The Deer Yard
\n<\/b><\/i>by Allen Cooper and Harry Thurston
\nKentville NS: Gaspereau, 2013
\n64 pp. $18<\/p>\n
Discovery Passages
\n<\/b><\/i>by Garry Thomas Morse
\nVancouver, BC: Talon, 2011
\n128 pp. $18<\/p>\n
Two East Coast poets, Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston, \u201cclose friends for over thirty years,\u201d trade stanzas in sequence about their different observations, one winter, when Cooper is at home in Alma, N.B. (\u201ca small fishing village on the Bay of Fundy\u201d), and Thurston, a Nova Scotian, is holed up in Campbell River, B.C. The result is The Deer Yard.<\/p>\n
An exquisite work in design and in feel, the book resembles a hymnal. But, here, the religion is bi-coastal nature and the songs are, so to speak, poems.<\/p>\n
Cooper tells us that the inspiration for the little book \u201ccan be traced back almost 1200 years,\u201d when Chinese poets Wang Wei and P\u2019ei Ti penned the Wang River Sequence, in which, Wei\u2019s twenty verses attract Ti\u2019s responding lines.<\/p>\n
Cooper and Thurston are naturals for this collaboration, given that both love nature and both translate classical Chinese poetry. Hear Thurston: \u201cOur poetry\u2014separately\u2014has always been rooted deeply in the natural world. Like many other Western poets, we have looked to the east … as one model to best express our relationship with what we now call the environment… \u201d<\/p>\n
On each page, Thurston pens the initial quatrain, which Cooper takes up in the next quatrain, in italics, not as an echo, but as a reflection.<\/p>\n
Thus, when Thurston writes about seeing two B.C. deer, \u201cunder (fir tree) branches, \/ staring (at him), with a question of their own,\u201d Cooper is prompted to wonder, \u201cWhat is it that the earth asks of us?\u201d Next, he notes, \u201cThe big spruce throw long shadows in late afternoon, \/ deep as the tracks that passed through the yard while I slept.\u201d<\/p>\n
The friends are attuned to each other\u2019s tastes and interests, so their verses generate a buddy-buddy, palsy-walsy vibe: Thurston sees \u201cWinter jasmine … \/ brightening the darkest days. Joy follows light.\u201d Cooper answers, \u201cthe crow is the companion of the snow\u201d and that \u201cmaple buds\u201d hear \u201cthe growing voices of the sunlight calling through the cold.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although images can be poignant (think of Thurston\u2019s notion that a \u201cjewelled trout\u201d has \u201crainbows under its skin\u201d), the relaxed tone of the chums, casting lines back and forth, might be too relaxed.<\/p>\n
Instead of pondering nature, they sometimes\u2014sentimentally\u2014pander to nature: \u201cWhat we take with us \/ is gathered in our hands, our eyes. \/ When spring comes, the trout will rise \/ to the first mayflies dancing above the brook.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cooper and Thurston strive to achieve the emotive clarity of Chinese verse in its ability to juxtapose the spiritual and the natural. They do well, but a more stringent work is Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei (1999) by Bread Not Pain…<\/p>\n
Garry Thomas Morse\u2019s Discovery Passages was a finalist for the Governor-General\u2019s Award in 2011, and rightly so: It is a striking, radical work, one that presages Idle No More, for these poems explore the contest between settler-state culture and language and the attempts of First Nations to preserve their own traditions.<\/p>\n
Retracing Cap\u2019n George Vancouver\u2019s \u201cdiscovery\u201d voyage, from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, Morse maps a saga of settler mischief and native resistance, and he does so in language that is unabashedly intellectual, spiky, punny, and allusive. The look of the pages mirrors those of Ezra Pound\u2019s The Cantos (1919-70) and William Carlos Williams\u2019 Paterson (1946-58).<\/p>\n
Morse\u2019s \u201ccode\u201d is, essentially, a rewriting of\u2014and a speaking back to\u2014the styles of English that were used to oppress First Nations peoples and abrogate treaties.<\/p>\n
The book opens with a politic yearning: \u201cI too want to write those long clean lines like \/ cedar planks removed,\u201d but there is also the wish to avoid \u201cpale \/ white\/wash \/ almost \/ so dreamy \/ & clean.\u201d<\/p>\n
The long poem, \u201cNo Comment,\u201d chops up the prose of Indian Affairs agents, a century plus ago and less, who strove desperately to suppress the Potlatch tradition. Morse renders their bureaucratic violence in a savage pidgin: \u201cI realize the evil \/ of the Potlatch \/ position \/ IDLERS ACT… \u201d<\/p>\n
Morse records other documents that show that Canadian repression of the Potlatch was also a cover for theft of First Nations art and implements and their sale to museums.<\/p>\n
These poems are smart, masterful and necessary.<\/p>\n
Ocean
\n<\/b><\/i>by Sue Goyette
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2013
\n80 pp. $20<\/p>\n
Ah We Talk: Lan\u2019 Ah Kaiso
\n<\/b><\/i>by Milton Carver Scobie
\nNorran Press<\/p>\n
Multiple, prizewinning, Haligonian poet Sue Goyette\u2019s fourth book isn\u2019t a collection, but a long poem whose subject is vast enough to swallow up all that Goyette is moved to cast forth.<\/p>\n
Ocean is awash in inspiration, aspiration, and ambition. Though it is divided into 56 lyrics whose titles spell-out sequential numbers (\u201cOne\u201d leads, one by one, to \u201cFifty-Six\u201d), Ocean has the reach of epic.<\/p>\n
However, it is really a set of Ovidian elegies\u2014or elongated epigrams\u2014that sometimes address the actual geography of Halifax and Dartmouth, but other times meditate on the ocean in outlandish metaphors whose impossibility reminds us that the ocean itself exceeds our grasp.<\/p>\n
When discussing Gaspereau Press books, one must reference the design. Ocean is muted in tone\u2014like sea-buffed glass, with a cover texture like soft sandpaper; the title page artwork recalls that of Ralph Gustafson\u2019s collection, Rivers Among Rocks (1960).<\/p>\n
Goyette wrings the notion of the ocean for all its worth: \u201cIt was the original god of hypnosis \/\/ and made us all feel sleepy\u201d; \u201cThe art of complaint was perfected when we first took note \/ of its temperature\u201d; \u201cIt was more interested in talking about what we thought \/ it tasted like: fish or tears, it wanted to know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goyette does an excellent job of thinking about how the ocean might regard us: \u201cthe ocean \/\/ was teaching us about patience. It was compelling to see it \/ take its time, stretching its slow hunt, nursing new rocks\u201d; \u201cWe could drop \/\/ a whole house into it in exchange for what it knew. \/ It was moving all right but still \/ it wouldn\u2019t budge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also fetching are Goyette\u2019s lines on Nova Scotia\u2019s capital: \u201cReal shadows were made \/ across the harbour back then in Dartmouth. The refinery \/ still stands and ancestors of lurking shadows gone feral \/\/ can still be seen in its parking lot and across the street \/ in Value Village … . \/\/ a metropolis of used clothing… . \/\/ Fog was responsible \/ for many marriages and, consequently, when it lifted, \/\/ many in-laws.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ocean is a rich read, bountiful in its meanderings. One can quibble, though, with Goyette\u2019s penchant for far-fetched metaphors, such as \u201cthe raisins of winter clouds\u201d; \u201cwalk the uneven ground of our fear\u201d; \u201cWe were invalids in the pale hospital hours \/\/ of our kitchens\u201d; \u201cWhen had our hearts become badly behaved \/ dogs we had to keep the screen door closed to?\u201d There is even \u201ca talk show \/\/ of rain clouds.\u201d<\/p>\n
If \u2013if\u2014such images seem overdone, it is a minor issue. Ocean\u2019s sweep is as overwhelming as a flood. Dive into this book… .<\/p>\n
Milton Carver Scobie is 70 this year, and lives in Toronto, but comes from Trinidad and Tobago, a nation that he continues to revere. He is a grassroots, vernacular bard, pleased to invent nostalgic rhymes or patriotic ditties, to remind other \u201cTrinbago\u201d exiles of the history and the culture of their homeland.<\/p>\n
For the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the independence of Trinidad and Tobago, Scobie has released, Ah We Talk: Lan\u2019 Ah Kaiso, which is self-published by his Norran Press. The verse is so down-to-earth as to constitute, in a sense, \u201cnothing special.\u201d<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not true. What is radical about this book is Scobie\u2019s belief that black writing\u2014in the African Diaspora\u2014is made complicated because black writers need to operate in a \u201cstrange tongue.\u201d<\/p>\n For him, then, \u201cDialect with its pleasant cadences interlocking flow and logical imaginative diction has become for me the PastS sweet sad Survival song.\u201d Not only that, but English punctuation is eschewed in favour of an eccentric grammar of his own invention. So, instead of writing \u201cPast\u2019s\u201d above, Scobie writes \u201cPastS,\u201d replacing the apostrophe with a majuscule \u201cS.\u201d<\/p>\n But Scobie does write well, including inventing verbs like \u201cto Naipaul,\u201d which he says, means, \u201cto live gloriously in the reflection of experienced idyllic time,\u201d thus granting the Nobel Laureate in Literature an extra immortality.<\/p>\n The poem, \u201cIndependence,\u201d is musically strong: \u201cJ\u2019ouvert coming is almost daybreak \/ The bouquet thrown The bamboo done break \/ Towards the town is the road they make.\u201d<\/p>\n Scobie fuses politics and poetics effectively, even when it seems most simple: \u201cChasing butterfly \/ Riding see-saw high \/ KiteS song in the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Brilliant Falls Pickled Dreams Naked Hailing from Hamilton, Ontario, John Terpstra is a poet who never strains for effect. His work is what it is\u2014an enunciation of perception, an annunciation of feeling.<\/p>\n His latest collection, Brilliant Falls (Gaspereau $18), features the mature poet mourning the sickness, loneliness, and loss of parents, that is to say, the ultimately terminal nature of seniority.<\/p>\n (Strange how parents pass away just as their adult children begin to understand their fineness and to accept their faults\u2014the progenitors of their own affable afflictions.)<\/p>\n \u201cBrilliant Falls\u201d is not a place, but a phrase describing the diving of gilt and crimson autumn leaves to their rests, where they\u2019re eventually \u201cground to sodden mulch.\u201d The image is a picture of the vanishing light of our elders as they ebb to rests beyond our grasp.<\/p>\n But their mortality\u2014their frailty\u2014is also ours: \u201cThere is the fact of our fragile enormity \/ upon the landscape.\u201d Fainting is its own little death: \u201cIt\u2019s as though a variation on [Genesis] \/ is being played out. I brush particles of soil \/ from her face. She rises and goes indoors, \/ a slight bruise on her cheek.\u201d<\/p>\n An elegy for \u201cDad\u201d takes as subject the dearly departed man\u2019s \u201cking-size mattress\u201d or \u201cmatrimonial half-acre,\u201d recalling how, \u201cas kids we ragged you folks about \/ … how vast it was, asking … \u2018how do you find each other,\u2019 \/\/ appalled at the very thought of your intimacy\u2014and where, alone, \/ she found you, on the night that all the fight left you.\u201d<\/p>\n Terpstra\u2019s clarity is reverential, closer to magisterial dignity than it is to folksy tent-show. Yet, he is wonderfully plain, with a style that recalls both homespun, whimsical Alden Nowlan (1933-83) and the shock effects of Irving Layton (1912-2006).<\/p>\n His \u201cNowlan\u201d-like poem imagines the Queen wheeling a \u201cclassic \u201953 pickup, souped up, \/ … itching to pass.\u201d The Laytonesque poem sees the speaker shoot a man \u201clast night \/ but only in a dream… . \/\/ I was so surprised he fell \/ that I didn\u2019t fire again \/\/ when he stood and stumbled on \/ favouring the shoulder I must have hit.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pete Seeger pacifist tune, \u201cWhere Have All the Flowers Gone,\u201d lends its title to the final poem. Clearly, it is a salute to that other<\/i> \u201cGreat Generation,\u201d not the generation that vanquished Hitler, but the generation that stopped the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n They are beginning to leave us now, and must be celebrated for their gifts to us of greater social equality, environmental awareness, and anti-war protest.<\/p>\n Norman Stock is a Jewish New York prize-winning poet who is, like Terpstra, nicely comfortable in his skin, dedicated to non-fancy but playful utterance, and a pleasure to read. He is quite openly indebted to Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and Ogden Nash (1902-71), taking from them a talking style related to tall tale and folk song.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s more than a dash of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), and e.e. cummings (1894-1962) present as well in Pickled Dreams Nake.<\/p>\n See the lyricism of \u201ccan I untangle your hair that is so beautiful or must I wait \/ can if I want to do as I want to.\u201d It\u2019s so superbly musical and simple.<\/p>\n Stock\u2019s 9\/11 poem, \u201cWhat I Said,\u201d captures the contradictory moods of remorse and revenge: \u201cafter the terror I \/ went home and cried and \/ … . I said and I said this is too much to take no one can take a thing like this \/ after the terror yes and then I said let\u2019s kill them.\u201d<\/p>\n But a companion poem establishes the resilience of a great city: \u201cfall on the floor New York, get up and be beaten again \/ you expected everything and you sure did get it all \/ New York of the towers, of the homegrown idiots, of the torn flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n Stock is particularly good at satirizing creative-writing classes: \u201cI have a problem with this poem \/ and my problem is you you miserable person \/ sitting here in this godforsaken poetry workshop trying to become famous \/don\u2019t you know that only the teacher is famous… .\u201d<\/p>\n Sweet, too, is \u201cAgain\u201d: \u201cthat was good I said hey let\u2019s do \/ it again she said ok let\u2019s \/ do it again if you like so \/ we did it again it was good… .\u201d<\/p>\n The Canadian poet closest to Stock\u2019s style is Ray Souster (1921-2012). He is also a poet who rewards reading and re-reading.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fireship: Early Poems, 1964-1991 Shakespeare\u2019s Nigga I like to read poetry because it is compact and incisive and fits well in knapsack, briefcase, suitcase, or glove compartment. So, now I consider Fireship: Early Poems,<\/em> 1964-1991. This title is Nova Scotian poet Peter Sanger\u2019s record of the perfection that he has sought in his chosen art, presenting us thus a selection of his lyrics writ between the ages of 21 and 48. Born in 1943, he is entitled, given his biblical three-score-and-ten, to assemble his examples of aspiration and achievement. In the earliest poems, there is artless art: \u201cWater \/ hides seams \/ a keel \/ uncovers.\u201d<\/p>\n Every writer is an intellectual, as is Sanger, also a retired, English prof. But he is steeped in the local\u2014the agricultural and mineral, the flora and fauna, the historical and the indigenous, all that\u2019s richly provincial. A locavore thinker, he says that, after relocating to Nova Scotia, \u201cI dug in.\u201d The influence of other poets who write about where they live\u2014Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Thompson\u2014is here, but Sanger excels in being succinct and accessible: \u201cA mouse skull, an \/ unbroken thimble \/ of bone, whose eye \/ socket I \/ copy with finger \/ and thumb.\u201d Philosophical beauty emerges from precision. A \u201cWoodcock Feather\u201d is \u201cGrey, my love, \/ shading to rufous, a form \/ interfusing, allusive,\u201d but it is more: \u201cspeckled, barred, streaked, a gather \/ of mottle and margin, or touch, or \/ breath we have also drawn together.\u201d The focus on a thing\u2014a feather\u2014becomes a meditation on love.<\/p>\n Short poems also speak volumes. See \u201cGaelic Cemetery\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s said or almost \/ all been said, until \/ the living leave \/ their living dead.\u201d If you\u2019ve not yet read Sanger\u2019s fine-wrought verse, open Fireship<\/em>. Sanger locates the roots of poetry itself right here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Shakespeare is the poet and playwright for all seasons, surely, but so should be the works inspired by his creations. Thus, let us read Shakespeare\u2019s Nigga, for, here, Joseph Jomo Pierre contests the Bard\u2019s treatment of his star \u201cblack\u201d characters, namely, heroic-tragic Othello and wicked, Machiavellian Aaron.<\/p>\n Indeed, my use of \u201ctreatment\u201d is a pun, for Pierre imagines Shakespeare as a brandy-swilling slavemaster, one who favours Othello, but shackles Aaron. Billy Shakespeare is a patriarch with a wilful white daughter, Judith, who, unbeknownst to her father, has been double-back-beasting with Aaron, to the extent that she is soon prego with a mixed-race baby.<\/p>\n The plot thickens when the \u201cDark Lady\u201d of The Sonnets is revealed to be Othello\u2019s mama, but Othello is also in love with Judith (unwittingly his half-sister), and bold Aaron decides that it\u2019s time to put the Shakespeare plantation to the torch, ending all these melodramatic, incestuous shenanigans.<\/p>\n Pierre\u2019s play riffs off Blaxploitation cinema, Djanet Sears\u2019s play Harlem Duet (1997), Lorena Gale\u2019s play Angelique (1999), and Amiri Baraka\u2019s play Dutch Man (1964). It\u2019s an African Canadian response to Dead-White-Men\u2019s cultural imperialism, but seems closer to farce than to tragedy… . It does make one think… .<\/p>\n <\/p>\n when this world comes to an end<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n By Kate Cayley<\/p>\n London, ON: Brick, 2013<\/p>\n 88 pp. $20<\/p>\n Notebook M <\/b><\/i><\/p>\n By Gillian Savigny<\/p>\n Toronto, ON: Insomniac, 2012<\/p>\n 112 pp. $17<\/p>\n In her first book, when this world comes to an end, Kate Cayley employs the free-verse, bio-narrative, in which the speaker\u2014the poet or the subject\u2014meditates on his or her life lived.<\/p>\n The personages are famous (Simone Weil, etc.) or infamous (Charles Dodgson-as-pedophile, etc.). Thus, Cayley reminds one of Michael Ondaatje\u2019s cinematic verse-studies of artists and criminals. But her approach also recalls Edgar Lee Masters\u2019s Spoon River Anthology (1915) and the \u201cdramatic monologues\u201d authored by Victorian poet Robert Browning.<\/p>\n Cayley gives us the confession of axe-murderer William Kemmler, the first person to die in the electric chair (1893). She pens adroitly his cold-blooded recollection of his crime: \u201cI was not a good husband. \/ Whiskey lay like (urine) in dozens of glasses\u201d; \u201cThe first blow \/ I thought she\u2019d fall apart easily as \/ a jug breaking, streaming water\u201d; \u201cSeventeen cuts, her skull sharded, a map \/ of red drops on the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n Cayley depicts Judas Iscariot as a retiree in cottage country: \u201che is unremarkable, pleasant. \/ Good at parties… , \/ knows a thing or two about wine… . \/ It was only \/ the other apostles who wished he\u2019d hanged himself \/ in that ravening field planted with silver pieces, the rope \/ pulling his face purple… .\u201d<\/p>\n A Toronto theatre artistic director, Cayley follows the example of British writers W.H. Auden and Angela Carter in updating historical speakers to give them a jarring, new context and diction. Perhaps she also follows Canadian poet Richard Outram (1930-2005), who was also a theatre tradesman.<\/p>\n Cayley also inks poems based on photographs and prose poems that are newfangled fairy tales (in the patented style of Canadian poet Stephanie Bolster). These pieces seem less focused, less intense.<\/p>\n But one glimpses powerful images, here and there, as in these lines from \u201cSilver Cross Mother, 1919,\u201d a photo-lyric: \u201cA tight hermetic grief \/ too close for sunlight to slide through … , \/ a quiet seepage, \/ as if under her dress \/ her breasts leaked blood.\u201d<\/p>\n Gillian Savigny\u2019s first book of poems, Notebook M, takes up Cayley\u2019s interest in reanimating a historical personage, in this case Charles Darwin (1809-82).<\/p>\n The collection is ambitious, with Savigny mining verse from the great British naturalist\u2019s philosophical Notebook M, in which Darwin muses about \u201cMetaphysics on Morals & Speculations on Expression.\u201d<\/p>\n Savigny experiments here. She reprints actual pages of Darwin\u2019s work in faded print, but then isolates\u2014in bold print\u2014words or word-parts, to create new-\u201cfound\u201d lyrics out of Darwin\u2019s prose.<\/p>\n So, Darwin\u2019s sentence, \u201cSuch is the history of the changes in which the present condition of Patagonia has, I believe, been determined,\u201d yields\u2014in bold print\u2014Savigny\u2019s line, \u201cTHE HISTORY OF CHANGES.\u201d<\/p>\n This revisioning technique leads to surrealism. So, a page of Darwin yields this Savigny \u201clyric\u201d: \u201cPort Famine … the name expresses the lingering and extreme suffering of a people \/ who were led captive many years \/ in \/ the stomachs of \/ scorpions.\u201d<\/p>\n Savigny \u201cedits\u201d Darwin, to emphasize the poetry lurking within his prose.<\/p>\n (One can have some fun in considering \u201cpoetic\u201d Darwin phrases that Savigny hasn\u2019t highlighted or selected: \u201csterile countries\u201d; \u201cthe neighing of the guanaco\u201d; \u201can ass mounted on taller legs and with a long neck\u201d; \u201cWe undermined the grave on both sides but could not find any relics, or even bones,\u201d etc.)<\/p>\n When Savigny writes in her own voice, yet echoes Darwin, the results are fine: \u201cOff the coast of Patagonia, the ship sailed into a storm \/ of butterflies so thick the sky was lost behind them… . \/ In the sea off Cape Corrientes, he hadn\u2019t been looking \/ for insects but found them in the thousands, \/ and spiders descending with silk parachutes \/ from some mysterious source.\u201d<\/p>\n This passage compares well with Darwin\u2019s own words about butterfly \u201cflocks\u201d and his memory of sailors crying, \u201cit was snowing butterflies.\u201d<\/p>\n A born Vancouverite who has worked all about Canada, Savigny now lives in Toronto. While Notebook M records her obsession with Darwin, one notes that when she is free of his spell, and is, in fact, her own woman, she writes her most compelling verse, as in \u201cThe Dictionary.\u201d To be read.<\/p>\n between dusk and night <\/b><\/i><\/p>\n By Emily McGiffin<\/p>\n London, ON: Brick, 2012<\/p>\n $19<\/p>\n Rosa Rose <\/b><\/i><\/p>\n By Robert Priest<\/p>\n Hamilton, ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2013<\/p>\n 50 pp. $10<\/p>\n In her debut collection, between dusk and night, Emily McGiffin, who lives in northwestern BC, turns a watchful eye to Nature and our relationship to it which is, well, to terrorize it.<\/p>\n (McGiffin\u2019s book cover photo is evocative in this regard: There is sunset over the central peak of a mountain that is girded by smaller peaks, with the result that the sun looks like a candle flame about to be extinguished as it drowns in its cratered wax.)<\/p>\n But McGiffin is a poet, and she chooses to showcase the miracle of creation. Thus, a fast car drive turns into a confrontation with \u201cthe sudden \/ ramparts of the mountain landscape… . \/ \u2018Vast\u2019? Inadequate. It thumps the wind out. The heart \/flutteringly aware of how paltry it is.\u201d<\/p>\n A heart \u201cfluttering\u201d may not be news, but the idea of a mountain, \u201cthumping\u201d the wind, well, that is poetry.<\/p>\n McGiffin has an eye for subtle images that are exact and right: \u201cSun the marrow of a bone-white sky.\u201d But she also has an ear for verbs and everyday, provincial speech: \u201cUp at six and out, bumping up the mountain road \/ for the split, toss, stack [of firewood].\u201d<\/p>\n Her verses recall Isabella Valancy Crawford\u2019s picturesque and rollicking narratives, but also the philosophical touches of Jan Zwicky, Mahatma Gandhi, and Antonie de Saint-Exupery.<\/p>\n One example of her domestic style is McGiffin\u2019s \u201cThe Afternoon of Your Parting\u201d: \u201chalving our way through the last bite of some excessive \/ chocolate dessert, I read you a piece about glass-blowers, \/\/ how their art is a variant of absence: \/ coloured spheres a tempered striving \/ to catch breath\u2019s flight, sunlight falling through. \/\/ An extension I guess of our human physiology: \/ the heart healing around an emptiness \/ into some tougher, brighter thing.\u201d<\/p>\n McGiffin is a good poet, but she could push herself further, to compose more lines that startle the heart with their sudden fierce perception: \u201cyou stood amid aspens barked up and blackened by frost. Lucid \/ the trees were articulate with wind \/ and the ramshackle sunlight\u2014how they leaned into it, greening!\u2014 \/ though the moose laid their thick teeth into that spring flourish, \/ into that bitter sap, that throb of… of? desire? fortitude? old habit?\u201d<\/p>\n Nice it is when the answers ain\u2019t immediate. When mystery transfigures the poet.<\/p>\n British-born, Toronto-born singer-songwriter and poet Robert Priest has been fusing music and message for young and old, for entertainment and enlightenment, for 25 years. Most famously, his 1992 lyric, \u201cSong Instead of a Kiss,\u201d scored Canadian rock-legend Alannah Myles a Grammy nomination.<\/p>\n But Priest is a poet-troubadour in the 1960s mode of Bob Dylan: To illuminate injustice and to celebrate struggle against it.<\/p>\n This premise lies behind his latest children\u2019s-oriented book of verse, Rosa Rose, wherein Priest presents a gallery of heroes, those who suffered to achieve real liberation for the poor and oppressed, or simply to make life better for others.<\/p>\n So \u201cRosa Sat\u201d is for seamstress Rosa Parks who sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the greater Civil Rights Movement in 1955, by refusing to surrender her seat on the bus to \u201ca white man (who) stood in the aisle.\u201d The point is made in child-friendly rhyme: \u201cRosa rose, and the people rose \/ She went to court and she won. \/ Rosa rose and the people rose \/ And they\u2019d only just begun.\u201d<\/p>\n Terry Fox\u2019s Marathon of Hope is remembered poignantly: \u201cTerry ran, Terry ran, \/ he strode from hip to heel. \/ One leg was muscle, bone, and skin. \/ One fibreglass and steel.\u201d<\/p>\n Mahatma Gandhi\u2019s 1930 campaign for free salt for Indians and an end to British imperialism is given a spicy spin: \u201cHe was a very gentle man, \/ A slow and steady stepper. \/ For salt he brought the empire down\u2014 \/ What if he\u2019d wanted pepper?\u201d<\/p>\n The Greek poet Sappho, a woman whose lays about love of women was lost \u201cand remained that way \/ Almost a thousand years\u201d is recovered triumphantly: \u201cLovers have saved her\u2014the poet of love \/ She was lost beyond recall. \/ Sappho of Lesbos, we love your lines! \/ One day we\u2019ll have them all.<\/p>\n Maybe the showstopper treats Muhammad Ali: Our children do need to know that the greatest boxer \u201cof all time\u201d was also anti-imperialist\u2014and, thus, an inspiration to millions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films I like movies\u2014blockbusters and intense, quiet flicks too. So, let\u2019s consider Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. First published in 1999, it was revised in 2007 so that author James Chapman could respond to Casino Royale (2006). A film prof at the University of Leicester, Chapman has been in \u201cBondage\u201d since seeing his first Bond flick, at age 8, in 1977, namely, The Spy Who Loved Me, which he deems \u201cmassive and sumptuous.\u201d<\/p>\n Chapman is a Bond buff, a film fan, and a serious scholar, and he wears all three hats, as it were, in assessing the screen adaptations (24 up to 2006) of Ian Fleming\u2019s fictional spy, emphasizing directors\u2019 styles, actors\u2019 interpretations, plot plausibility, and geopolitical tie-ins, as well as box-office success and critics\u2019 views.<\/p>\n Chapman places each release in a cultural context of international events and Anglo-American relations. He quotes journalists and scholars, but never neglects fans: His writing balances the visceral responses of audiences and the \u201cobjective\u201d opinions of others.<\/p>\n Chapman offers new ideas, such as explaining that Sean Connery\u2019s popular incarnation of Bond introduced \u201ca new style of performance: A British screen hero in the manner of an American leading man.\u201d<\/p>\n But there are errors: Chapman situates Manuel Noriega, once dictator of Panama, in \u201cNicaragua\u201d (p. 206); he omits a certain Mr. Black as one of the \u201cmedia tycoons\u201d caricatured\u2014albeit obliquely\u2014in Tomorrow Never Dies (p. 226).<\/p>\n Also, Chapman seems to miss \u201cthe big picture\u201d (pun intended). Maybe the reason for the fun of Bond films is that they present an epic sense of adventure, featuring shocks and sex, which, while formulaic, varies enough each time so that each picture seems superbly sensational in its own right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Poetry and Film Reviews The Deer Yard by Allen Cooper and Harry Thurston Kentville NS: Gaspereau, 2013 64 pp. $18 Discovery Passages by Garry Thomas Morse Vancouver, BC: Talon, 2011 128 pp. $18 Two East Coast poets, Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston, \u201cclose friends for over thirty years,\u201d trade stanzas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1661,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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-672","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1612,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions\/1612"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/b><\/i>by John Terpstra
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2o13
\n64 pp. $18<\/p>\n
\n<\/b><\/i>by Norman Stock
\nNew York, NY: NYQ Books, 2010
\n112 pp. $15<\/p>\n
\n<\/b><\/i>by Peter Sanger
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2013
\n190 pp. $26<\/p>\n
\n<\/b><\/i>By Joseph Jomo Pierre
\nToronto, ON: Playwrights Canada, 2013
\n$17<\/p>\n
\n<\/b><\/i>by James Chapman
\nNew York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2008
\n336 pp. $21<\/p>\n