<\/p>\n
Distillo Deepwater Vee <\/p>\n Distillo<\/em> is Basma Kavanagh\u2019s debut poetry collection; Deepwater Vee<\/em> launches Melanie Siebert\u2019s career in poetry. Kavanagh now lives in Kentville, NS, while Siebert has lived recently in Victoria, BC. Both poets are interested in weather, rivers, latitude, longitude, forests, flora, and fauna.<\/p>\n Kavanagh opens her collection with a catalogue of different types of rainfalls, and the subject is suitable to her style, which emphasizes vivid verbs: Her descriptions spring forth or rain down the page, so to speak. \u201cImbris Delapidato\u201d describes rain that\u2019s \u201cnot a true rain,\u201d but rather, \u201ca dense shower accompanied by strong, gusting winds.\u201d The poet then gives her definition: \u201cCold winds fling this rain in brittle handfuls \/ against the house, fling it stinging against \/ skin. Gravelly bursts invert umbrellas, \/ \u2026 zing \/ pepper the face\u2026.\u201d \u201cPluvia Pertendo\u201d is, as it turns out, \u201ca true rain, light but steady\u2026\u201d Kavanagh also terms this rain \u201cbreathy chatter\u201d that, in the backyard, \u201cinvites a rush of feather-fluffing among \/ the kinglets and the sparrows tucked \/ into spruces half-hiding from the water\u2026.\u201d Here her observational detail supplements her verb-based insight.<\/p>\n There is something Hopkins-esque in such writing, or, closer to home, one could say that Margaret Avison\u2019s\u2014or Peter Sanger\u2019s\u2014spiky verbs and Nature-watching lyrics are in evidence. But there are also concrete poems\u2014in the shapes of fish\u2014that seem to follow Dylan Thomas, though without his wasteful\u2014if sonorous\u2014surrealism. While Kavanagh\u2019s debut is assured and remarkable, the naturalist impulse is a tad d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em>. Nature is the perennial prime subject of our English-Canadian poetry, and so it must be tackled from fresh tangents if it is to make for compelling reading.<\/p>\n The simple poem, \u201cRice Root,\u201d does seem to break from the mould of wilderness observation, principally by assuming the form of a shaman\u2019s chant: \u201cSkunk lily \/ rotting-meat lily, \/ Purple-bronze fritillary \/ keep-it-living lily, \/ Rice-root fritillary, \/ feeds-the-people lily. \/ Black sarana lily, \/ cooked-with-oil lily, \/ Xukwem lily; \/ scatter-the-grains lily \/ for \/ next year\u2019s lily.\u201d Another strong poem is \u201cBear,\u201d which seems to describe the animal, but then begins to comment on what is bearable\u2014or not: \u201cEndure the nasty fug \/ of something lumbering around \/ while half-pretending it isn\u2019t there.\u201d Occasionally, what could be a \u201cwet carpet \u2026 inflates \/ into hundreds of pounds of muscle \/ and fat with a fierce face.\u201d<\/p>\n Kavanagh finds her most original strength when she is not only describing an element of nature, but is also thinking about the deeper meaning of that phenomenon, discovering its magic or its strangeness vis-\u00e0-vis human experience. See her \u201cHush\u201d: \u201cA thrush swims its voice down \/ through air, casts a weightless \/ net of notes to float at dusk.\u201d It is lovely; yet, one wonders what this moment means for the speaker. Aside from quibbles, Kavanagh is off to a strong start.<\/p>\n And the same can be said for Siebert. She has explored rivers and struck camp in various quarters of the original North West Territories (which included Alberta and Saskatchewan) and she studied creative writing in Victoria, BC. Her poetry is, as with Kavanagh\u2019s work, rooted in nature observation, but she is less disciplined\u2014wilder\u2014with leaps and curves and switchbacks, with her ideas and memories moving about as unpredictably as a flooding river: \u201cRiver of mixed tongues and guns traded west, frayed edge of the muscle-old herds chewing the hills, fringe between grassland and aspen parkland. The river opaque in all seasons, cartilage, cash flow.\u201d \u201cFlow\u201d is really the style of these lyrics; they run; they jig: \u201cNorth Sask wobbles into the underbrush voicebox. \/ Acid rain trucks in from the tar sands. \/ Two weeks ago stormwater \/ overflowed sewage into the river.\u201d The power of such writing is that one seems to experience the observations simultaneously with the speaker. But the rush of images is not always clear: Does a river wobble\u2014or warble\u2014into a voicebox? Is it easy to visualize acid rain arriving in trucks? Is the description of the stormwater and the sewage ineffectively prosaic? Etc.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Post-Apothecary When All My Disappointments Came At Once <\/p>\n Post-Apothecary<\/em> is Sandra Ridley\u2019s second book of poetry; When All My Disappointments Came At Once<\/em> is Todd Swift\u2019s eighth verse collection. Ridley witnesses medical violence; Swift muses on infertility. Both poets meditate on doctoring\u2014or therapy\u2014and its limits.<\/p>\n Ridley applies the \u201cinnovative\u201d poetics of disjuncture\u2014wrenched syntax, agrammatical statement, and a teasing refusal of lyrical utterance. One is invited to experience confusion and alienation; to feel the weird turmoil of the heroine; one is asked to enter into her suffering, her trauma. The result is postmodern, feminist Gothic. The victim is first viewed as \u201ca note hung over a bed, a metal trolley, & swinging doors,\u201d as \u201cReeled. \/ Rocked. A wet tangle of hair,\u201d as \u201cmaking it all up. \/ Can\u2019t possibly see through a retinal slit, out the dilated corner of.\u201d The image recalls slasher films such as Psycho <\/em>(1960) or Halloween II<\/em> (1981) or I Spit On Your Grave<\/em> (1978). But it also looks back to classic victims of male repression, such as Hamlet\u2019s Ophelia, but also to the female author of one of the great horror stories, namely Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein<\/em> (1818).<\/p>\n Then again, this narrative lyric suite is inspired in part by the author\u2019s tour of the Saskatchewan Hospital, a psychiatric institution. (Electro-shock therapy, used a century ago, recalls Frankenstein\u2019s monster being animated thanks to bolts of lightning sizzling through its dead flesh.) Post-Apothecary <\/em>straddles, in its very title, eras and \u201ccures\u201d; it could be \u201cnow\u201d or it could be \u201cthen.\u201d One poem mentions a \u201cswitchboard\u201d\u2014seemingly in this century; another references a \u201ccorset\u201d\u2014perhaps the Victorian era. Another poem offers medieval medicine: \u201cBlack bile & melancholy before a sponge soaked with mandrake\u201d; but the last poem insists that the patient, merely playfully named (one hopes) \u201cRidley,\u201d has been given \u201cmethedrine 10 mg IV.\u201d<\/p>\n The time-shifting mergers of medications (apothecaries) underlines\u2014as do the epigraphs from five women poets\u2014the feminist analysis at work (or play) here: Women victims of male monsters are often further abused by male medical practices, from the application of laudanum or \u201cfaith in morphine\u201d to \u201chalothane\u201d (used in the deadly crimes committed by Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo in Ontario in the 1990s). This good collection of poems wonders whether there\u2019s any real difference between a male doctor and Jack the Ripper, or between sexual \u201cinterference\u201d and the \u201cintervention\u201d that is supposed to heal its harm.<\/p>\n Swift\u2019s poetry is also concerned with the collision between biology and medicine, but is more diffused and more poignant than is necessarily the case for Ridley, for he isn\u2019t writing a story, but, in a sense, a memoir: These poems treat his and his wife\u2019s psychological responses to the news that he is infertile, that, together, for all their love, they cannot have a child. That fact explains the elegiac tone of the book as well as the piercing quality of individual poems. However, never mind the incitements of the verse; the collection is excitingly excellent.<\/p>\n See the opening stanzas of \u201cSeven Good Fridays\u201d: \u201cApril takes vinegar once a year\u2014 \/ Easter I turned forty, gave up youth \/ And reckless afternoons endowed with darkness \/\/ Being twenty is like being a millionaire\u2026. \/\/ I should have come into the world in summer \/\/ Not shadowing the saviour like a blinking twin \/ Upstaging his broken promise on the skull \/ With a spring birth, small, infertile.\u201d Born and raised in Montreal, but now teaching creative writing at Kingston University, at London, UK, Swift is steeped in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Yet, he is accessible, succinct, and clear. In one poem, the speaker and his wife build a snowman\u2014or, for them, a \u201cchild,\u201d enjoying the experience of being parents of a sort. But, by morning, it is \u201ctrampled down\u2014 \/ Particles, bits and chunks, a rumour \/ Of what it has been to us: a snow-child \/ Killed by real kids, cruel to snow as rain.\u201d Here is grief-tinged beauty: \u201cStay, lie with me when I die \/ and keep me now I am dead\u2026. \/\/ Fold your arms around what stays \/ when older forms of love have fled.\u201d Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling The Essential Robert Gibbs <\/p>\n Since 2005, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, in its Laurier Poetry Series (LPS), has issued selected poems, intro\u2019d by an editor, with an afterword frequently by the subject poet, thus producing a multicultural roster of studies of poets ranging from Dionne Brand to Fred Wah. A new LPS entry is Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling<\/em>, selected and interpreted by Griffin Poetry Prize recipient A.F. Moritz. Halifax\u2019s own Brian Bartlett helmed a choice of Cape Breton poet, Don Domanski\u2019s work for LPS in 2007.<\/p>\n Now Bartlett has done the same for Br\u2019er New Brunswicker, Robert Gibbs (1930), but for a rival \u2018canon,\u2019 namely, the Porcupine\u2019s Quill-published Essential Poets Series (EPS), which has assembled verse from the likes of Don Coles, James Reaney, and P.K. Page, a fairly Establishment club (with incipient nods to Margaret Avison and Richard Outram). However, The Essential Robert Gibbs<\/em> selects a poet who is not as anthologized as others in the EPS, but who is also not as avant-garde<\/em> as are several of those in the LPS (cf. Steve McCaffrey, Nicole Brossard, etc.). Yet, his work is remarkable; Bartlett\u2019s choice allows us a fresh auditing.<\/p>\n A prize-winning poet himself, Bartlett presents Gibbs as a metaphysical poet with earthy touches, with a ken for the dense, intense nature scrutiny of Brit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and as one who is kin to U.S.-U.K. egghead, T.S. Eliot and homeboy bard, Alden Nowlan. Bartlett highlights Gibbs\u2019s pursuit of \u201cgrace,\u201d but misses his interest in \u201cunderstanding,\u201d human experience, with an ear to the Bible and an eye for the world. In cadence and content, Gibbs recollects the ex-cathedra<\/em> naturalism of Yankee poet, Robinson Jeffers as well as the Anglo-Saxon \u2018Beat\u2019 impulses of Canuck poet Earle Birney. Let\u2019s let lines speak for themselves: \u201cLight trims the white edges of the bay, \/ Limestone licked clean by salt-loving tongues\u201d; \u201cWhatever the lighthouse means \u2026 flaring round \/ off-beat with the foghorn \u2026 \/ in this watery envelope \/ where black-backed gulls work their wings \/ indifferently\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Also powerful are people-portraits: \u201cLittlejohn Tow tramping the dockyards \/ caught a Liverpudlian cold from a tart \/ in a Merseyside house \u2026 wished himself \/ home in Lincolnshire eating suet \/ pudding from his mam\u2019s hand or selling \/ bullseyes to nippers in his dad\u2019s shop.\u201d<\/p>\n While Bartlett reads Gibbs as a land-and-sea-anchored intellectual (yes, a Maritime clich\u00e9), U.S.-born Moritz looks at fellow Yank-by-birth, Fetherling (1949-), as an outsider belle-lettriste<\/em>, as an \u201calley cat\u201d or flane\u00fbr.<\/em> Moritz\u2019s characterization recalls Norman Mailer\u2019s notions of the \u201cWhite Negro,\u201d but also Robert Browning\u2019s surreptitious poet, his \u201crecording chief-inquisitor.\u201d In his Afterword, Fetherling links African-American jazz musicians and Russian occultists to his own subtle subversiveness as an urban hermit, one who is dangerous because he is invisible and liberated because he is poor. Yet, there is a strain of George Grant-derived Red Toryism in Fetherling\u2019s work, a worry about jingoistic warring and consumerist whoring, ills worsened by mass ignorance of art and history. In his jittery poet\u2019s prose, Moritz sees affinities between Fetherling and the Beats, Baudelaire, and a set of bookish scholar-poets more obligated to libraries than to life. Yet, Fetherling also resembles the U.S. \u2018Hippy\u2019 poet Richard Brautigan, but with a lot less zaniness and a lot more zeal\u2014for examining art and archives.<\/p>\n Fetherling has many good poems, but Singer, An Elegy<\/em> (2004), is a Patersonian masterpiece. Moritz grants excerpts: \u201cHe stopped when the music stopped \/ stopped when the night stopped\u201d; \u201cMemory is the last surviving document. \/ Hearsay evidence is all I hear said\u201d; \u201chis style was more like Whitman, a machine man \/ who liked to get his hands dirty learning \/\/ how things worked\u201d; \u201cI\u2019ve learned from myself by myself\u201d; \u201cI see him stoking the furnace at five a.m. \/ sending the heat of Hell up through ducts to the hell above, \/\/ then using the handle of the shovel to slam \/ the cast-iron door in the face of circumstance.\u201d<\/p>\n Explore the LPS and the EPS; sample Moritz\u2019s Fetherling and Bartlett\u2019s Gibbs. Set excellence against\u2014or beside\u2014excellence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Undark Marrow, Willow Subversive Sonnets <\/p>\n Sandy Pool\u2019s second verse collection, Undark<\/em> is an \u201coratorio\u201d about the thousands of women employed, 1900-1960, to paint luminous\u2014and poisonous\u2014radium on time-pieces, dials, etc., to set them glowing in-the-dark. The industry crippled and killed its workers. Once ingested or absorbed, the radioactive paint dissolved bones and tissue.<\/p>\n Pool\u2019s elegy for these women is a narrative lyric suite\u2014and, given the poet\u2019s background in theatre\u2014a series of poems for voices. Her women (and one man\u2014the inventor of the radiant, deadly paint, namely Sabin Von Sochocky, 1882-1928) are not just spectres of workers, moms, lovers, trial witnesses, and patients. They are also legends (Sappho and Hatsheput) or myth (Nox). Radium itself is personified as Undark, \u201ca propaganda radio personality.\u201d Nominated for the 2010 Governor-General\u2019s Award in poetry, and interested in experimentation, Pool is taking a doctorate in poetics at the University of Calgary. Three styles dominate this book: square bracket-studded pages that seem to represent static-interrupted speech; 2) choppy lyrics utilizing unrhymed, enjambed couplets; 3) italicized prose-poetry that allow for sensual breaks from the more intellectual or studious writing.<\/p>\n Images are startling and effective: \u201cHere is her \/ body, elegantly tired. Stomach \/\/ full of flashlights.\u201d Statements can be insightful: \u201cIn the end we do what love tells us\u2014 \/ we get up again and again and again \/\/ until we can\u2019t.\u201d Some lines, though striking, want a graduate-student readership: \u201cWho says we want to live in this \/ world anyways? Ruinous lexicons pounding \/\/ our ears.\u201d Another difficulty is, the women are never differentiated. They seem a single iridescent, (undead) cadaver.<\/p>\n This book should be received as its subtitle suggests\u2014as a performance work. Staged, with the appropriate John Adams-style music, it could be magnificent. (One design note: the book cover deliberately imitates the dangers of working with radium. It uses traces of a glowing substance that will rub off on your fingers. Handle with care!).<\/p>\n Marrow, Willow<\/em> by Maureen Hynes, is a plainer work of contemporary Canadian verse than is the case for Pool\u2019s Undark<\/em>. It is standard free verse, intended to communicate the imaginative transformation of everyday objects and doings\u2014including sightseeing. There is no thesis to this work beyond visual presentation and narrative explication.<\/p>\n \u201cLupin Pods\u201d starts strongly: \u201cJust remembering the Atlantic island, the strange \/ coldness enters my chest again. All night \/ a wild keening over the tunnelled and treeless island\u201d: Hynes gives us the flavour of the place succinctly. But the next lines waste this intensity: \u201cmy hotel door rattling in its frame, the rain drumming \/ at the window, the wind let loose and wailing\u2026.\u201d The problem with losing a sense of cadence is that verse turns into prose\u2014and prose has more room for clich\u00e9 than does verse. Hynes\u2019 ghazals are more successful, for she is forced to be spare in diction: \u201cLast night, the single broken howl. O wolf, \/ where is your pack? As numerous and inaudible as the stars. \/\/ No stove, no music except my own tuneless hum and bang. \/ two feet and a sore thumb.\u201d<\/p>\n The late, great Welsh-Canadian poet John Thompson touches on Hynes\u2019 ghazals (just as he does a couplet or two in Pool\u2019s work), but that\u2019s laudable, for it engenders helpful Dichtung<\/em>\u2014or Concentration: \u201cClaim this lake for a week, encircle it with footsteps, \/ wood smoke. If fear arises, let it be autumn-lit. \/\/ Mid-afternoon, the leaves\u2019 green glow veils the bedroom window, \/ Promise of amber and red before full fade.\u201d Hynes has a lot of talent, but may need a little editing, to author poetry of consistent strength.<\/p>\n The very fine Jamaican-Canadian poet Olive Senior has written a lyrical endorsement for sister Jam-Can poet Pamela Mordecai\u2019s newest book, Subversive Sonnets<\/em>. And so have I. But here\u2019s what Senior says: \u201cSubversive Sonnets is clever, witty, insightful and linguistically acrobatic\u2026. A courageous, affirmative, and\u2014yes\u2014entertaining read.\u201d Senior is right, and Mordecai\u2019s sonnets are subversive in both form and content\u2014and exultantly so.<\/p>\n The Other Side of Ourselves <\/p>\n Darren Bifford\u2019s debut collection, Wedding In Fire Country<\/em>, features lyrics that are somehow deliberately recklessly ramshackle with odd juxtapositions of danger or ugliness, set against the beautiful and the romantic.<\/p>\n Take the title poem: An image of water bombers as \u201cbuffalo \/ bellying the lake, which they slurp sloppily,\u201d leads to the speaker\u2019s recognition that a forest fire is encroaching on a wedding: \u201cSmoke chugs into more of itself darkly enough to scare \/ my little cousin who wonders about our safety.\u201d Soon, however, rain damps down the distant fire, but also the bride, \u201chuddled in your white fine dress,\u201d and \u201cour friends \/\u2026 throwing wet confetti.\u201d This moment is chased by a Native-sounding rumination about the metaphorical linkages among skies, hills, deer, and buffalo. Then, the poet finally relaxes into lyricism: \u201cthe wind is the fury and the author \/ of the way your hair flirts by not staying in one place \/\/ but flits above your eyebrows and ears. \/ I wish \u2026 \/ to be the courter of your hair \/\/ and the comforter of your whorled ears.\u201d<\/p>\n The narrative poem is full of shifts that dare disconnection\u2014and sometimes achieve disconnection. Thus, the last two-line sentence of the three-page poem fails to resolve the various metaphors that the poet has indulged: \u201cFor tonight we\u2019ve sojourned \/ close in that place where the fire\u2019s herd freely roams.\u201d But one likes the risks that Bifford runs. He\u2019s a breathtakingly break-neck poet, trying to achieve the right combo of easy-going expression and startling image, out of declared homage to the late, great Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, but also some undeclared absorption of U.S. poets Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens (who also fuse plainness and strangeness).<\/p>\n Raised in Summerland, B.C., and residing now in Montreal, Bifford also reminds one of the similarly rambunctious lyricist Irving Layton (1912-2006) and his technique of marrying the cantankerous and the graceful.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most successful passage in this first book is the poet\u2019s intense imagination of horses (a recurrent animal image in the collection): \u201cSagebrush and the bony-legged horses. \/ The night sky and sloppy black moans of horses. \/ Clear morning and dew-shine. Wet hides of horses. \/ Sudden summer storms tremor through horses\u2026. \/ The long brown hair of the girl and long brown manes of horses\u2026.\u201d This lyric moment \u201crocks\u201d: it has gusto, but also concentrated accuracy of recollected observation. The poet has looked at horses and thought of horses and knows what he is celebrating. Other lyrics where he is just as sure, offer the same zing. Late in the collection, Bifford\u2019s persona muses on \u201cwhatever great leap forward I attempt\u201d: One trusts that he will make those \u201cleaps\u201d continuously, for when they are realized, they enthral.<\/p>\n Rob Taylor\u2019s debut book is The Other Side of Ourselves<\/em>. Issued in 2011, the collection establishes Taylor\u2019s wonky fusion of the plain vernacular voice of Al Purdy and the funky, anti-conventional stance of U.S. poet Richard Brautigan. Even so, Taylor\u2014like Bifford\u2014ends up sounding a bit like the late, great Jewish-Canadian poet Layton. This likeness is most apparent in the weird, grotesque, darkly comic poem, \u201cNothing against Art [Garfunkle]\u201d: \u201cI\u2019d sucker punch the guy \/ if I ever got the chance, \/ really rattle his skull \/ and send what\u2019s left of his \/ ridiculous, frizzy hair \/ skittering into the air.\u201d The problem is, Garfunkel\u2019s \u201ccareer is the echo of \/ someone else\u2019s song\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Layton\u2019s satiric ire is usually inspired by greater dislikes. Still, it is good that Taylor attempts a similar attitude. Then again, his poem, \u201cThe Diver,\u201d seems to shout out to a famous, early Layton poem, \u201cThe Swimmer\u201d: \u201cPerhaps he is looking down at the pane of water \/ and imagining what his body will do to it. \/\/ I don\u2019t know or ask or gasp as he falls.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in Port Moody, B.C., and now resident in Vancouver, Taylor won the 2010 Alfred G. Bailey Prize for an unpublished poetry manuscript. This resulting book is rich with promise. He\u2019s still finding his voice, his way. But anyone who can write a good poem\u2014as Taylor does\u2014about writing bad poetry\u2014is a poet of talent.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Lake Diary Little Timothy in Heaven <\/p>\n The Lake Diary<\/em> is avant-garde and jazz guitarist Arthur Bull\u2019s second homey collection of poetry. It\u2019s a quiet book, full of Zen riffs on \u201cnature \/ longing \/ isolation \/ calm.\u201d Bull is from Toronto and travels the world, playing gigs, but lives in Digby Neck, NS. He\u2019s grounded there\u2014and in his experiences of his family home on Lake Ontario.<\/p>\n There\u2019s zero pretentiousness in Bull, no sloppy overreaching for \u201cF\/X.\u201d At the lake, the \u201cfirst thing \/ dawn does is pour pink \/ over the whole surface.\u201d On another occasion, on the lake, his speaker loses his hat. The event is ironic, for the hat bears the slogans, \u201cAmistad Freedom,\u201d and so, like a fugitive slave, it has stealthily escaped the speaker\u2019s ownership. Bull\u2019s brief bio states his \u201clove\u201d for nature, \u201cChinese literature, and jazz,\u201d and these motifs recur and resonate throughout the slim, reader-friendly book. It is amiable because it has no ambition beyond perceiving the self in the moment. Looking at a red maple reflected in the blue lake, Bull\u2019s persona says, \u201cI took those colours \/ renaming them \/\/ vermilion and cobalt \/ to dress my sorrow in.\u201d Image and thought compact to illustrate profound self-criticism.<\/p>\n In spring, we discover that \u201csentences \/ come apart \/\/ In our hands \/\/ And reveal the hidden \/ Syntax of our bodies \/\/ Scattering \/\/ I, garden, thee, \/ Glove, eyes, brows, \/\/ Tender \/\/ Everywhere, \/ between.\u201d It takes a special eye, to see that \u201cThe fishplant nestled in the woods \/ could be a temple.\u201d There\u2019s a Bohemian, Beat sensibility at play in Bull, and it is attractive, suggesting the power of art to establish magical equilibrium: \u201cI have only \/ to curl the eaves with my pencil, \/\/ To bend the tower\u2019s rulered lines \/ a little toward China.\u201d There is sorrow in his world: \u201cMy guitar \/ leans silently on the bookcase. \/\/ Its strings haven\u2019t vibrated \/ for weeks now.\u201d But there\u2019s also healing: \u201cMore and more \/ I have come to value only \/ whatever sees us through.\u201d Bull\u2019s simplicity and down-to-the-bone spirituality are welcome inaugurations for MMXIII, The Year of the Snake (in Chinese astrology).<\/p>\n Robert Cooperman\u2019s poetic career has concentrated on the narrative lyric sequence\u2014the book or chapbook that tells a story, in free verse, utilizing multiple perspectives and speakers. The Brooklyn-born, Denver-based, Jewish-American poet is singular in writing accessible chronicles, in vivid verse, canvassing everything from bios of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats to tales of Colorado \u201cgold fever\u201d and the Grateful Dead. His newest narrative-in-verse is Little Timothy in Heaven<\/em>, which addresses Christianity\u2019s bloodlust anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n Set in medieval Angelsea, presumably in England, the story tells of the horrendous repercussions that befall local Jews when the stabbed and slashed body of a little rascal boy, Timothy, is found in a well in the Ghetto. As is typical in Cooperman\u2019s lyric narratives, \u201cinnocence\u201d and \u201cguilt\u201d are both easy to attribute and tricky to establish, so that, while atrocity is righteously identified and condemned, our general, human invidiousness is also witnessed.<\/p>\n Once Timmy\u2019s mother, Griselda, blames a young Jewish woman, Rebecca, for her son\u2019s murder, show-trials and show-executions (lynchings, really) follow quickly.<\/p>\n Rebecca testifies to trying to save Timmy from a town filled with \u201cmore cutpurses \/ than rats, brothel owners \/ who\u2019d turn Timothy into a rare gift \/ for a lord or lady of vile tastes.\u201d For her troubles, Rebecca reels from \u201ca fist\u2014a Crusader\u2019s \/ battering ram \/ smashing my face.\u201d Upon her hanging, \u201csome wag\u201d rips her shirt, \u201cgauzy \/ as a spiderweb, to display her nakedness.\u201d The \u201cgirl\u2019s writhings (are) \/ more entertaining than Outremer\u2019s houris.\u201d While her nakedness pleases \u201cthe pack\u2019s wrath (that) grows like a thousand \/ angry beehives disturbed by thoughtless boys,\u201d her father and the rabbi, also hanged, perish too quickly for the mob\u2019s pleasure.<\/p>\n By the end, we know Timmy\u2019s murderer is not Jewish, but the point is also made that religious belief is too often just a ruse to permit deceit, killing, plunder, and rape. Cooperman\u2019s text is just-right in the writing and right-on in reasoning. 11\/22\/63 <\/p>\n 11\/22\/63<\/em> asks, what if John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th<\/sup> President of the United States of America, hadn\u2019t died in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963? In bestselling horror-novelist Stephen King\u2019s account of events, the assassination is thwarted, at the last possible instant, by a time-travelling, English teacher, Jacob Epping, but not without incidents, coincidences, and consequences.<\/p>\n The most interesting aspect of this 850-page book is not the subject, which has been treated in works as varied as Don DeLillo\u2019s novel, Libra<\/em> (1988), Norman Mailer\u2019s true-crime meditation, Oswald\u2019s Tale: An American Mystery<\/em> (1995), and William Manchester\u2019s authoritative chronicle, The Death of a President<\/em> (1967). Rather, it\u2019s that King has turned his talent and boundless resource of fame (a kind of currency) to a story that is meant to tax his knowledge of literature, his storytelling technique, and his own socio-political sensibility to produce a commentary on time, fate, love, and death.<\/p>\n These are big themes that demand epic treatment\u2014and a novel as big as Mailer\u2019s tome and as sweeping and as engaging as Manchester\u2019s.<\/p>\n Jacob Epping\u2019s surname carries echoes of \u201cepic\u201d and his entr\u00e9e to time-travel\u2014a portal between September 9, 1958, and 2011\u2014is a kind of invisible Jacob\u2019s Ladder (or staircase) that allows him to go back to the past to try to set things right (namely, to thwart Kennedy\u2019s assassination). King\u2019s hero is an Odysseus of time-travel, who must live five years in the past (1958-63) before he can return to the present, and whose \u201cPenelope\u201d\u2014so to speak\u2014is Sadie Dunhill, a teacher who Epping loves and loses (in 1963), but rediscovers in 2011, when she is in her 80s.<\/p>\n Given its epic scope, 11\/22\/63<\/em> cannot be dismissed as just another page-turner. It is ambitious: it is also a historical novel written as speculative fiction (a very neat trick), plus it comments on the value of \u201cserious\u201d literature (William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck) versus the mass bestseller (Shirley Jackson, Ian Fleming). King is anxious to demonstrate that there needn\u2019t be a division. A careful reader will find echoes of \u201cserious\u201d literature\u2014from Mark Twain\u2019s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court<\/em> (1889) to John Fowles\u2019s The French Lieutenant\u2019s Woma<\/em>n (1969)\u2014which also emphasizes the different endings possible (plausible) in a story, and from Joyce Carol Oates \u2018s Blonde<\/em> (2000) to Anthony Burgess\u2019s A Clockwork Orange<\/em> (1962). Tellingly, these works, all canonical, are also \u201cpopular.\u201d In addition, King refers to Ayn Rand, H.H. Munro (\u201cSaki\u201d), Zane Grey, Jonathan Franzen, Leo Tolstoy, and Karl Marx, (there may also be a nod to Marguerite Duras\u2019s Hiroshima, Mon Amour<\/em> [1959]), all writers who, again, depending on one\u2019s likes, can be seen as \u201cpopular\u201d and\/or \u201ccanonical.\u201d<\/p>\n Arguably, the subtle concern of 11\/22\/63<\/em> is not Kennedy\u2019s assassination (or Lee Harvey Oswald\u2019s \u201cattempt\u201d), but rather the questions of literary value\u2014what makes an author or a text important (including \u201cbestselling\u201d)\u2014and what makes a story a cultural force\u2014as a text to be studied and\/or celebrated. While it is fascinating to see King take up these scholarly issues, in essence to prove that one can be a great writer and be \u201cpopular\u201d (although Epping is rightly reluctant to mention Franzen and Tolstoy in the same breath), 11\/22\/63<\/em> must still succeed as a story, and it does. Indeed, the moral of King\u2019s yarn seems to be that, though it is human to wish to change it, \u201cthe past is obdurate,\u201d and that efforts to improve upon it can actually make things worse\u2014or, if one prefers, simply, differently<\/em> unpleasant. For one thing, as a result of Epping\u2019s interference with JFK\u2019s fate, Maine ends up joining Canada, which King considers bad news. (New Brunswickers would likely agree.)<\/p>\n As it turns out, as rotten as the present may seem, it is likely the best of the alternatives available. To put this point another way, bold souls make history\u2014but devils change it. In 22\/11\/63<\/em>, King offers an excellent portrait of JFK\u2019s America, but also, a Gone-With-The-Wind-size love-story, and an affectionate (and semi-glamourized) portrait of alleged assassin Oswald\u2019s real-life wife, Marina Prusakova. Not bad. Shakespeare would approve.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The One: The Life and Music of James Brown <\/p>\n R.J. Smith\u2019s The One: The Life and Music of James Brown<\/em> is a rare excellence: Smith translates into print the intangible genius and legendary charisma of \u201cSoul Brother Number One,\u201d the one and only Brown (1933-2006). Music, dance, rhythm, and speech tend to oppose the relative frigidity and rigidity of print. As screaming, moaning singer, as shimmying and thigh-splitting dancer, as shaper of rhythm & blues into funk, and as a scatting, freewheeling lyricist, Brown escapes the confines of prose.<\/p>\n But Smith finds a way to comprehend the entertainer, icon, and trendsetter. He does so by fusing the scholar\u2019s fidelity to fact and the audience\u2019s attention to sound. Smith delves deep into African-American and pop music history; his writing utilizes the cadences and earthy metaphors of Brown, his friends, family, and foes; and Smith gets us close to \u201cThe One,\u201d both Brown and his philosophy of the (black) beat, of African-originated percussion. Along the way, Smith \u201ccrawled around a South Carolina cemetery as it sank into the swamps, \u201c got \u201crun off the road by an 18-wheeler,\u201d \u201ccaught pneumonia twice, and lost my job,\u201d and even \u201creceived a faith healing in the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse.\u201d<\/p>\n Smith\u2019s research adventures mirror the religious-revival, backwoods, moonshine-spiked vaudeville act and Africanized American urban performance rituals that composed \u201cThe James Brown Show\u201d and made their way onto records, and across concert stages.<\/p>\n Smith begins Brown\u2019s life story by focussing on the \u201cThe One,\u201d an African concept of rhythm\u2014including \u201cpatting, tapping, dancing\u201d\u2014that views it as flowing \u201cinto the body as surely as it (flows) from it\u2026.\u201d For Brown, \u201cThe One was a way to find yourself in the music,\u201d and it was \u201can anchor, an upbeat that put him in touch with his past and who he had become.\u201d Brown explained, \u201cThe \u2018One\u201d is derived from the Earth itself, the soil\u2026. The upbeat is rich; the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive \u2018One,\u2019 not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat.\u201d<\/p>\n If there\u2019s mysticism in Brown\u2019s sense of \u201cThe One,\u201d he came by it honestly, for, at birth, he seemed stillborn, and it was only after \u201cinfinite minutes\u201d that \u201che came to life.\u201d Brown\u2019s early struggles were compounded by his mother\u2019s desertion, his \u201cmedieval poverty\u201d in the segregated South, his juvenile thievery and incarceration. He needed redemption; he found it in gospel songs. \u201cAs he performed, he noticed that those around him were moved, crying, and then he surprised himself by breaking into tears, too. You beat an opponent in the ring and people cheered, but this was a greater power.\u201d When he first heard a broadcast of his \u201cPlease, Please, Please\u201d (1955), it \u201canimated him like nothing else in life\u2026. It made him feel special, different, and hungry for more.\u201d Because audience adulation meant cash, fame, and (temporary) salvation, Brown became \u201cThe Hardest Working Man in Show Business,\u201d recording a train of hits that define the rhythm & blues side of \u201cintegrated\u201d rock & roll: \u201cI Feel Good,\u201d \u201cPapa\u2019s Got a Brand New Bag,\u201d \u201cCold Sweat,\u201d \u201cPrisoner of Love,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n But what distinguished Brown from other singles artists was his realization that the \u201cShow\u201d\u2014his band, singers, and dancers\u2014required the expansive format of the album. Thus was born Brown\u2019s first great masterpiece, Live at the Apollo<\/em>, recorded in October 1962 and released in May 1963. Here he uses his \u201cshow\u201d just as jazz maestros Duke Ellington and Miles Davis used their bands: as inspiration for spontaneous improvisation. In the late 1960s, Brown, Davis, and Jimi Hendrix thought of collaboration. Davis did borrow Brown\u2019s drummer to produce his jazz-fusion marvel, On the Corner<\/em> (1972). All three transformed music, but it is a still pity that this trio never played together. Upon his death on Xmas Day, 2006, one of the books found in Brown\u2019s house was The Autobiography of Malcolm X<\/em> (1965). It makes sense: Malcolm X had also been a boxer and a convict, but had found mass influence as an orator, becoming the voice of \u201cBlack Consciousness.\u201d Brown earned similar prominence as the voice of \u201cSoul\u201d and \u201cFunk,\u201d the pop grooves that flesh out \u201cBlack Consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0 Beyond Redemption: The People vs Lucas and Bender <\/p>\n Authored by ex-Manitoba Crown prosecutor John D. Montgomery, Beyond Redemption: The People vs Lucas and Bender<\/em>, is a cri de coeur<\/em>, a j\u2019accuse<\/em>. Montgomery lambastes justice officials for their \u201cleniency\u201d toward two murderers, convicted of an atrocious axe-slaying in 1974, who, despite receiving 20-years-without-parole sentences, still found means to commit fresh, deadly violence. I review this 2004 book because one of the two offenders, Mr. Dwight Douglas Lucas, has contacted me to complain about Montgomery\u2019s characterization of him, which is\u2014yes\u2014scathing.<\/p>\n In his prosecutorial judgment, Montgomery classes the convicted Lucas of 1974 and 1975\u2014as, first, a teenage\/punk-killer and then, decades later, as a seasoned manipulator of parole officials and social workers, as a con-man who has never repented of his callous role in the deaths of two innocents\u2014one man by axe, one woman by accident. The prosecutor doubts that most convicts can ever be rehabilitated; all their talk of change is fraudulent: \u201cLucas (is) cunning enough to contain his cockiness\u201d; he is, forever, for Montgomery, a \u201cposturing axe-murderer.\u201d Montgomery is clear: The problem with the convictions (that he personally achieved) in \u201cRegina v. Lucas and Bender\u201d is that bureaucrats\u2014who \u201cpamper\u201d inmates\u2014worked to ease the strict sentences.<\/p>\n Montgomery believes that Canada\u2019s \u201conce-respected system of criminal justice\u201d deserves his \u201cabusive denunciation\u201d and \u201ccheerless political assassination\u201d because \u201cbleeding-heart\u201d do-gooders \u201cmake a mockery of justice.\u201d He even thinks that the allegedly \u201cescalating crime in this country of ours\u201d is due to \u201cna\u00efve\u201d bumblers crying over incarcerated, cold-blooded killers. Montgomery must have been a fearsome prosecutor. His subjects didn\u2019t just murder their victim, \u201cThey butchered him alive.\u201d They are also \u201cpsychopaths,\u201d \u201ca pair of pigs in the Temple of Justice.\u201d If Jack Wayne Bender is \u201cthe uncrowned king of crudity\u201d (thanks to his \u201csewer-mouth\u201d), then Lucas is \u201cthe undisputed crown prince.\u201d<\/p>\n When one witness felt Lucas resembled \u201ca much younger Sammy Davis, Jr.\u201d (the late African-American entertainer), Montgomery writes, \u201cThe likeness was striking; the comparison vital but odious.\u201d Is there a racial tinge in Montgomery\u2019s treatment of Lucas? He is described as \u201cthe black-billed magpie,\u201d but Bender is cast as \u201cthe prototypical hyena.\u201d When inmate Bender weds and has a conjugal visit, Montgomery terms it a \u201cboudoir farce\u201d and \u201ctragicomic intertwine.\u201d Although he never states it forthrightly, Montgomery seems to favour the death penalty: Execution would eliminate the problem of repeat-murderers. He does say that he \u201cnever could drum up much Christian charity\u201d for Lucas, and maybe he\u2019s right. Yet, when Lucas bloodied his hands 35 years ago, he was a boy. Should he have been hanged\u2014as we almost hanged the innocent, but wrongfully convicted, Steven Truscott, who was sent to death row at the age of 14?<\/p>\n Montgomery admits that rehabilitation is possible: \u201cI know that convicts can be reformed.\u201d But how can one tell which once-youthful thug will emerge from prison, years and decades later, reformed enough to be deemed a \u201cmodel citizen\u201d? Montgomery doesn\u2019t know, nor does anyone. Our choices are stark: Lock murderers up forever (or hang em high) or allow \u201cfaint hope\u201d and provide rehab programs. Montgomery is correct to argue that some \u201csavage bastards\u201d should be incarcerated for good (a fate meted out to Paul Bernardo, but not his then-accomplice and murderess-wife, Karla Homolka). How do we select these convicts?<\/p>\n Though Montgomery\u2019s prose is purple-faced, we need to hew to facts: 1) the crime rate is falling\u2014not because we\u2019re angels, but because we\u2019re aging; 2) prison suicide and violence rates are increasing; 3) we\u2019re building more prisons which means we will \u201cneed\u201d more criminals; 4) we punish alleyway thugs and shopping-mall thieves, but the crooks who loot seniors of their pensions get to laugh all the way to their tax havens.<\/p>\n As for Lucas feeling hurt by Montgomery\u2019s words, it is good that he has feelings. Perhaps now, in his fifties, Lucas extends to others the sympathy, empathy, compassion, and caring that he failed to muster as a youth.<\/p>\n *Some of these reviews first appeared in The Chronicle Herald, Halifax.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Poetry, Biography, Public Discourse and Fiction Reviews Distillo by Basma Kavanagh Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2012 96 pp., $20 Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2010 96 pp., $19 Distillo is Basma Kavanagh\u2019s debut poetry collection; Deepwater Vee launches Melanie Siebert\u2019s career in poetry. Kavanagh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1117,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-698","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1016,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/698\/revisions\/1016"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>by Basma Kavanagh
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2012
\n96 pp., $20<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Melanie Siebert
\nToronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
\n96 pp., $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Sandra Ridley
\nSt. Johns, NL: Pedlar, 2011
\n96 pp., $20<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Todd Swift
\nToronto, ON: Tightrope, 2012
\n65 pp., $17<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by A.F. Moritz
\nWaterloo, ON: WLU Press, 2012
\n82 pp., $17<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by <\/em>Brian Bartlett
\nErin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2012
\n64 pp., $15<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Sandy Pool
\nGibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2012
\n80 pp., $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Maureen Hynes
\nSt. Johns, NL: Pedlar, 2011
\n96 pp., $20<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Pamela Mordecai
\nToronto, ON: TSAR, 2012
\n112 pp., $18<\/p>\n
\nWedding In Fire Country
\n<\/em>by Darren Bifford
\nGibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2012
\n96 pp., $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Rob Taylor
\nMarkham, ON: Cormorant Books, 2011
\n63 pp., $18<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Arthur Bull
\nEmmerson Street Press, 2011
\n113 pp., $22.50<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Robert Cooperman
\nMarch Street Press, 2012
\n71 pp., $15US<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Stephen King
\nUSA: Gallery Books, 2012
\n880 pp., $40<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by R.J Smith
\nGotham Books, 2012
\n464 pp., $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by John D Montgomery
\nWinnipeg, MB: Watson & Dwyer, 2004
\n144 pp., $18<\/p>\n