<br />
<br />
“San Pellegrino” is the cornerstone poem of <i>Leviathan</i>. Nearing four pages, an unusually long effort in the Starnino corpus, the narrator-poet commences in perhaps the blandest opening line of verse you’ll chance upon in a while: “I sit here facing a glass of water. I have a family: a son, baby daughter.” But over the breach of that first line, the poem explodes: “Life’s harder. Harder, and sadder. My father/has stage IV lung cancer.” Again, though, here the reader may pause, fearing another in an endless line of poems about parents with terminal illnesses. (Entire books have been fashioned thusly, making one wish that an inanimate object could suffer the same fate before sputtering to page fourteen.) Starnino doesn’t bury himself in a lugubrious elegy, however. Though the ostensible focus is on his father – (“Epic snorer, inveterate jaywalker, and, when he lost his temper,/a spanker.”) – the poem’s more a study of the narrator’s ontological polarities: Apollo vs Dionysus. The father embodies the latter, and the speaker’s seeming distance, even antipathy, towards the elder’s actions are belied by a loving anguish not far from the surface. The speaker, by the bare fact of writing such an elaborately detailed poem, counters with reason, but the two states can never be fully integrated, which explains the lack of resolution in the closing lines: “[I] will sit here, staring deeper and farther/into this glass of water until that point everything becomes clearer.” The speaker is still caught in reason’s attempt to make order, to provide a final explanation, but, ultimately, he’s too intelligent to think it possible. In an ironic twist, then, it’s Dionysus that prevails, after all, despite the father’s many indiscretions and faults.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, the same dichotomy is teased into a conflicted admiration for disordered vitality. “The Factory Lifer” is a dispassionate study of a “Piss-eyed/nicotine wreck/perving over secretaries.” No one, perhaps, but a fellow traveler in that world is going to commend one who, after being glanced at, would “draw a thumb/across his throat”, but fascination remains for the outsized energy, the pure ‘fuck you’ attitude, the fate that awaits a man whose upbringing, genes, work opportunities, and lack of natural reflection dooms him to a life of depraved alienation. By contrast, Starnino’s images and descriptions are coldly, exactly rendered. The poem’s a minor gem.<br />
<br />
Quite a few poems concentrate on the speaker’s love for his children, the most successful being the collection’s opener, “Shadow Puppet”: “The point is to make/something/from the laying on//of nothing”. The narrator’s lawn also receives metaphorical attention in several poems, the best, “The Manly Arts”, being a humorous and well-executed ars poetica: “getting high/on the scent of order it exhaled”.Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-91602459153437886772020-01-24T11:59:00.001-08:002020-01-24T12:03:47.536-08:00Richard Harrison’s On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the FloodPhilosophy and nostalgia make a disastrous combo. In <i>On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood</i>, the volume that unbelievably – even in the context of other bizarre winners of major poetry awards in Canada throughout the years – scored Richard Harrison a Gov Gen victory, the narrator has the demeanor and voice of one who nonchalantly and inoffensively sidles alongside you in a long line-up and proceeds to spill his guts about his past, unaware or (worse) unconcerned that you’ve pegged him as a verbose bore, however sincere, within the first twenty seconds.<br />
<br />
These poems are interminable. Length is relative. Most entries are only one to two full pages, but the narrative development is static, the details bland, the images disperse, the conclusions obvious. It all makes you pray the line-up in front of you starts moving again, or for the self-immersed rambler to catch the eye of a more promising sounding board. Three poems in, the reader is confronted by “Gone”, possibly the worst published poem I’ve read this century. It has a plethora of faults, including, but not limited to: bald prose (“When the groom’s mother died on the way to the wedding in San Diego,/it became a wedding from an American novel.”); cliches (“Everything fell into place”); ugly syntax and ugly common phrasing (“setting the whole thing up”); hysterical, false similes (“a song stuck in your head is/your mind reaching for poetry like a drowning mouth reaching for air”); and false spiritual wisdom combined with poor grammar (“you never know how beautiful air, or light, or life are until you must gasp.”).<br />
<br />
There are brief passages of skill and verve here and there, lightning flashes that, even in their surprise, throw into dramatic relief the depth of the surrounding darkness: “She had looked for sweets/the colours of childhood comfort/and instead received bad-bread green and disinfectant yellow,/and a kind of teal that almost glowed/like a seabird in an oil spill.” from “Colour Code”. While waiting twelve poems till the next flash, you’ll get the quality of, “sleeping with your mouth open/the way the open mouth is pretty/on someone caught thinking/the nothing they are thinking/between their thoughts.” I don’t know, perhaps the latter is supposed to gain something from the downstairs line indents (which I can’t reproduce here), but then we’re elevating poems into successes completely dependent upon their spatial positioning, that fraudulent line of assertion from Olson and his many acolytes.<br />
<br />
The back bio tells us that Mr. Harrison has been a creative writing instructor since 1995. Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-7746218580706849272020-01-17T01:05:00.000-08:002020-01-17T01:05:20.297-08:00Robin Richardson's Sit How You WantI suppose comparisons of Robin Richardson’s poems to those of Sharon Olds are inevitable. Both writers concentrate on the dance, denouements, and death of sex, but whereas Olds’ take on the subject is elemental, Richardson more frequently details desire and its fallout within relationships. In <i>Sit How You Want</i>, her latest collection, Richardson has thrown a welcome ingredient into the high boil of sexual strife: hard-won, terse, frequently acidic philosophical summations or epiphanies. “Eventuality” links natural and human-made disaster with the troubling aftermath of sex – “nukes/in North Korea aimed like loaded cocks. What offspring!” – but the concluding two lines bring the historical or speculative considerations back home: “Now we’re naked on the pullout, losing interest./We’re no better than the rest.” “Without a Roof” moves from extreme vulnerability (“open/on the operating table, so impeccably pink/pearl you could drape me on a hotel heiress”) to sexual distancing (“He disapproves:/the carefree sovereignty of solitude”) to transformative assertion (“There’s freedom/in what no one knows”).<br />
<br />
Even in the short quotes above, Richardson’s heady lyrical scoring delights. She manages, deftly, the difficult trick of creating sustained music through quickly shifting tonal registers and narrative fractures.<br />
<br />
More mature than her also excellent <i>Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis</i>, <i>Sit How You Want</i> is top shelf reading, contemporary as a power line, traditional as a post-coital Rothman’s. And nowhere in the volume does she succumb to the “fashionable cleverness in sex”, Dudley Fitts’ criticism of a topic most writers either approach with jokes, or avoid altogether like a neon-flashing landmine.Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-83045153420924950002020-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:002020-01-10T18:30:22.386-08:00David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to nightElsewhere I’ve noted that many of our elder poets resemble boxers who’ve stayed on for one (or more than one) fight too many. The poems keep on a-comin’, but their punches lack strength and accuracy. David Zieroth – a poet who’s written some charming, quirky fantasies and honest anecdotes encapsulating some fine and subtle spiritual dimensions in minute-to-minute mundane action – has recently put forth <i>the bridge from day to night</i>, and it’s a sad book to contemplate for its gloomy self-regard. This is especially troubling since the tone is set against the beauty of Vancouver’s North Shore, emphasizing the speaker’s uneasiness with chaos and mutability. This results in one of any poet’s great sins – retreat from engagement with the sensed world. Zieroth often shows his impatience with the outside world by avoiding it altogether, acting instead as caught fly in a weak cauchemar-web. “first thought” quickly devolves to “all of my thoughts” to “the many limbs of the forest” to “each day the thoughts erect a wall/and tell me not to look/back into the tangled garden”.<br />
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Five poems in a row, near the volume’s close, are particularly lugubrious. “grief” details, clinically, the emotion’s effect on the body: “muscles in our organs/draw away from contact with skin/and contract so blood drains/out of toes and fingers foreign/in the face of sorrow”. The language, here, is as dead as the bodily processes it describes. “grief” concludes with, “our wonderer worries that nothing/better might ever be”. I had the same thought about this collection at around page 21.<br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-59858590685730801242019-12-30T20:33:00.001-08:002019-12-30T20:33:34.196-08:00Best Books Read in 2019Again, because of time constraints, I've limited the year-end review to specific parameters. Concentrating here on poetry and fiction, I've also excised rereads and books ranked 1-4 on a scale of 5, where 5 (all books here)is exceptional, 4 is very good, 3 is fair-to-middling, 2 is subpar, and 1 is irredeemable. Just including books from rank 4 (very good) would have ballooned the reviews to a number too big to take on.<br />
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1) Bernardo Atxaga, <i>Nevada Days</i> (tr. M.J. Costa), 2013. Categorized as a novel, <i>Nevada Days</i> is presented more accurately as a journalistic memoir with surrealistic interludes. Atxaga, with wife and two young daughters, and on a writer exchange in 2007-08 from home Basque country to the University of Reno, sets down an amazing array of adventures, Spanish reminiscences, phone conversations to and from his mother, Nevada histories, and geological explorations, all of them lively and strangely moving, while also maintaining a subdued, even accepting, tone in the face of (often) violent foreboding or remnant evidence. The lynchpin to the book is the rape and eventual murder of 19 year-old Brianna Denison in January 2008, the abduction situated catawampus from the Atxaga digs in Reno, but other highlights (if I can put it like that) include attending the optimistic auditorium carnivals (with frenetic retinue) of presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and (later) Hilary Clinton, the funeral (in deep woods) of an overseas Basque-American army soldier, the historical recounting of a heavyweight boxing match in 1931 between Paulino “the Basque Woodchopper” Uzcudun and Max Baer, poisonous spiders and snakes, encounters with state prison road crews, and a particularly frightening loss of bearings during Atxaga's drive through desert with his family. Costa's translation, as with many of her projects, brings colour, vividness, immediacy, and transparent thought to the fore without undue linguistic awkwardness. I've thought often of this book throughout the half-year since I read it, and themes, if you will, are many and interlocking: awe and non-judgement in the face of overwhelming cultural shock; asserting oneself into whatever experience is undertaken, but not as star or solipsistic focus; elemental bleakness, without the opposing sins of sentimentality and tragic hopelessness; loose ends that can never be satisfactorily tied together; and a relentless low-key tenacity in observation and diurnal confrontation.<br />
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2) Leslie Thomas, <i>Dangerous Davies The Last Detective</i>, 1976. I usually read about one crime novel a year, foregoing more because of the genre's limited engagement with character complexity, attention to writerly panache, and off-beat or meticulous description. My own take on plot is that it should only be the focus for the lowering of coffins, but I'm not your typical genre reader. Lately, though, I've been delighted with a new (to me) discovery: comic crime. I should have been more intuitive long ago, what with many comic movie adaptations of crime novels. Thomas' Dangerous Davies series of four begins with this book under review, and it nails so many elements, and with an astonishing ability, of what I look for in a 'literary' novel: individual vision; quirky, finely delineated, believable characters; moral complexity; descriptive prowess; emotional versatility; authoritative (and appropriate) information; lexical surprise (and general stylistic brilliance); and, yes, though it's not always needed, especially in those 'literary' works, an interesting and surprising plot. Davies is the 'last' detective because he takes on moribund (actually, buried) criminal cases that have gone 'unsolved' for decades. Somewhat of a physically maladroit Clouseau, Davies nevertheless proceeds with an underappreciated doggedness and guile, eventually (with the sometimes-help of his Babe-in-Arms bar room philosopher friend Mod) putting 2,418 and 654,774 together to solve the case. Steeped in Brit vernacular, and punctuated with the wit of black comic dialogue and situational physical highjinks (though with a touch more wistfulness than bite), the novel packs more 'meaning' into its wild yarn than a warehouse-filled remaindered stock of ponderous literary fare.<br />
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3) Patricia Beer, <i>The Estuary</i>, 1971. This slim poetry collection is a (pardon the pun) high-water mark for Beer, balanced skilfully between classical structures and interpersonal history. Marriage, severe illness, local history, house interiors – whatever the level of emotional charge, Beer creates a proportional art that avoids outsized declaration or obscure dullness. Rereading rewards one with layered ‘facts’, but also fresh perspectives without easy accusations, or even a sense that taking sides ultimately matters. Her imagery recalls Patrick Anderson’s approach of mating common nature word choices – rain, sun, shadow, grass – with unusual adjectival juxtapositions which act as both compliment and contrast. Classical allusions are expertly inserted into contemporary stories, sometimes dramatically, sometimes humourously. <br />
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4) John Updike, <i>Rabbit is Rich</i>, 1981. The best novel of Updike’s tetralogy – more mature than <i>Rabbit, Run</i>, much more believable and less politically simple-minded than <i>Rabbit Redux</i>, and less cynical and fatalistic than the final <i>Rabbit at Rest</i> – received generally high acclaim when it came out, though now, like so much else earlier than ancient 2000, it’s been downgraded in certain academic quarters because of its perceived sexism and middle-class complacency. The last charge is hilarious when considering the ambiguously considered wife-swapping, the long and final (and brilliant) encounter with protagonist Angstrom’s first-ever fuck, and the many family decisions Angstrom makes in regards to the car dealership. The first charge misunderstands, in a sadly common recurrence, the difference between the author’s views and that of any of his character’s, and, even were he to be ‘guilty’, has little if anything to do with the aesthetic force of the work. And that the often “too much sex” charge is even given credence is itself puzzling. There’s too little sex in most novels, or, if a major factor, it’s often written as a craven or jejune or obfuscatory sandbagging exercise. Updike depicts sex, in many encounters, as joy, disappointment, lust, boredom, disgust, tenderness, and mortal reminder. You won’t get that kind of all-encompassing wisdom from sexual experience when it’s relegated to a ‘cleaned up’ academic room visited every hundredth page. Aside from sex, Updike’s other great themes are money and natural efflorescence and decay. For someone personally sheltered from many of life’s economic difficulties, his knowledge of money’s complexities – from many characters up and down the class ladder – is deep and on-the-ground convincing. Many reviewers and critics have lauded – rightly so – Updike’s facility and expertise with language. But they stop there. What makes it so? A large vocabulary is often cited as the, or a, chief reason. But Updike’s not so very different, in that regard, from many other excellent writers. He can write long, elegant, sinuously gorgeous sentences, but what really stands out is his stylistic virtuosity. Dialogue, descriptive passages, and philosophical musings are seamlessly interwoven without losing any narrative or meditative thrust. Nature metaphors are exceptional, often, as in classical or jazz music, with repetitive thematic material turned over like jewel light from different angles, or, to keep with the musical analogy, in tonal variations.<br />
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5) Shen Congwen, <i>Border Town</i>, (tr. J. Kinkley), 1932. This classic Chinese novel was banned during the Cultural Revolution. It’s unbelievable because Congwen’s focus is on the socialists’ supposed dream: manual labourers unencumbered by, and unconcerned with, intellectual concerns and counter-measures. A traditional story of two brothers competing for marriage to the daughter of a poor widower who operates a riverboat all day, the novel lacks even the undertones of political allegory or critique, instead steeping itself in the surrounding natural elements, those acting as metaphorical emotional forces in (mostly) the naïve and yearning young woman. A terrifically crafted and subdued tragic tone is maintained throughout, and if the ending lacks surprise, the climax matches the fatalistic cues and forebodings at every turn in the story.<br />
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6) Daniel Cowper, <i>Grotesque Tenderness</i>, 2019. (Reviewed for an upcoming issue of <i>Hamilton Arts & Letters</i>.)<br />
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7) Marjana Gaponenko, <i>Who Was Martha?</i>, (tr. A. Spencer), 2012. Another novel in a long line of exceptional European depictions of the guilt- and depression-ridden residues left behind after two, three, four generations of WWII experiences (Erpenbeck, Tokarczuk, Sebald). Unlike the other novelists mentioned, Gaponenko’s tone here is light (with pensive, even profoundly tragic, underpinnings), humorous, witty, farcical. It’s quite an achievement to make that complex tone register against the arthritic psychological backdrop of an old man having a determined adventure outside his formally steadfast mundane existence before cancer shoots its final tendrils into him. <br />
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8) Nicholas Bradley, Rain Shadow, 2018. (Reviewed in <i>subTerrain</i> issue #83.)<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-67531184759424779722019-09-02T13:24:00.001-07:002019-09-02T13:24:10.402-07:00The Utopian Literary World of Michele A. Berdy<a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/08/14/if-i-were-the-queen-of-translation-reviews-wordsworth-a66847"></a><br />
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In her August 14th article in The Moscow Times entitled “If I Were Queen of Translation Reviews”, Michele A. Berdy prides herself on her tone, a “rant”. It’s actually closer to a myopic, supercilious, ungenerous clusterfuck (ironically) against the very translators and (especially) original authors she professes to champion. But it’s especially ungenerous towards the potential readers of those works.<br />
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After an off-topic, current hard-times ground state that’s supposed to lend justification for the “rant” – I suppose, in hopes that sheer outraged tone is to override any points that may be challenged – Berdy begins with rule #1 of “Those Banned From Reviewing” with “Someone who doesn’t know the language of the original. Duh, right?” Actually, duh, wrong. Her only reasoning is that “I mean, would you ask me to review a translation of book (sic) of Chinese poetry if I didn’t know Chinese?” The answer: it depends. I want the reviewer, above all, to be a passionate and knowledgeable reader of poetry, and to write well. Knowing the source language is certainly a help, but often not a prerequisite, and highly dependent on the review’s context. Who is it written for? What publication is it in? What are the writer’s particular reviewing parameters, either self-imposed or determined in advance by the editors/publisher? Is the review a retrospective on a work or works, or, especially, on the author? (In the latter case, even a glancing knowledge of the original material isn’t needed.) And why stop there? By extension, her draconian measures should encompass transfers of jargon, argot, idiom, and dialect. Imagine the audacity of a transatlantic English speaking reviewer presuming to opine on the untranslated Irish brogue of Paul Durcan!<br />
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Further, if reviewers (and publishers) acceded to Berdy’s dicta, readers wouldn’t even know of many original works in their conversant language of the received translation, let alone come across opinions, story outlines, broad judgments, and on and on. Scholarly work, including tonal faithfulness and nuanced assessments of word choice? Sure, but most reviews don’t have that as a mandate, and a good thing it is. How many reviewers, often working for free or for a pittance, even if they are fluent in the original, are going to spend hours tracking down the context and probability of use for a now archaic phrase that has a muddied philological history? And how many of that reduced number are (e.g.) fluent in both Burmese and English, know the back catalogue of the original author (another of many of the Queen’s requirements), and are intimately familiar with the political and cultural milieu in which, say, the particular novel takes place? Would you give double-digits-to-one odds that the number is close to zero? I would. <br />
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Berdy royally waves away anyone who would presume to review translations without knowing the source language, but how about the many <i>translators</i> who actually go German-to-English with no more extensive vocabulary than <i>ja</i> and <i>nein</i>? This happens frequently, and in poetry, not ‘just’ non-fiction tomes, with lauded results.<br />
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There are many other ‘prerequisites’, in the article, from Her Highness, but from what I’ve outlined here, the procedure is already unworkable and needlessly restrictive. <br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-84766406247659552912019-05-25T14:41:00.000-07:002019-05-25T14:41:23.674-07:00Patrick Warner's OctopusPick up a copy of most any poetry collection these days, flip to the back, and you’ll note the weighty thematic encapsulated in a bumpf so precise (yet paradoxically vague) you’d think you were about to dig into an epic novel were it not for the thin spine. There are several reasons for this: it makes for a more coherent outline in order to gain grant money from our government overlords; it presents as serious content, most often allied with current hot button topics and with others in the poetry community (in which the ‘transgressive’ poet always seems to join the winning team); and it’s easier to get away with individual poems that are mediocre since each is meant to be taken as a small piece in a narrative whose sum is (supposedly) much greater than its constituents.<br />
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Patrick Warner is a throwback in that he writes poems meant to be enjoyed and assessed within the parameters of each offering, attuned to the desires of present-day consumers of songs, who enjoy and assess them as singles, not oases in DVD deserts. <i>Octopus</i>, from 2016, is his fifth collection, and though themes and obsessions can be observed, volume to volume (as they inevitably will in any poet, good or bad), his focus is much more on intricate rhythms, sound patterns, dynamics, narrative surprise, vocal idiosyncrasy, apt and piquant diction, subtle irony, moral dilemmas, and a rare humour that combines the black with the compassionate.<br />
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Warner enjoys going for walks and looking at the earth, foregrounding his observations, rather than using them, as is usual in ‘nature’ poets, as metaphorical standbys for the spiritual malaise of the speaker (or author, let’s not be coy). In that, he’s aligned with Bly, Kinnell, and, closer to home, Peter Norman. But, unlike the aforementioned poets, Warner isn’t averse to including disparate comparisons within a poem. Take “Cold July” (dedicated to the late Elise Partridge), the first stanza of part one of which is recorded below:<br />
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I have seen it a beaver-dammed<br />
lukewarm dribble, but this summer the brook’s a river,<br />
deep and cold, running steeped tea<br />
and a skim of froth around lichened rocks,<br />
roaring like an air-conditioner.<br />
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The next poem, “Downpour”, is even better on the same front: out of a cistern, “oblong doilies;/crocheted antimacassars; gobs of/cuckoo spit; and here where two stones/make a whirlpool, a round lace pastie/ringed by seven clear bubbles – a rotary phone’s finger holes.”<br />
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Fun in contemporary poetry has been attempted through sheer will of personality, whether made up or natural. Blame Purdy, sure. But his followers are ultimately culpable. Flat or mild jokes – OK for stand-up comics, dire for repeated poetry readings – dominate the mode. Warner is having none of that. In “Guerilla”, the fun is one-hundred percent language driven : “Adios to my pueblo, my adobe abode, my white-washed hacienda of the mind”. It continues, through eight sestets, in the gathered and regrafted tropes of a scion of a Spanish conquistador, his revolution one of spiritual, not military or political, movement. <br />
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Painstaking observation, care in expression, emotional heft and complexity. Those attributes don’t have a chance next to the various popular social positions most are shouldering within to get positive ink and communal support. That is, until time, the ultimate judge, immune to hype, has its say.<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-33587126317140138202019-02-15T01:53:00.001-08:002019-02-15T01:53:26.703-08:00Dan MacIsaac's Cries From the Ark<br />
It’s been estimated by some environmental scientists that, each day, about a hundred species of bird, beast, or insect vanishes from this globe of water, dirt, and asphalt. Of course, we don’t know the exact amount since most endangered species aren’t headline news like the Malayan tiger or ivory-billed woodpecker. Rather, most species are microscopic, tucked away (e.g.) in Amazonian jungles, unknown to us, and are indispensable for the survival of many other creatures since they start the feeding chain. Scientists have been urgently trying to find and classify those species before they’re gone, so that at least we know what we’ve missed, as this will at least shed light on the interconnectedness of ecosystems in those areas. It speaks to the dire predicament we’ve found ourselves in when a concession of extinction is made even before finding those species.<br />
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Dan MacIsaac’s inaugural poetry collection, <i>Cries From the Ark</i>, celebrates and elegizes the eponymous critters, and, with that as a base, speculates on past life forms, and how they came to extinction, whether through human or natural challenge. The book is divided into six sections: animals; Biblical personnae; birds; anthropological digs and myths; insects; and anthropology updated.<br />
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MacIsaac’s concentration on many members of Noah’s roll call is a welcome reprieve from the environmental grandstanding or abstraction that hampers a particular subset of advocacy verse. Some of the animals the author depicts are in a peculiar bind: their numbers and habitat aren’t at the tipping point (yet), so they haven’t gained sensationalistic press, but neither are they home and clear from current and various stewardship malpractices. The British Columbia Kermode bear is one such animal. Here’s MacIsaac’s “Spirit Bear”, in full (sub-heading: <i>Ursus americanus kermodei</i>):<br />
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At the river’s black mouth,<br />
the white bear waits<br />
for the swimmer.<br />
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He crashes into shallows,<br />
seizing the quick fish,<br />
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glisten of silver<br />
along cinder lips.<br />
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A cedar twig<br />
cracks.<br />
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He lunges<br />
for the far shore<br />
murky with hemlock.<br />
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He vanishes –<br />
froth spattered <br />
on dark rock.<br />
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This is near perfect in its execution and vibrancy of images, and captures the grace, patience, strength, and ferocity of the bear with close observation, neither overstating the event nor interposing distracting, subjective layers. One such poem is worth a thousand hand-wringing self-regarding prosy salvos.<br />
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Elswwhere, the author accomplishes a wider perspective than the recording of events. In “Dandelions”, “my child, grown older,//will blow parachutes/of spun seed/over alien country.” A humble – even clichéd – ritual becomes sexual necessity, and the poem ends with, “love seems most/like the lion’s tooth.”<br />
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Consistently on display is an ear attuned to both appropriate rhythm and sound patterns. MacIsaac’s go-to notes are paired assonants, which emphasize importance of theme, and they often link to similar sounds in later stanzas. Internal rhymes also figure, and have a similar effect: “From a deep cirque of thorns,/the tribesmen goad the herd”.<br />
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Humour is sparse, but natural. The opening of “Red Pileated Woodpecker” is illustrative: “Headbanger,/mohawked,//with a buzz-saw/guffaw,//flaps over/the mosh pit”. But humour gives ground to the author’s sober insistence that what we call ‘nature’, or ‘the environment’, is not some cute concept to be proselytized in sentimental urgency, but a dynamic force, frightening in its potency, and often, like the “Bison: Wallowing”, “sweating out ticks/from its soiled hide/into the suety ooze.”<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-74445434271343392872019-02-08T13:24:00.001-08:002019-02-08T13:24:38.499-08:00Dani Couture's Listen Before Transmit<br />
Dani Couture’s latest volume of poetry, <i>Listen Before Transmit</i>, obsesses and moves over time shifts between present and future, by way of spatial relations. The present is personal, the future is abstracted. Both are dire. It could be labeled pre-apocalyptic lit. Teasing out those shifts could have been a fascinating exercise, yielding many insights, but the speculations would have to have been grounded in a convincing present reality. This is a problem throughout the collection. Too often that present isn’t a developed panoply of imminent environmental disasters, but a focus on the doomed individuals: death by accident (“It was/a black spot on their left shin after having/mown the lawn. During an eclipse,//they looked at the sun without their/daughter’s pinhole camera.”, from “Black Sea Nettle”), vague suggestions of mass capture and, perhaps, deportation (“The helicopter nears. Tonight, even the air is filled with bodies.”, from “Another Earth”), female subjugation and overcoming (“Jet propulsion will eventually erupt/and cause a break between her legs, at which point she will take off.”, from “Pioneer 14”).<br />
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Another problem is tonal choice. The most effective registers for apocalyptic speculation, near or long term, are solemn and scarily plausible or angry and accusatory. The voice, here, is distanced, cool, at times even ironic. Cool then becomes cold, and the inevitable fall-out leads to pretentious lines like, “The electric lever of passive care plasma fuels/or sometimes doesn’t” (from “A Casual Defence”), or “T minus the time it takes you to forget/your intention” (from “Minus Time”), or “An issue with constant values/and constant invalidation of facts.” (from “Flyby”). <br />
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Mary Dalton’s blurb recognizes the “uncertainty, estrangement and disconnection”, but also comments on “a countermusic in the book that strengthens the hold these poems gain over the reader”. I didn’t hear it. Similar to the failure of Dennis Lee’s <i>Yesno</i>, the author might listen, but fails to transmit any joy in the present world that should serve as the bedrock for the rage or grief that would necessarily follow from ‘the end of the world as we know it’. The collection’s closer, “Transit of Mercury”, ends with, “So when I say I miss you,//it’s not to you, but through to the palm trees/on the throw pillow that are not actual palms.//But I enjoy the idea of their shade/when the sun hits them right.” The only enjoyment is in “the idea”, which perhaps accounts for the joyless and dull phrase, “when the sun hits them right”.<br />
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In <i>Listen Before Transmit</i>, Couture has bitten off far more than she can chew. It’s more convincing as a personal fear of death than as a speculative take on different apocalyptic scenarios. <br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-45666347575524439052019-02-01T02:10:00.001-08:002019-02-01T02:10:21.395-08:00Jeramy Dodds' Drakkar NoirWho doesn’t enjoy entering a funhouse of mirrors at a county fair or city exhibition? You pay your five-spot (or get discount tickets), glance at yourself in the convex madness for a few minutes, and exit back into the brilliant sun or tragic snow. <br />
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Now imagine yourself as you open the pages to Jeramy Dodds’ latest poetry collection, <i>Drakkar Noir</i>. You chuckle a few times during the madcap shifts and distorted riffs, but you can’t exit, not if you want the whole experience. So you read the rest of the book, and the relentless one-note antics turn from humourous to annoying to numbing. <br />
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You’re led to believe the intention is to “bravely chas[e] after the new gods of our post-electric reality” which will reveal “the truth about what the hell is happening to us” (from Robert Montgomery), yet as soon as the carnival packs up, the contorted images disappear, and are remembered, if remembered at all, as adolescent jackanapes after a bender on chloroform.<br />
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Dodds isn’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to yoke comic absurdity with the whole nine yards of the contemporary information freeway. And he offers the add-ons of wordplay: homonyms, double entendres, rhyme replacements mid-phrase, arcane pairings. But a funhouse doesn’t refer to what’s outside of it, to “what the hell is happening to us”, it refers only to itself, and is giddy with what it sees, precisely because it <i>ain’t</i> real. Or of any import. Here’re a few examples:<br />
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“After a brief period of mourning, it was afternoon./This mirror is selfie-proof”.<br />
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“My daughter starts dating a dwarf./They attend a Bergman retrospective;/she gets home after midnight, every night./My child is nine” ... “He was wearing one of my shirts, taken in:/ ‘Time Traveller Caught with Miner,’ ” ... “ ‘Will you be heading to the beheading?’ ” <br />
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And so on.<br />
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Stay for the first few punch lines. Then cut your losses and get out.<br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-28367424237091431292019-01-25T11:31:00.000-08:002019-01-25T11:31:29.354-08:00Aaron Giovannone's The NonnetsThe cult of personality was outsized during Canadian poetry’s centennial heyday. Pick your favourites or denounce them – and there were many – but you couldn’t go three volumes down a bookstore shelf without encountering a front cover mug shot of an author setting his face (and they were mostly men) to the appropriate takeaway – tough, bemused, bewildered, laughing, or grim. Al Purdy gets blamed, unfairly, for starting the angle. (Most of his covers were faceless.) You could also point the finger at Frank “I do this, I do that” O’Hara. But they didn’t get the ball rolling. After gathering snow, that ball finally froze, motionless, at the edge of a sewer drain during the 90s when personality meant transparently autobiographical jokey or tender anecdotal blathering. Enter the brilliant new millennium. Personality, if present in any recognizable manner, was sublimated, or at least at the service of craft and narrative force. But the cult of personality never went away. New practitioners were clever enough to mask their foregrounded selves with greater layers of irony and wit, disjunction and ambiguity. Tone was fluid, which, in practice, meant provisional, confused (and confusing), overriding. We now have a spate of current CanPo titles that tweak 90s jokey or tender into jokey <i>and</i> tender. Aaron Giovannone’s <i>The Nonnets</i> is among those collections.<br />
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<i>The Nonnets</i> refers to Giavannone’s own form, nine-line poems which split evenly into three stanzas. Any other formal constraint, though, is an add-on, if present at all. For example, the author employs rhyme, end or internal, at times. As for organic development, that’s either not on the menu, or is subverted. Since an example is impossible without full quotation, and because the poems’ brevity allow it, here’s one entry, in full (all poems lack titles):<br />
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WHEN GREENPEACE CANVASSERS stop me<br />
I say, <i>I’m late for a meeting.</i><br />
This is the meeting.<br />
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Just to be here’s amazing.<br />
I’d like to thank the many people<br />
who believed in me.<br />
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That was your first mistake.<br />
A silver maple with twinkling leaves.<br />
Just kidding. There’s no tree.<br />
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This poem’s fairly typical in procedure. Introduce one scene, sever that completely in the second stanza, then refer obliquely, even obscurely, to the first stanza in the wrap-up. The language is banal, the sentences or sentence fragments are short and often declarative, the poem references itself implicitly (and in other poems, explicitly, with the “Dear Reader” address), the tone is floating. The effect on the reader is of being in the audience where a magician keeps hinting that multiple and endless rabbits will, eventually, be pulled from hats. Unfortunately, in all but several poems, there are an awful lot of hats and very few rabbits.<br />
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When Giovannone drops the casually practiced and ineffectual comic shtick, his efforts can stick. He’s much better when at his most directly vulnerable. Here’s a terrific nonnet, fifth from the final poem:<br />
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ZOOMING SEMIS ROCK my car<br />
on the highway’s shoulder.<br />
Hazards flash in the gallery of pine.<br />
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Is anyone here afraid of bears<br />
or of that blue pickup<br />
parked at the edge of the woods?<br />
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Because we’re alive, we’re growing<br />
a moustache, at least its wispy beginnings.<br />
Dead, we will be too.<br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-37352778860854839382019-01-18T11:38:00.002-08:002019-01-18T11:38:50.944-08:00Stevie Howell's I left nothing inside on purpose<br />
<i>I left nothing inside on purpose</i>, the title of Stevie Howell’s 2018 collection of poems, is taken from a note in the window of a Mercedes, in a ridiculously optimistic request for preservation of property. Howell’s header uses that naive note ironically, realizing we – I use that collective pronoun seriously – can’t shut out disaster, whether we’ve money and good health, or, in the speaker’s case, little of the former and even less of the latter. The title also refers to the fearless revelations of the speaker, impatient with the poses and tertiary peccadilloes that comprise so much of the tea-cosy-and-grey-sky school of poetry.<br />
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Voice is a particular challenge in this volume. The tone, I feel, left plenty of room for various inflections, tempi, and dynamics, yet I didn’t feel this an arbitrary exercise. The poems have to be read aloud – all of them – and I found myself stopping and starting frequently because of the constant indentations, caesurae, ellipses, one-and-two line stanzas, short phrases, and sporadic period disappearance. The effect is halting, but not tentative, and certainly not flat. Though sentences are paratactic, they don’t fill the page with numbing, unresolved repetition, the latter a cheap ball-peen in the postmodern toolkit. Actually, the ‘flat’ tone emphasizes the terse and not infrequent tragic maxims that follow the earlier strategy. And those harsh conclusions are earned by the (now) heightened earlier content. This is difficult, even impossible, to relay accurately here because of the typographical misrepresentation which would result. And unlike the often arbitrary indents and erratic spacings other poets use in an attempt to impart complexity, Howell’s efforts in layout are instructive. So I’ll just pick a few quotes from various poems that can be rendered here with fairly close representation, realizing that, in this volume more than most others, excision doesn’t do justice to her work.<br />
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“A dream of diaphaneity by the calcified. Life requires 3 people to make a//tragedy. & for the tragedy to be performed. A 3rd person can’t come between a couple unless//you let him, & he wants to.”<br />
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“That I can close my eyes & make you//mine on loan is a miracle////God help me – <br />
”<br />
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“a retired train station, too. A maze of different platforms makes you panic – you might miss your ride into oblivion.”<br />
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The bravery on display doesn’t just result from exposing the extremes of mental and emotional states – (“I refuse to describe the tangible world in signs anymore. Since Google killed/the lyric, all we have inside//(states, not traits)”) – but on laying out spare relational settings (objects in a room; mundane images) and somehow managing to link the humble beginnings to interesting, even profound, observations, and all this through transitions that, initially, seem maximally disjointed. <br />
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Here I note that her editor was Ken Babstock. I don’t normally comment on a book’s editor, publisher, or designer, preferring to let the poems speak without the support system, not that that system is unimportant – far from it – but that those details can easily veer into the ‘business’ of poetry, important for sure, but also dangerous in that false conclusions, or at least banal ones, can be drawn from the links. In <i>I left nothing inside on purpose</i>, though, Babstock’s influence shows. His latest book, <i>On Malice</i>, now four years in the rear view mirror, uses flatness and disjunction to mirror emotional reactions to history as impersonal insult. Howell has learned well, and has added her own deft touches, dependent on no one.<br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-5921544410532111152019-01-11T01:10:00.000-08:002019-01-11T01:10:01.649-08:00Catherine Owen's Dear Ghost,Catherine Owen’s previous poetry collections have stuck pretty closely to an all-encompassing thematic: life in the fast lane of a metal band; grief over, and elegies to, a dead lover (twice); studies of other artists (Egon Schiele and Robinson Jeffers). In her latest collection, <i>Dear Ghost,</i>, the focus is on herself (though there’s also an extended section on others), including artistic excitement during childhood and work experiences in the present. Unlike many other poets who rework the same source material until every mundane detail, post-wringer, is rank and dry, Owen has had a varied and interesting life that can withstand (with caveats) the frequent dead-ends and narcissistic concentration that overwhelms lesser efforts in the autobiographical mode.<br />
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This is Owen’s best volume. Always bold and engaging, she shows a deeper vulnerability here that works lyrically to hold the emotion while also, paradoxically, setting it free. The excellent “Against Billy Collins’ Refusal to Read Poems called ‘My Grandfather’s Binoculars’ ” ends, after a curious exploration giving the lie to Collins’ typically facile and jokey remonstrance, with, “the small ships drift by and I want to mark their names,/to enter their fierce ceremony of water for awhile.” <br />
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The same problems apparent in her earlier work also surface in <i>Dear Ghost</i>, , though their evidence is more scant. Questionable (or outright wrong) word choices intrude. Thoroughbred horses aren’t “shot” when they break down, which softens much of the sting and (otherwise) complex rage of “Just the Way Things Are (He Said)”. And, with “The Window Washer”, I have a hard time with the verb wherein a wind “bashes him into his bucket”. These are faults of overwriting, or, more particularly, raising the stakes for a falsely heightened dramatic effect.<br />
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Owen publishes too much (volumes, and poems within volumes), but her best poems, and there are many here (“When I Love Film the Most”, “Residual Lingerie”, “The Dildo Craftsman”, “Swallows’ Nests of Isla de Janitzio, Michoacan”, “The Combination”), dominate the more negligible efforts with their intense lyricism and sharp observational capture.<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-11142041112735378752019-01-04T02:28:00.001-08:002019-01-04T02:28:52.901-08:00Jeff Latosik's DreampadPick up most any poetry journal or magazine from the past 50 years and you’ll meet at least two, possibly 50, poems of mild observation, event or anecdote – the crushed roadside raccoon, the carrot steaming in the pot, grandfather’s rheumy eyes. One reaches the end of the poem with unbearable ennui, and hastens to the next page, fingers crossed for a more enlightening guide. <br />
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Quite a few of Jeff Latosik’s poems start out on (not metrically) similar feet. Moving through a house, playing guitar, sliding a hand inside his parka, checking a bump on his knee. These are openings to poems from his 2018 collection <i>Dreampad</i>, but Latosik has an interesting and inquisitive mind which is able to branch off in many directions from such humble sources. Time and space are the author’s primary considerations. Nothing ever ‘begins’ in the usual generative sense, anyway, and Latosik’s observations are fascinating to follow as they link to concurrent and disparate thought patterns, time loops, and speculative outcomes based on shifts in spatial possibility. This may begin to sound like sci-fi tomfoolery, but only to the unimaginative, obtuse, or stubbornly prosaic. There is much to latch onto here, and, far from the emotional plastic landfill of an Adam Dickinson, Latosik’s ruminations often run parallel with wise sadness, cautious acceptance, and transitive joy.<br />
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The anecdote’s usual goal, in a standard poem, is a set-up for the reassuring – or, at least, hopeful – epiphany, boring and solemn as an Oral Roberts telethon. The religiose comparison is also apt in that the reader is asked to join the writer, through an emotional sales job, in hazy communal faith. Latosik undercuts all that malarkey. “To know that no one and nothing is coming” begins “Oath of an Unaffiliated Boy Scout”. How’s that for immediate black irony? But progression is still possible, through reversal: “To know it will take many years but might not”, “To know there’s no bedrock but still agree”, and “To live, for as long as you can, in the difficulty”. There’s a church I could get used to attending! But what’s a church without good music?<br />
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Latosik’s wayward thought processes wouldn’t seem to be suitable for formal designs, but, moreso that in his first two volumes, <i>Dreampad</i> is notable for internal rhyme, close-shouldered assonantal comparisons, and chiming unrhymed gerunds. As well, he relaxes into a more personal mode, which helps to relieve abstract congestion that tended to mar some of the poems from his first two collections. Here, to illustrate, are just a few passages, but there are many standout poems throughout: “[y]ou’re met,/ as ever, by the range of choices your qualm half fits,/a cache of wants crushed on a touchpad of options/that feel as though they’ve been free-floating//and present forever.” (“Troubleshoot”); “But what I am now can’t/be made real to whoever was once lying there.” (“Silverado”); “It wasn’t a place, but you could go there.” (“The Internet”); “spike the microphones in the grass/so no one sings; and spin again the giant carousel/I must step off to just see anything.” (“The Bright Note”). <br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-62089097886616178002018-12-30T00:26:00.000-08:002018-12-30T00:26:44.362-08:00The Fulsome PhoenixTorpid cinder-biting is over, at least for 2019. I’ve decided to resurrect this blog for the next fifty-two weeks, beginning January 4 (next Friday). A mini-review of 300 to 600 (or so) words will be posted here every Friday during the Year of the Pig. All reviews will concern contemporary Canadian poetry, most of those featured collections published during the past three or four years. <br />
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I’ve decided not to post my usual ‘best of’ yearly review. For whatever reason – bleaker metaphysical state, chance, stepping out for unfamiliar genres and authors – the past year was (mostly) a disastrous reading experience when it came to non-fiction or non-poetry fiction. I’ve always treated the ‘end of’ posts as celebratory recommendations, so, this year, didn’t want to grouse, or, if positive, overpraise or deposit a severely truncated list. If I had to choose one favourite, though, it’d probably be Ivan Turgenev’s wonderful, loosely-linked short-story collection, <i>The Hunting Sketches</i> of 1852 (available under various titles), my edition being the translation of B.G. Guerney.<br />
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Heartfelt Holidays!<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-64793534103089540922018-01-01T23:52:00.000-08:002018-01-01T23:52:06.076-08:00Best Books Read in 2017I read 101 books the past year, liked or loved a little more than half of them, and couldn’t finish another five. I didn’t include journals, rereads, individual poems or poem sequences (e.g.) in collections or online, books I reviewed for journals (or those upcoming), religious tracts left on my front stoop, or technical manuals on how to build bomb shelters, fascinating though those may have been. If it weren’t for time moving faster than Hermes ahead of a Zeus thunderbolt, I’d have included some words on all 50 + books I enjoyed. Here’s a list of my top ten, in order.<br />
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<b>1) Juan Filloy, <i>Caterva</i> (tr. Brendan Riley), 1937.</b> Last year’s fave book was Juan Filloy’s <i>Op Oloop</i>. At two novels, I’ve now completed all of Filloy’s works translated into English. He wrote, in Spanish, another 100 novels. ¡Maldición! <i>Caterva</i>, like his <i>Op Oloop</i>, another wild ride heavily influenced by Joyce’s Ulysses (this one involves seven outcasts on a bizarre peripatetic quest to acquire money by nefarious means), burns the brainpan with lexical mischief and complexity (neologisms, archaisms, vernacular insults, salty witticism, high-toned description, philosophical rumination), and through all the serpentine plot twists and asides, the undertow throws back alternating states of hilarity, tragedy, desperation, and tenderness. Run or drive to your closest book emporium and demand this novel be ordered! <br />
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<b>2) Jenny Erpenbeck, <i>The End of Days</i> (tr. Susan Bernofsky), 2012.</b> A female protagonist is followed through five life stages and stories, each of them ending in death. It’s a merciless look at that puzzle: if we escape a brush with death, will our lives be altered in subsequent years, or does fate leave its calling card at conception (or before)? Existentially, Erpenbeck destroys any safe spaces we’ve cooked up for our own survival. Paradoxically, a sly grace is granted to the woman, despite the unsparing ruminations undertaken in a nursing home. A poetic reader may appreciate the symbolism of names and books, but that’s transcended by an attention to language carved and polished into totemic figurations, stark and unyielding. <br />
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<b>3) Czeslaw Milosz, <i>The Collected Poems 1931-1987</i> (various co-tr.), 1988.</b> Czeslaw Milosz was a ‘fortunate’ poet, spending the first 40 years of his life in some of this planet’s most explosive environs. His move to West Coast academia helped his profile, but it would be hard to credit that fact alone with his outstanding push to recognition when one opens this thick Collected, and encounters page after page of existential inevitability, understated sobering description, images that both startle and drift, and merciless personal inventory.<br />
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<b>4) Silvina Ocampo, <i>Thus Were Their Faces</i> (tr. Daniel Balderston), 1988.</b> Short stories have to work quickly to gain that mesmerizing affect necessary to great fiction. Some stories crash and burn. Others take the opposite route: drab anecdotes not saved by worn-out themes and symbols. Then there are authors like Ocampo. Borges loved Ocampo’s stories, and it’s easy to see why. In this lengthy Selected compilation, the stories chosen are stamped with similar ‘outward’ terrain: familial interaction, and a particular setting with (seemingly) mild conflict. Reading an Ocampo short is like walking into a twilit back alley where one is alone to wonder while noting dark shapes forming in squalid doorways. A character changes – permanently – mid-sentence, but is it because of that character’s ‘development’ (or devolvement), or the observer’s own destruction reflected in the environment he or she sees? These are disturbing stories, and though they condemn humanity, there’s an aching pity and outcry – in every story – for our spiritual limitations.<br />
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<b>5) Orhan Pamuk, <i>A Strangeness in My Mind</i> (tr. Ekin Oklap), 2013.</b> Another epic novel from the author, Pamuk’s latest is set in Istanbul, and covers that city’s geographic, political, economic, and moral changes from the mid 20th century to the present as seen through many eyes. Mevlut – a poor boza (a drink with minimal alcohol content) seller – takes centre street in the story, but Pamuk gives first-person voice to everyone in the extended family, as well to the omnipotent narrator who (as in many of the author’s novels) turns to the reader directly from time to time. The tone is pitch-perfect. In the novel’s most heart-wrenching scenes, facts are delivered neutrally from the narrator, which increases the weight of sadness, that sadness only possible at all from earlier, carefully etched, scenes of dialogue, rumination, and description. Not as dynamic as his <i>Snow</i>, <i>A Strangeness in My Mind</i> is nevertheless another Pamuk masterwork.<br />
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<b>6) Doris Lessing, <i>Five</i>, 1953.</b> A collection of four novellas and one novel, Five shows Lessing’s early development in fiction. The first two selections were hard to plow through. As in her endless novel <i>The Four-Gated City</i> (which I couldn’t finish), the tone is relentlessly bleak and grey. But when Lessing shifts us to Africa, the novellas come alive. A young Caucasian boy has to fight his parents’ expectations for university in Johannesburg, choosing instead to stay in touch with his African friend. The dilemma changes in the other “gold” story from racial to economic, as another Caucasian boy must deal with his prospecting father’s duplicity. But the real show-stopper is the collection’s novel, <i>Hunger</i>, about a destitute African boy who leaves his family’s hut for the city, only to get naively entangled in revolutionary agitation with sexual complications.<br />
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<b>7) Thom Gunn, <i>Collected Poems</i>, 1993.</b> Most every poetry lover knows of T.S. Eliot’s move from St. Louis to England, but not as many may know of the effects of Thom Gunn’s move in the opposite direction, the latter ending up in San Francisco. Some critics attribute Gunn’s early formal verse to his London university days, but frankly gay free verse wasn’t exactly prominent in journals on this side of the Atlantic, either, at that time (1953). Gunn didn’t have any personal conflict between the two approaches, however, and he could shoe a metrical foot with as much vigour and aplomb as he (later) could a more loose and ‘offhand’ (or off-foot?) production. <br />
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<b>8) James Pollock, <i>Sailing to Babylon</i>, 2012.</b> Allusive yet seemingly casual, lyrical yet grounded, Pollock’s poetry collection is infused with a wonderful meditation-event shifting. The shorter poems work – some more than others – on a personal level, yet they also work, like Cavafy’s efforts, to bridge the wide gulf between diurnal monotony and historic import. The long “Quarry Park” is a brilliant meditation on time, regret, fulfillment, and alternate hypothetical histories, as the narrator walks over hills and among trees with his young son. The rhythms match the walking tempos, the energy never flags, and the wisdom comes from both event and reflection.<br />
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<b>9) Lauro Martines, <i>Furies: War in Europe 1450-1700</i>, 2013.</b> A hundred-hectare battlefield of history books depicting World Wars I and II cover the printed landscape, but not nearly as many deal with the wars during the long span between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. (1700, in the title, is a bit misleading.) Rather than featuring political figures, or theorizing on how one conflict led to the next in a seamless flow chart, <i>Furies </i>concentrates instead on the day-to-day brutalities suffered by soldiers and civilians, how religious division enflamed sieges, and how economic expansion and usurpation heightened the carnage. The book also gets into detail regarding moral dilemmas, as when destitute civilians got nabbed by nation-state authorities to fight their own citizens. (Some carried out their instructions to torture; others defected away from, or into, the ‘enemy’ camp.) Grubby and shocking, the narrative goes beyond numbers to look at the atrocities themselves, and the (mostly) stupid, prideful, and greedy reasons they were engendered. Unlike many history books, this one’s well-written. Engaging and succinct. <br />
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<b>10) Charles Willeford, <i>I Was Looking For a Street</i>, 1988.</b> The first of a two-part autobiography from the influential crime novelist, this one focusses on a two-year period in Willeford’s life from ages 16 to 18. The author, after his parents died, and to escape stifling poverty while living with his grandmother, left home to ride the rails during The Depression. Embellishments? Maybe, but who cares? The liveliness of the writing mirrors the harsh circumstances and events on the ground. Despite the hunger, freezing, desperation, depressing sexual encounters, and economic hopelessness, Willeford makes several heartfelt friendships, learns many practical lessons, and is a great manifestation of Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me ...”.<br />
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Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-58473063097284120552017-12-14T17:00:00.000-08:002017-12-14T17:16:41.625-08:00Jason Guriel, Arguing With His Own Straw Man<br />
https://thewalrus.ca/the-case-against-reading-everything/<br />
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A while back, Jason Guriel wrote a grumpy article – his specialty – for <i>The Walrus</i> that castigated other essayists for inserting their own lives into the mix of whatever theme or argument they were trying to outline. A few days ago, he followed up, in kind, with another ‘rule-breaker’, this time an admonition to stear clear of the writing mill injunction to “read widely”. His previous piece had some initial merit. What reader, after all, hasn’t felt irritated after segueing in a few short paragraphs about – say – immigrants’ struggles to adjust to lateral poverty in their new countries – with the addition of language difficulties and confusion – to struggles in the author’s own life as a literary newbie trying to engage socially at a poetry reading? Trouble is, Guriel frequently takes a promising issue, sets up his own misrepresentations like tenpins three feet from the bowler, and smashes them without having to worry too much about aim. He argued against the critic’s attempt at street cred by way of personal anecdote tied to the book, movie, or CD that the review supposedly highlighted. But Guriel’s ‘proof’ weighed heavily on examples from the online world of rock crit and celebrity gossip. Rock crit, by nature, is subjective, often lighthearted, light on literary concentration, tonally hyperbolic, and personality-driven. Usually, readers <i>prefer</i> this approach to popular entertainment. But Guriel tries to plane off-the-cuff concert reviews onto the literary stage, with disastrously inappropriate results. Quoting Woolf, or even dragging in Pauline Kael and Dorothy Parker, means nothing when the object of ridicule is a reviewer of Celine Dion. Besides, there’ve always been narcissistic reviewers of pop culture. Teh interwebz, of course, has accelerated this, and has made it more accessible, but, against Guriel’s contention, nothing fundamental has changed. Music mags and newspaper box weeklies from yesteryear also featured self-promoting reviewers displaying their epiphanies when playing Grand Funk Railroad under the auspices of speckled black lights and lysergic acid. That’s why the venues in which their thoughts were splashed were called “rags”. You’d leave them on the bus after skimming the reviews for a laugh.<br />
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The new essay doesn’t even have a legitimate starter. “Read widely” is belittled even though Guriel is unsure of what it means. That doesn’t stop his assumptions (and resulting rebuffs), though. His <i>modus operandi</i> is to use very little evidence on which to peg his argument, and what evidence is used is conveniently suspect, if not, as here, ridiculous. To wit: novelist and critic Aleksandar Hemon is chided for a tweet (yes, Guriel’s entire argument is based, directly, from one tweet), in which the “hapless omnivore” (Guriel’s words), reads (in Hemon’s words) “compulsively – preferably a book of my choice, but anything would do. I’ve read, with great interest, nutritional information on cereal boxes. I regularly read wedding announcements in <i>The New York Times</i>.” Well, as Guriel himself wrote in an essay from his <i>The Pigheaded Soul</i>, “who <i>doesn’t</i> hate that guy?” When writers advise other writers to “read widely”, they don’t often mean to “read indiscriminately”. Also, to read widely doesn’t mean to “read everything”, as the unfortunate essay title has it. I realize that Guriel probably isn’t responsible for that click-bait enticer, but he <i>does</i> angle toward that hyperbolic end-point of the continuum when quoting Hemon, and when naming disparate authors later in the essay. Total assumption on my part, here, but most “read widely” advisors are probably aware that doing so still means only a waft of possible depth and breadth in the reader’s variety of literary experience contrasted to what has been recorded in the archived repository of words. But that seems an even greater argument for wide reading, to break open a window or two even though it means only seeing an extra meadow on Earth in a universe whose spatial possibilities we can’t comprehend. And isn’t it ironic that two of the “read widely” authors Guriel mentions – Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King – are literary genre and hard niche genre writers, respectively? Obsessive authors – the kind Guriel prefers – have read widely for many reasons which have later helped their vision and craft: to find out what has been done so as not to repeat the process, thereby becoming DOA; to find out what one (usually an author in her or his early ‘career’ stage) likes/dislikes or is good/bad at; to gain information out of simple curiosity, as well as for informally targetted research purposes; to take on different styles for possible use in their own writing. To this last point: Guriel is wrong about the uselessness of exploring different styles, as if this was a waste of time, or worse, a confusing avenue of approach. Would Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i> have been possible if he’d been a hedgehog instead of a fox? How about Robert Lowell’s career arc? One might think of Emily Dickinson as narrowly focussed, but she was a wide-ranging, voracious reader, exploring many movements and genres. This is the further irritation in Guriel’s insistence on narrow (narrow-minded?) obsession as against diversity and expansion: an author doesn’t <i>decide</i> one way or another. There are great writers who’ve had a fairly limited range of background reading, but (and I don’t include farm manuals or billboards here) most authors of any renown have been plugged into a wide range of material <i>for its own sake</i>. “Read widely” is advice I used to give aspiring writers, as well. (Notice how I insinuated myself into this, which is, of course, a Guriel no-no?). But it’s pretty useless. Writers who are excited about writing are usually excited about reading, and variously so, whether the books involved are high or low, poetry or novels or non-fiction, comedy or tragedy, politics or kitchen-sink miniatures, history or fantasy. (There will always be preferences, and even, yes, obsessions, but that doesn't cancel out variety.) If you have to tell someone to read widely, or even to read at all, you’re probably telling them to take their cod liver oil.<br />
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An author can eventually burrow deeper into one or two areas more exclusively, of course. In fact, I agree somewhat with Guriel here. But then he goes off the rails again by his focus on one author at a time. Great advice for a biographer. Pretty stultifying for a creative writer.<br />
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(Guriel gets excited by Strunk- & White-like rules. I purposely included, above, the em-dashes and semi-colons because of this. I guess he hates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose, or indeed, just about any eighteenth-century novel. I even caught a mid-sentence "however" in Orhan Pamuk's latest masterpiece, and I'm only on page 99!)<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-72725801511483807322016-12-18T00:46:00.001-08:002016-12-18T00:46:34.391-08:00Stendhal's Scarlet and BlackRomanticism remains a literary football, its detractors, on different teams, digging leather-bound products from dust-filmed closets and kicking them all over their studies. The excesses of confessionalism are sometimes traced back to earnest lyrics by Wordsworth. Soft-lens adventure yarns are damned as low-middlebrow James Fenimore Cooper excitations. But Romantics – even those in the first-wave of 1789-1824 – developed specific obsessions that were faithfully adhered to, even throughout Realism, until the great artistic tumults of 1913. One of those obsessions, of course, was a worshipper’s belief in the power and value of intense feeling. And when the hyper-rational George Bernard Shaw calls Shelley’s <i>The Cenci</i> one of the great tragedies in English drama, one can only imagine how passionate must have been the views of its adherents back in the day when Napoleon was busting heads. <br />
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Stendhal’s masterpiece, the novel <i>Scarlet and Black</i> (most often translated as <i>The Red and the Black</i>), came out in 1830 when the first onrush of Romanticism’s emotional and individual force had lessened somewhat, though its aesthetic dominance, while not monolithic, was unchallenged. Stendhal’s genius was a combination of a unique style – wildly at odds with the descriptive flourishes the dominant movement required – with Romantic passion bordering, at times, on melodrama. That emotional drive, though, was pestered by an ironic view, finely placed, on the proceedings. (Romantics – Byron and maybe a few others excepted – hate satire.) And that style must have been a brave approach: plain and without immersive symbolism, but set in complex subordinate clauses mellifluously rendered, and with a psychological acuity both brilliant and detailed among variously motivated class-positioned characters.<br />
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Well before this point, it’s traditional for the reviewer to give a plot synopsis, but I hate those kinds of reviews. The biggest reason is that it destroys narrative surprise (though if it’s a postmodern novel, that’s usually unimportant, even encouraged). Another reason is that even in plot-heavy novels, the story is just a framework to hold more important features of the work. It’s here I smile, because the preceding few sentences of meta-commentary is a lead-in to Stendhal – that trailblazing out-of-time realist – as whispering Lawrence Sterne, the French author sneaking in one paragraph, a now famous one, which operates as a shocking narrative interruption, an <i>l’art du roman</i>. I include it here, prefaced by most of the preceding paragraph:<br />
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“[T]hese attach themselves with obstinate tenacity to some particular set, and if that set ‘makes good’ all the best things society can give are showered upon them. Woe to the studious man who does not belong to any set; even his minor doubtful successes will be held against him, and superior virtue will triumph over him by robbing him of these.<br />
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Why, my good sir, a novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror reflects the mire, and you blame the mirror! Blame rather the high road on which the puddle lies, and still more the inspector of roads and highways who lets the water stand there and the puddle form.”<br />
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The novel’s long chronicle reaches its exquisite finalé in the drawn-out prison scene, Julien a presursor for Camus’ Merseault in <i>L’Etranger</i>. As much as I love the latter novel, and realizing that Camus’ first-person anti-hero was neutrally positioned, Stendhal’s protagonist’s clash with the cleric, his father, and the exchanges with his two visiting loves, is elemental, frenetic, yet almost documentarily conceived, pitiless yet moving, eerie, funereal. It makes the similarly-plotted <i>L’Etranger</i> climax seem desiccated and didactic by contrast.<br />
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(My edition was wonderfully, painstakingly, translated by Margaret R.B. Shaw.)<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5705212129043604002.post-85378370751521575142016-12-17T01:37:00.000-08:002016-12-17T01:37:05.048-08:00Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta's Fabulous Fictions“First there was the Word ...” Even if not a Biblicist, most have heard this phrase (from John?). Flattering to literary types, when thought of as a collaboration between, say, poets and creators within a different artistic field, the words usually come first. Schubert composed lieder to Goethe’s poetry, for example. The relation of words to painting, however, has occasioned a reverse sequence. Ashbery, among other poets, often uses a particular painting or drawing as a starting point for excited speculation. That relationship continues with veteran short story maker Leon Rooke and painter Tony Calzetta, in this year’s <i>Fabulous Fictions</i>. The latter provided a set of typically vivid abstract objects floating from or over a simple background of night sky or amoeba-like flourishes which evoke a curious feeling of neutral pulsing with menacing foreboding. It’s a perfect fit for Rooke, whose stories, here and elsewhere, trick us with uproarious dialogue, monologue, and plot (such as it can be in these particular flash fictions), so that the underbelly of human-besotted action creates shock by contrast. “Bank President’s Address To Minions On The Eve Of The Release Of The Annual Financial Report Showing Profits Heretofore Unseen In The World” shows Rooke’s strength to best effect. At first, the story seems like it could travel down the typical path of simple political denunciation, but the president’s speech, without seeming to adjust its register, incorporates personal failure, and the two narratives are interwoven expertly without the speaker’s remorse for either experience. A more immediate justice is served in other stories. “Son Of Scroll”, in what must be less than two hundred words, proceeds by way of amoral (immoral?) interviewer probing the life of another outsider now part of the ‘backwards’ island community. But it’s the interrogator who proves backward during the witty ending (which I won’t spoil). <i>Fabulous Fictions</i> is a delightfully insouciant production from The Porcupine’s Quill.<br />
Brian Palmuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05850783426719352543noreply@blogger.com0