George Elliott Clarke<\/p>\n
Afloat <\/i><\/p>\n
by John Reibetanz
\nLondon, ON: Brick, 2013
\n87 pp. $20<\/p>\n
The Family China <\/i>
\nby Ann Shin
\nLondon, ON: Brick, 2013
\n74 pp. $20<\/p>\n
In his eighth collection, Afloat<\/i>, John Reibetanz, native New Yorker and now English professor at the University of Toronto, ranges across landscapes and seascapes, all transfigured by art and historical perception. Amy K. Epstein\u2019s gorgeous, Chinese-styled cover art sets the tone, a landscape slowly washing into watercolour abstraction, as in impressionism. The poems offer similar transformations.<\/p>\n
One particularly striking work is \u201cCurious George Takes Flight, 12 June 1940,\u201d in which the creators of the iconic children\u2019s book, Hans and Margret Rey, are remembered, fleeing \u2014 by bicycle \u2014 the Nazi onslaught on France, the precious inkling of their book stowed in a basket. \u201cGeorge guides (the Reys) \/\/ from flaming cities through forests of pure animal \/ instinct \u2026invulnerable \/ to occupation\u2026\/\/ gives their hearts \/ the courage to redraft a yellow star of reproach \/\/ into wearable sun \u2026the yellow hat of rescue\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Such is the constant alchemy that Reibetanz offers. Here is \u201cCorner Brook, Nfld\u201d: \u201cNew-found, never-caught, \/ cod-slippery, the blood\u2019s brook \/ leaps through the heart\u2019s grip.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reibetanz is an American poet first. I hear notes of Muriel Rukeyser in the unscrolling imagination and unfurling descriptions. The intellectual propensity reminds me of Al Moritz, Reibetanz\u2019s Americo-Canuck confrere.<\/p>\n
Another strong poem is \u201cThe Monarch Butterfly Migration, 1943,\u201d which juxtaposes the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, with the travel of millions of butterflies \u2014 \u201cmonarchs in silk robes\u201d \u2014 from blazing, European cities \u2014 \u201cthe flame tornados that wrenched \/ trees from earth \u2026 human spirits \/\/ from the blackened chrysalids of incinerated \/ children\u2026\u201d \u201cWhy would they not \/\/ choose this metamorphosis of flame when cathedrals \/ were shattering\u2026 this soft floating stained glass \/ blazoned like tropical fruit \u2026?\u201d Reibetanz has won the Petra Kenney Poetry Competition and his poems, \u201cThe Vineyard\u201d and \u201cDisplacement,\u201d (in this volume) have won laurels too. The entire collection is a reward and a feast for all who love transfigurative, transformative poetry.<\/p>\n
Ann Shin\u2019s second verse collection, The Family China<\/i>, traces life-journeys of migration and aging, from Korea to Canada. The several dozen poems fall into five suites, and most of the poems also have a sidelong \u201cfootnote,\u201d to reflect upon the lyrical statement. Shin is evocative, exuberant even, about childhood: \u201cWe ran through the (new house\u2019s) rooms like it was Christmas\u2026, \/\/ our bodies \/ knitting in with this place that so wanted kids. \/ Trees sprouted apples, cherries dropped from heavy boughs. But there is constraint too, the facts of pain and death and loss, and the veiling of impression with scads of description.<\/p>\n
So, a mother washes the walls of a house, presenting an image of controlled chaos, but more vivid is the daughter\u2019s memory that, \u201cI never caught a butterfly all the summers we lived there \/ never tried enough, afraid of crushed wings releasing \/ orange-yellow dust into the night breeze.\u201d The adjacent note reads, \u201cchaos: after her \/ accident the house fell into decline, fruit \/ flies like blackheads \/ stippled rotting pears\u2026\u201d These alternative poems, mini-lyrics, resembling skinny newspaper columns, are also, in a sense, buffers. The poet feels deeply, and wants us to see her feeling, but also wants to wall off her painful sensitivity, the fear that \u201cchaos has its own furious design.\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
One strong poem lacks the side note: \u201cLet\u2019s have it out, shall we? \/ Hurl everything through windows \/ fracturing surfaces \/ we\u2019d grown to believe solid \/\/ and get scraped down \/ to the breastbone, \/ a searing clean.\u201d It is shorn of unnecessary ornament and \u201cextra\u201d rumination. The vivid couplet, \u201cPiece by piece we pick apart the orange \/ as if sunshine were ours to kill and eat\u201d would have retained that arresting power, had it not been chased by lesser lines. Shin\u2019s struggle is between observant reticence and sensual abandon. More observant abandon might be a compromise.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Folk<\/i><\/p>\n
by Jacob McArthur Mooney<\/p>\n
Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2011<\/p>\n
112 pp. $19<\/p>\n
The Hottest Summer in Recorded History<\/i><\/p>\n
by Elizabeth Bachinsky<\/p>\n
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2013<\/p>\n
80 pp. $19<\/p>\n
This past September 2nd<\/sup> marked the 15th<\/sup> anniversary of the tragic loss of Swissair 111 and its 229 lives, off of Peggy\u2019s Cove, NS. The calamity fills voluminous reports. But Jacob McArthur Mooney\u2019s second collection of poetry, Folk<\/i>, is half about the Nova Scotian \u201cfolk\u201d response to the Swissair crash and half about the \u201cfolk\u201d who live near Pearson International Airport in Malton, a Greater Toronto Area suburb.<\/p>\n Published in 2011, Folk <\/i>also answers to Nova Scotian Mooney\u2019s \u2018flight\u2019 from his East Coast home to his \u2018landing\u2019 in Toronto, where he graduated from Creative Writing at the University of Guelph-Humber. Perhaps due to its birth in a classroom, Folk<\/i> is acutely self-conscious, wry, sardonic, and knowing, but with a desire to parody media and bureaucrats. The beautifully titled poem, \u201cThe Ocean Speaks of Incendiary Things,\u201d treats the splash-down crash as a matter of the aircraft becoming \u201csoluble, smothered, \/ pulled apart and pummelled clean.\u201d The poem asks us to \u201cretrieve\u201d the \u201cbeauty\u201d of the disaster; next, the \u201cocean\u201d\u2014or the poet\u2014comments, \u201cI believe \/ in beauty, in the \/ wish-thin \/ packaging \/ and pander of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n Mooney\u2019s intellect and art are enviable. But his lyrics show little feeling for the perished. Like E.J. Pratt in his great 1935 poem on The Titanic disaster, Mooney is able to imagine the physical disintegration of the craft: \u201cDown this insurrection, \/ the breaking gained momentum and surprised \/ the unbreakable\u2014a bolt, its head \/ shorn free from the shaft, \/\/ a crumpled medal found inside \/ a crevice carved from bone.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike Pratt, Mooney fails to depict the trauma of wreckage\u2014or carnage. He gives us the grotesque: a dog \u201ctweezed free a human hand from the beach \/ and half-buried it out back.\u201d What irks Mooney is the arrival of reporters\u2014outsiders\u2014to the South Shore and their perception that the \u201cfolk\u201d\u2014locals\u2014represent \u201ccenturies \/ of stubborn \/ interbreeding.\u201d Also irksome are the efforts of some mourners to offer their sorrow as transcendent. The poet comments, \u201cGrief \/ is not composed of grief. Grief \/ is a compulsion. Walk up to the dead \/ and lay your body on their bodies \/ until you share a central chill.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, the poem in which a speaker is most permitted to feel\u2014a bit, is that which tells of a car\u2019s accidental killing of a doe: \u201cWe tracked her back \/ through the skid of fur and bowel failure, found \/ her head, upright, thinking thoughts \/ for the ditch.\u201d When Mooney abandons the Swissair memorials, literally, and attends to the \u201cfolk\u201d who live (and work) in the vicinity of Pearson Airport, the poems assume greater humanity.<\/p>\n Quibbles aside, Folk <\/i>is a palpably split achievement\u2014reminiscent of Cronenberg\u2019s 1996 film, Crash<\/i>.<\/p>\n Elizabeth Bachinsky\u2019s fifth work of poetry, The Hottest Summer in Recorded History<\/i>, also reads as if it has been creative-writing workshopped to achieve the acme of smarty pants smirking at the dullards who \u201cjust don\u2019t get\u201d how meaningless and ridiculous language can be. So, Bachinsky reproduces her \u201cpoetic\u201d e-mails with a pal (with his permission) and pens poems that exploit slang and nonchalant speech. Although these poses can seem (deliberately) irritating and\/or off-putting, there is a method to Bachinsky\u2019s Gertrude Stein-like playing around, and it is to reclaim usually non-poetic language.<\/p>\n See \u201cHobbled\u201d: \u201ca horse in hobbles \u2018hops.\u2019 1500 pounds of horseflesh, \/ hopping. It\u2019s unexpected!\u201d The tone is of an unsophisticated cowpoke. But, soon, one reads, \u201ceven hobbled, it takes us hours \/ to track them through this burnt forest of alders \/ where green shoots and wildflowers bloom \/ from the charred ground already green.\u201d Suddenly, what seemed banal becomes beautiful. But, just as frequently, the trivial remains trivial: \u201cI\u2019m looking for a place that\u2019s just called NAILS. \/ There\u2019s always some place that\u2019s just called NAILS. \/ In every city and suburb, they\u2019ll do your NAILS\u2026.\u201d Sigh. Some poems\u2014\u201cSomething\u2019s Gotta Give,\u201d \u201cThe Mountain,\u201d \u201cThe Spider\u2019s Alphabet,\u201d and \u201cMere Anarchy, St. John\u2019s Nfld\u201d\u2014make the effort to transcend the status of the word-game. To be more than farce and arty artifice\u2026 And one does want more. Precisely that: more effort.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems<\/i><\/p>\n by Carole Glasser Langille<\/p>\n Toronto, ON: Pedlar, 2012<\/p>\n 112 pp. $20<\/p>\n Sit You Waiting<\/i><\/p>\n by Kim Clark<\/p>\n Halfmoon, BC: Caitlin, 2012<\/p>\n 112 pp. $17<\/p>\n Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems<\/i> is Carole Glasser Langille\u2019s fourth poetry book. Twice a poetry-award nominee, the Dalhousie University Creative Writing teacher, in this new book, invests Shakespeare\u2019s Ophelia with an inner life. In Hamlet, Ophelia is the lovelorn, would-be lover of the sable-clad prince. Addled by Hamlet\u2019s murder of her Machiavellian dad, the gal, suicidal, drowns.<\/p>\n Langille undertakes the Atwoodian mission to recover Ophelia\u2019s thoughts and impulses, to see the character as less a victim and more a scapegoat, and then to view her as a cultural icon of endless resonance. In short, Ophelia becomes a martyr-saint in Langille\u2019s literary take on the real-life Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc., founded by a Manhattan, performance artist. Langille engages with Hamlet, but also with the post-mortem \u201clife\u201d of Ophelia as post-modern symbol.<\/p>\n Langille sees Ophelia as morbid, but meditative: \u201cI traded \/ the North Star for a sinking bough. To have charity always \/ in our mouths, isn\u2019t that the virtue?\u201d Ophelia perishes in a wilderness less Danish than Nova Scotian: \u201cThe cut throat of dusk leaked milky light \/ then darkened until the whole winter sky with its \/ hunters and beasts, its lit dippers, somersaulted \/ below the water\u2019s surface, rippling.\u201d<\/p>\n Sensual and rightly sexist is the imagery of drowning: \u201cA dead man\u2019s hand, the ice pick of water, \/ pried open my mouth.\u201d Perilous fluidity even shows up in the numerical titles demarcating each section of the collection: They are printed to resemble waterlogged, floating, theatre tickets. Watery imagery is all: \u201cdreams get washed away \/ like soil when nothing is left \/ to hold them in place\u201d; \u201cDreams move the sea\u2026 I reached out as if I could grasp that man\u2026, \/\/ wall of water that he was.\u201d<\/p>\n A fine conceit: Hamlet\u2014both prince and play\u2014is a tsunami that ravishes Ophelia, bereaving her, and then leaving her tear-sodden and submerged in elegy\u2026 Abandoning the play behind and considering Ophelia as symbol, Langille wonders, \u201cWas Ophelia Jewish? She read what she saw \/ backward, from right to left, like Hebrew\u2026.\u201d Interviewed by Carl Jung, Ophelia answers his word \u201cSilence\u201d with the statement, \u201cWhat quenched my thirst.\u201d In \u201cOphelia.com,\u201d our lady of sorrows comments, \u201cDying as I am continually, \/ everyone has use for me. The drive\u2019s hard. \/ Once barely perceptible, \/ now I\u2019m perpetual.\u201d<\/p>\n Autobiography is hinted at too, in the poem, \u201cGirls Who Lived in New York in the Sixties,\u201d a mash up of the TV shows Mad Men<\/i> and Sex in the City<\/i>. True: some poems could use further trimming, to accent the strongest insights and images. Yet, this book is a superb outing. Plunge right in.<\/p>\n Kim Clark\u2019s Sit You Waiting<\/i> is a side effect, of sorts, of multiple sclerosis. Though the disease hinders some brain functions, it has freed Clark\u2019s poetical self. The result is art; it\u2019s \u201csit-u-ational,\u201d one might say. But these are sharp, unsentimental lyrics: Vers libre<\/i> with guts and gusto: \u201cMy body held poetry for ransom, \/ threatened sinistrally\u2014 \/ first with a little finger \/ [accidental pizzicato], next my left foot. \/ The price was high, mind had to pay up \/ to make room for the lyric line.\u201d Clark makes frequent use of square brackets, to provide for fuller\u2014or alternative\u2014readings of a line, an image. It can feel overdone: \u201cSleep [stealthy] leaves \/ the makeshift bed, the woman \/ [a subduction].\u201d But the device is immediately distinctive\u2014much like bill bissett\u2019s ee-cumming\u2019s style grammar and spelling. And it is\u2014usually\u2014effective: \u201ca wetness sharp enough \/ to cut the ashen sorrow \/ cleansing the palate \/ of mere [black\/white] words.\u201d<\/p>\n The B.C. poet also writes straightforward lyrics, even poignant, haiku-like moments: \u201cthe trouble with tender \/ is the small word contained there \/ enveloped in empty letters.\u201d Clark\u2019s centrepiece is an impressionistic sequence about a train trip across outback Australia: \u201cthe light through the blinds \/ can only be \/ the sound of snow.\u201d The pieces are are either lyric or proem: \u201cAn intrusion of cockroaches escapes from a crusted \/ papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 ball, dead centre, first one, then an endless scurry.\u201d Clark shows debts to bp Nichol and P.K. Page. But she repays their influence by writing so powerfully and beautifully\u2014in her own right.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Writing the Common: Poetry Commemorating the 250<\/i>th<\/i><\/sup> Anniversary of the Halifax Common, 1763-2013<\/i><\/p>\n By Peggy Cameron (Foreword)<\/p>\n Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2013<\/p>\n 93 pp. $22<\/p>\n In 1763, King George III dedicated several hundred acres on the first major plateau above the harbour slopes \u201cfor the use of the inhabitants of the Town of Halifax as Commons forever.\u201d Thus was born those green acres\u2014public, unfenced, and open to the elements\u2014termed the Commons or Common. The latter word is the choice of Friends of Halifax Common, who have, with Gaspereau Press, issued a poetry anthology honouring this space.<\/p>\n Writing the Common: Poetry Commemorating the 250<\/i>th<\/i><\/sup> Anniversary of the Halifax Common, 1763-2013<\/i>, offers work by 31 poets (including yours truly), plus a nicely nuanced foreword by Peggy Cameron. Cameron highlights the struggle, in British history, between peasants and farmers, wishing to hold land in common for hunting, farming, and firewood harvest, versus the interests of aristocrats and capitalists wanting to fence off property as their own preserves or charge others fees for its use. This contest was transferred to Chebucto\u2014or Halifax\u2014as the British and ankee settlers arrived, stealing, of course, upon Mi\u2019kmaq lands. While the creation of the Commons served the progress of the colony, it also meant the transformation of a \u201ctreed, marshy watershed,\u201d a haunt of moose and ducks, into grassland, serving agricultural, military, and commercial needs.<\/p>\n Indeed, the Commons has been progressively shrunken, built upon, and paved over. The debate over the use of the old Queen Elizabeth High School lands and the successful development of the Common Roots Urban Farm (CRUF) is a continuance of tussles inherent to European feudalism. The Common(s) is a living museum of the local contest between grass and gold.<\/p>\n So, what of the anthology? The first question is, do we say \u201cCommon\u201d or \u201cCommons\u201d? An 1898 map proclaims the site as \u201cHalifax Common.\u201d But the original land grant employs the plural. (Cf. \u201cHouse of Commons\u201d: This usage also favours the plural). Most of the poets write \u201cCommon,\u201d but Bill Hanrahan, David Huebert, Jean MacKaracher-Watson, and Wanda Robson use \u201cCommons.\u201d (As a child who lived on Cunard and Maynard Streets, I remember playing on the \u201cCommons.\u201d)<\/p>\n Questions of nomenclature aside, the poets present a rich array of ideas, impressions, and memories. Former Halifax Poet Laureate Tanya Davis protests the fencing of the Commons for concerts, suggesting, \u201cI don\u2019t have a sheep, \/ but if I did I\u2019d bring it \/ and together we\u2019d balk at the business \/ and make rituals to gods who fled the premises.\u201d Brigid Garvey turns in a bluesy, break-up poem that ends happily thanks to the sudden up-spurt of the fountain. Corinne Gilroy\u2019s \u201cDark Grass\u201d is so crammed with striking images\u2014\u201cgravel dirty heart\u201d and \u201cblack grass hours ahead of dew,\u201d for example\u2014it borders on surrealism.<\/p>\n The prized poet Sue Goyette narrates a \u201cRevolution of Rhododendrons,\u201d that imagines a garden goddess with \u201ca contraband of pollen,\u201d who \u201cspreads honey on the idea of public.\u201d Hanrahan pictures the Commons as a Halifax Explosion field hospital and cemetery, while Huebert notes, pithily, how \u201cForests became lawns.\u201d Joanne Jefferson\u2019s fine poem is about a girl becoming a woman who loves women, navigating the Common all the while, as \u201cthe air bursts open as you cross Robie Street.\u201d Maryann Martin has intimations of mortality, while Robin Metcalfe comments on a Public Gardens Boer War soldier statue that resembles \u201ca nymph in drag.\u201d Karen Reynard\u2019s \u201cBlessing Common Roots\u201d conjures up the Zen Buddhist chanting style of Allen Ginsberg; it\u2019s a fetching celebration of the CRUF. Matthew Walsh channels a Beat aesthetic in his slim lyric.<\/p>\n Writing the Common helps us understand the city as a network of grassroots-and-asphalt fault lines, that is, as a site of concrete struggles over where we may live. History teaches us that citizens must decry inappropriate expropriations. The establishment of the Common(s) was, is, a public victory, then, yes, while the bulldozing of Africville was a triumph of uncivil power.<\/p>\n *November 29th<\/sup> was the 5oth Anniversary of the loss of TCA Flight 831. Nova Scotian author Ern Dick\u2019s book about the crash and the 118 victims, Voices from a Forgotten Tragedy, can be purchased via his website <www.tcaflight831.com>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Hermit of Africville: The Life of Eddie Carvery<\/i><\/p>\n By Jon Tattrie<\/p>\n Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield, 2010<\/p>\n 206 pp. $20<\/p>\n Lost Tongues<\/i><\/p>\n By Rudyard Fearon<\/p>\n Toronto, ON: RWF Publishing, 2013<\/p>\n In the wake of the passing, last July, of Dr. Burnley \u201cRocky\u201d Jones, O.N.S., LLD, the superb human rights champion and civil rights lawyer, I knew I could no longer neglect to read Jon Tattrie\u2019s The Hermit of Africville: The Life of Eddie Carvery<\/i>: Carvery was one of the many who worked with Jones and one of the very few to put public protest to personal test. Published in 2010, Tattrie\u2019s chronicle underlines the multi-generational social and familial dislocation that occurred as a result of the City of Halifax\u2019s Africville Relocation program, 1964-70, that razed a historic African-Nova Scotian community and trucked most of its former home-owner residents into municipal rental units or into actual, downtown slum housing.<\/p>\n Far from being a benign effort to support racial integration and social uplift goals, the so-called Relocation was, \u201cAs Rocky saw it,\u201d the result of \u201crace struggle\u201d that mandated Africville\u2019s \u201cdestruction.\u201d In Tattrie\u2019s own words, \u201cAfricville was \u2026 beaten to death.\u201d But the most eloquent testimony about the history of Africville is that of the persistent protestor, Carvery, who has spent the last 45 years fighting for apologies, the reconstruction of the Seaview Baptist Church, compensation or reparations for the former residents and descendants, as well as a public inquiry into the Relocation. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t give us pavement, but they could give us a dump. They couldn\u2019t give us sewage, but we had to receive their sewage. We got evicted. It\u2019s a vicious cycle of racism, what they did to us in Africville\u2026.\u201d And Carvery concludes: \u201cI\u2019m still in Africville. Right today, anybody driving by will see my little caravan of freedom fighters, fighting for what we all should be fighting for\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Carvery emerges as a heroic figure despite himself. He has been an addict, a prison inmate, and violent to his lovers and dangerous to his children. Describing his subject in the 1970s, Tattrie says, with a daub of yellow journalism and a dash of purple prose, \u201cCarvery was a human dump, a walking infectious diseases hospital, a bone prison for one.\u201d In short, for Carvery, the Relocation was a descent into Hell, while his personal salvation has been his dedication to protesting iniquity and inequity enough to help win painfully slow-in-coming apology and partial restitution from the City.<\/p>\n Tattrie\u2019s writing style is colourful, and each chapter in Carvery\u2019s saga, based on interviews and some research, is essentially a \u201chuman-interest\u201d J-School story. Even so, Carvery\u2019s flamboyant talk shines through. Not surprisingly, Rocky Jones makes vital appearances in the text, describing black history in Nova Scotia and even helping dig Carvery free of a 2004 blizzard that had swamped his camper. It was quite moving then to see Carvery at Jones\u2019s visitation three weeks ago: One fighter mourning another, as the struggle for justice and equality continues.<\/p>\n One wonders what Halifax might look like now and how socio-economic integration might have been assisted if, rather than being bulldozed down, Africville had been valued as a culturally unique and vibrant, seaside, African-heritage enclave, with proud homeowners occupying prize real-estate on the peninsula. It could have become a tourism must-see as a bucolic Harlem, or as a black adjunct to the city\u2019s Hydrostone district, or as an African-Nova Scotian version of Peggy\u2019s Cove\u2026. But such visions require visionaries. Given the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of Martin Luther King\u2019s Dream speech, \u201cnow is the time\u201d to revisit the planning of Africville as a once-and-future city estate\u2026.<\/p>\n Another notable title is Lost Tongues<\/i>, a self-published work by Rudyard Fearon, a Jamaican-Canadian poet who has also released CDs of his work. Fearon is a master of the epigram\u2014the pithy poem of wit, in which volumes of thought get distilled into an observation, or a chronicle, sketched out in a handful of lines. Hear \u201cenergy\u201d: \u201cthe young girl said \/ i was too old; \/ and i said \/ she was too young \/\/ but the energy \/ was strong \/\/ and proved us both wrong.\u201d Or try \u201cThe Complaint\u201d: \u201cthe cat \/ complained \/ to the dog: \/\/ \u2018i live \/ a dog\u2019s life.\u201d These are poems to reread again and again.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Karla: A Pact with the Devil <\/i><\/p>\n By Stephen Williams<\/p>\n Berkeley CA: Seal, 2004<\/p>\n 544 pp. $11<\/p>\n Muse<\/i><\/p>\n By Dawn Marie Kresan<\/p>\n Toronto, ON: Tightrope, 2013<\/p>\n 80 pp. $17<\/p>\n The female Muse can be either genius or villainess, depending\u2026 Stephen Williams\u2019 true-crime book, Karla: A Pact with the Devil<\/i>, appeared in 2003. While the vicious criminals\u2014the once-Mrs. Teale and her ex, Paul Bernardo Teale\u2014are now law-journal footnotes instead of newspaper headlines, one must not forget the police and prosecutorial bungling that permitted \u201cTeale\u201d to bargain for\u2014and receive\u2014a lighter sentence than that imposed upon her once-spouse.<\/p>\n Williams\u2019 first account of the case, Invisible Darkness<\/i> (1997), was an exquisite piece of investigative journalism that revealed a level of Niagara-region police incompetence that bordered on the malfeasant. Williams paid for his expos\u00e9 by being treated to a 1998 police raid, confiscation of his papers, arrest, and a trial for breaking a court order, only to be acquitted in 2000. His prosecution smelled of persecution.Yet, officials embarrassed by the first book must have loathed the second. In Karla<\/i>, Williams sifts psychological records, testimony, and correspondence with the then-inmate herself to reveal police whose failure to investigate the Teales made it necessary for them to cut a deal, to have the wife condemn the husband, and to proffer as her defence the incredible claim of battered spouse syndrome.<\/p>\n Williams finds that the Teales\u2019s bore equal responsibility for the assaults, abductions, and murders that they committed and suggests that each was the other\u2019s diabolical muse. He is a fine writer. He describes one lawyer, who, \u201cin amazing arabesques of hubris and stupidity, managed to turn himself into a total pariah\u2026.\u201d At 500-plus pages, however, the book\u2019s about 200 pages too long. It\u2019s exhaustive and exhausting. Also, as a neo-gonzo journalist, Williams puts himself too much at the centre of events. But, in writing a \u201cj\u2019accus<\/i>e,\u201d one needs to say, \u201cJust the facts, sir!\u201d<\/p>\n Dawn Marie Kresan\u2019s debut collection of poems, Muse<\/i>, re-animates the Victorian, redhead siren, Elizabeth Siddal, whose modelling provided the face of the greatest works of Pre-Raphaelite art from the brush, especially of her future husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. However, as Kresan\u2019s bio for Siddal stresses, her own \u201csmall, artistic output would be forever overshadowed by her role as Pre-Raphaelite model, mistress, and tragic muse.\u201d<\/p>\n To correct the repression of Siddal\u2019s creativity, to rescue her from imprisonment in men\u2019s silencing and exploitative portraiture, Kresan imagines Siddal\u2019s responses to the male painters\u2019 uses\u2014and abuses\u2014of her as well as her responses to the philandering of her lover and, briefly, her spouse, Rossetti. To paint her as Shakespeare\u2019s Ophelia, John Millais bid Siddal \u201clie hushed in a bath, \/ heavy fabric radiating.\u201d But the \u201csparse row of candles, \/ meant to keep you warm, have long ago \/ burnt out. A cough settles \/ in your throat. Water nestles in lungs. \/ Sickness a small price to pay for art.\u201d These lines portray a selfish man exposing Siddal to sickness so that he can paint his masterpiece. But the next lines fall into clich\u00e9: \u201cHow perfectly you demonstrate devotion\u2014 \/ the descent into madness.\u201d<\/p>\n If the imagery conjures up Elton John\u2019s Candle in the Wind, his (and lyricist Bernie Taupin\u2019s) saccharine elegy for Marilyn Monroe, later re-jigged to accommodate Princess Diana, it is apt that Kresan later presents Siddal and M.M. conversing and also a poem in which Di discusses \u201cFame and Fast Men.\u201d<\/p>\n Kresan is keen to emphasize female genius. So Siddal (d. 1862) is placed in the company of much later women such as Monroe and the princess, but also writers Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In \u201cMuse,\u201d Kresan\u2019s addresses Siddal directly: \u201cBy what authority do I speak of you\u2014 \/ sordid red metaphor through my colourless hands. \/ Your dead child and forgotten art used to enrich mine.\u201d An imaginary girl inspires the strongest poem: \u201cShe weeps over useless stumps. \/ What is the point of keeping oneself clean \/ and sinless if the body will be torn \/ from itself in either case?\u201d The lines have Margaret Atwood\u2019s visceral concision: \u201cButchered, the knob-boned shorn-skin twists \/ like thick branches blown from a trunk, \/ bluntly chopped short before the edge of sky.\u201d One doth hear the Muses singing\u2026.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019m Alive. I Believe in Everything<\/i><\/p>\n By Lesley Choyce<\/p>\n Cape Breton, NS: Breton Books, 2013<\/p>\n 103 pp. $16<\/p>\n On Thursday morn, October 10th<\/sup>, I guessed that Alice Munro had become Canada\u2019s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, because a woman sitting across from me, on my Frankfurt-Stockholm flight, was reading a Munro book. Carp as we like at some Nobel choices (a premature Peace Prize for a U.S. president who likes to\u2014ahem\u2014\u201cdrone\u201d on and on), the lustre of the Prize illuminates nations. Munro\u2019s triumph proclaims that Can Lit is must-read\u2014worldwide.<\/p>\n Munro\u2019s achievement also insists that we are not \u201cprovincial\u201d\u2014anywhere\u2014anymore. Canada possesses\u2014as Jewish Canadian poet A.M. Klein saw 70 years ago\u2014the absolute universal, made richly cosmopolitan by immigration from without and multiculturalism from within. That\u2019s how I read Nova Scotian author Lesley Choyce\u2019s latest collection of poems, both new and selected: I\u2019m Alive. I Believe in Everything. <\/i><\/p>\n Full disclosure: Choyce published my first book, 30 years ago, and he also published, among others, Richard Lemm and Maxine Tynes. Choyce\u2019s own voice echoes their registers: He is as passionate as Tynes and as compassionate as Lemm. What distinguishes Choyce is his American openness\u2014a capacious generosity\u2014the charitableness of Lemm, the gusto of Tynes; or, rather, the democratic vista of Ginsberg and the observant quietness of William Carlos Williams.<\/p>\n To hear a kinship between Choyce and Lemm is sensible, for each is a dissident, ex-American. (Tynes\u2019s \u201cAmericanness\u201d derives from her African-American roots, though rendered \u201cindigenous\u201d to Nova Scotia by her own Aboriginal\u2014Metis\u2014heritage.) Choyce\u2019s American qualities are vital to English-Canadian poetry, for, in its origins, it tried too hard to be \u201cBritish\u201d (an identity that our early poets interpreted as writing \u201cNature\u201d poetry with an intellectual\u2014even opaque\u2014ingenuity; so-called eco-poetry has this same bias). Choyce descends more from Whitman than Wordsworth and more from (Franco-Canado-Yank) Kerouac than from Hopkins, and the result is\u2014as in Tynes\u2014nature-informed poetry with zest and Zen-singing soul.<\/p>\n \u201cI am thinking about all the water in the world, \/ how it moves itself around day after day \/ in its own adventures.\u201d Choyce makes us \u201cflow\u201d with the subject of the poem, so that we note water, water, everywhere, enough to make us think: \u201cThe storms pass quickly now and congratulate themselves, \/ not like when I was a boy\u2026. \/ Now it\u2019s one solid slap and it\u2019s over, \/ the geese applauding at sunset \/ while all the water in the world \/ settles itself back down \/ into the deep democracy of itself.\u201d \u201cBlue Beach\u201d describes an \u201cOld dog \u2026 \/ black with a comedy of grey around the mouth\u201d who follows the poet out along \u201cFundy\u2019s Minas Basin,\u201d where one can see \u201chigh graphic cliffs, strata like old books piled \/ on their sides, some stories more important than the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the supreme poem of this sort is \u201cFog\u201d (with its debt to Carl Sandburg acknowledged): \u201cFog sidling up against the dockyards \/ and thick and soft on the rat\u2019s back \/ with pearling globes of the sea.\u201d Yes, Choyce is a shameless wind-surfing, beachcombing, tree-hugger and mushroom-eater. But he\u2019s also vulnerably personal, even when he allows himself a politic rant or two.<\/p>\n The consciously \u201cHowl\u201d-like anthem, \u201cBest Minds,\u201d demands that Baby Boomers (and kids) abandon their lattes and laptops and return to make-love-not-war plus \u201cgreen religion\u201d politics. But the poem is too much an imitation of inimitable Ginsberg. Much better is \u201cThe Beautiful Thing About My Outhouse,\u201d which sets the homely architecture within the poet\u2019s relations with neighbours and nature: It\u2019s now \u201cso old and persistent \/ it has become a living thing rooted in the planet \/ and can\u2019t be destroyed.\u201d That a drunk dude \u201cpeppered the door with birdshot\u201d is fine: \u201cThe holes make good ventilation and with the door closed \/ the sun projects a crazy constellation.\u201d<\/p>\n Some poems are too long and lose their concentration; or they falter upon an clich\u00e9d ending. But Choyce\u2019s poetry is always compelling because it is sumptuously crafted\u2014of feeling and philosophy; of whimsy and warmth. He makes us care for what he cares about\u2014the exemplary liberty of wind, water, and light; the godly love for life itself. No finer choice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Inhaling the Silence<\/i><\/p>\n By Anna Yin<\/p>\n Oakville, ON: Mosaic, 2013<\/p>\n 68 pp. $18<\/p>\n Allegheny, BC<\/i><\/p>\n By Rodney DeCroo<\/p>\n Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2013<\/p>\n 96 pp. $19<\/p>\n Anna Yin is Chinese by birth, Canadian by choice, and English in (second) language. Inhaling the Silence<\/i> is her second book; Wings Toward Sunlight<\/i> (2011) was her first. She received the Ted Plantos Memorial Award in 2005. Introducing Yin\u2019s new book, poet and scholar Richard (Rick) Greene observes that the \u201cdeepest roots\u201d of her poetics are \u201cChinese, and she achieves her finest effects by mysterious juxtapositions.\u201d He names Yin\u2019s antecedents as \u201c\u2018H.D.\u2019, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and even Wallace Stevens.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, Yin herself inks poems in homage to Canuck bards Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page, and she quotes Anna Akhmatova and Federico Garcia Lorca. She owes something to the extended lyricism of Layton and Page, while also imitating the cryptic politics of Akhmatova and the populist balladry of Cohen and Garcia Lorca. Educated in science at Nanjing University, Yin must know Mao Zedong\u2019s poem, \u201cThe People\u2019s Liberation Army Captures Nanjing\u201d (1949), and its victorious, martial rhetoric capped by an imagistic aphorism: \u201cMan\u2019s world is mutable: \/ Seas become mulberry fields.\u201d Many of Yin\u2019s poems, in Inhaling the Silence<\/i>, are first tentative exercises, fielding hit-and-miss images, even clich\u00e9s, but then clinching a triumphant conclusion vastly superior to the preceding words.<\/p>\n An example of this feinting\/striking approach is \u201cThe Night Garden.\u201d Yin imagines the night sky as \u201cdark chocolate branches\u201d a-stretch, with \u201cher moon face\u201d a-float, and stars brimming \u201ccrystal wine.\u201d Though individual images are, well, pretty, the effect of the whole is confusion (night is stretching branches, a female face is floating, while stars are somehow overflowing with wine) or clich\u00e9 (\u201ccrystal wine\u201d).<\/p>\n A stanza later, the passable line, \u201cTides chime and fish submerge,\u201d precedes cloying exoticism: \u201cLush forest and plump fruits scent.\u201d A \u201csilver river\u201d appears next. But the poem succeeds to a powerful stanza: \u201cWe have come this far \/ and find each other \/ closer \/ then burst into blossoms \/ in this night garden.\u201d \u201cMourning for Iris Chang\u201d takes ten lines, yet it needs only three: \u201cBeneath plum boughs, \/ petals shroud the ground \/ as last night\u2019s snow.\u201d The final line is even better if \u201cas\u201d is cut. Yin will become greater as her poems become stricter.<\/p>\n Rodney DeCroo\u2019s Allegheny, BC<\/i>, is a debut collection of verse that builds upon the lyrics of his album, Allegheny,<\/i> which has earned him notice as being one of Canada\u2019s best folk-alt-country songwriters. Raised in the coal-mining wilds of Pennsylvania, but Vancouver-based for the past 20 years, DeCroo\u2019s lyrics recall the harshness of his rural, working-class, Allegheny riverside childhood and youth, and a further troubled youth in hardscrabble, back-country British Columbia.<\/p>\n The poetry is likely distinct from the song lyrics in that, while often cut into recognizable quatrains or quintains, the poems don\u2019t rhyme. But their content presumably echoes the songs. If so, they hearken back to Bob Dylan\u2014early Dylan, that is, still imprinted by Woody Guthrie. Taking DeCroo at his words (pun intended), these poems are blank ballads about booze, beatings, and broads; or losers, labour, and liquor; or dirt, drink, and death. Et cetera\u2026 DeCroo is relentless in remarking on pain, poverty, and pollution\u2014inner and outer.<\/p>\n The Allegheny River is a site of \u201chuge rats\u201d and \u201cdead carp and catfish\u201d rotting \u201cin a wash of yellowish scum\u201d; kids in the coal-dig towns have rock fights, using \u201csmall stones \/ hardly bigger than pebbles,\u201d but still capable of wounding: \u201cI held my hand to my face \/\/ and when I brought it back \/ to look, it was bright with blood.\u201d<\/p>\n Country life can be lousy. DeCroo recalls \u201cMy uncle\u2019s huge, \/\/ scarred hands wielding his greasy bible, \/ my aunt\u2019s thin, feral-cat face. \/ Clinging to their wrecked farm \/ like ghosts jealous of the living, \/ except for church or groceries, \/ they seldom left that dessicated ground.\u201d<\/p>\n The poems are nicely spare, plain-wrought; the images are as clear and cutting as glass shards: \u201cThe bear began to cough as its sides heaved, \/\/ blood swamping its lungs.\u201d DeCroo is heir to Al Purdy and Milton Acorn: calloused troubadours.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n JFK\u2019s Last Hundred Days<\/i> <\/b><\/p>\n By Thurston Clarke <\/i><\/p>\n New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2013<\/p>\n 448 pp. $30<\/p>\n On Friday, November 22, 1963, I was three, and napping in my family\u2019s home on St. Margaret\u2019s Bay Road in Halifax, when at about 3 p.m. (1 p.m. in Dallas, Texas), I was awakened by an adult neighbour running up the road, weeping, and screaming, probably, \u201cThe President\u2019s been shot.\u201d<\/p>\n Fifty years after John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination, Thurston Clarke\u2019s new bio of the 35th<\/sup> U.S. President, JFK\u2019s Last Hundred Days<\/i> (Penguin Press, $30), seeks to explain just what it was about the man that helped make his death \u201cthe first time many children saw an adult cry\u201d and why it is that \u201cJFK\u201d remains iconic globally. Indeed, Clarke opines that the \u201csurvival\u201d of Kennedy\u2019s memory is proof of his \u201cgreatness.\u201d<\/p>\n He has a point: Presidents Garfield and McKinley perished by assassination in 1881 and 1901 respectively, but are hardly remembered, even though McKinley won the 1898 Spanish-American War. President Lincoln is certainly great, but he waged the U.S. Civil War successfully, before being shot and killed in 1865.<\/p>\n So why or how is JFK \u201cgreat\u201d? Clarke says the answer lies in the achievements of\u2014and plans set in motion\u2014during the last 14 weeks of Kennedy\u2019s life. To document\u2014as the subtitle reads\u2014\u201cThe Transformation of the Man and the Emergence of a Great President<\/i>,\u201d Clarke adopts the practice of Kennedy portraitist Elaine de Kooning: \u201cto discover the essence of a man who compartmentalized his life, you had to look into all his compartments.\u201d Clarke delves deep into these \u201ccompartments\u201d and finds vivid contradictions. His JFK combines \u201ccourage and mendacity, generosity and sudden rages, idealism and cunning,\u201d so that he is, in the end, \u201ca very complicated yet appealing human being.\u201d Complexities abound. In mid-August, 1963, the Democrat Kennedy appoints Republican Henry Cabot Lodge as his ambassador to South Vietnam. He expects that this appointment will provide him with political cover if he withdraws US advisors from Vietnam as he is considering.<\/p>\n However, Lodge aids and abets\u2014and JFK tacitly approves\u2014a coup against South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem that results in his assassination, just 20 days before the US president\u2019s own murder. Though Clarke marshals evidence that JFK did plan to pull US forces from Vietnam, it is curious that Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary to both JFK and his successor President Johnson, escalated the war drastically, 1965-68, in the process, likely slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, in napalm and bullets.<\/p>\n McNamara is quoted as saying, on October 2, 1963, \u201cwe need a way to get out of Vietnam.\u201d Yet, he shortly ramps up the US bombing runs to war-crime status. Maybe the rationale for JFK\u2019s Machiavellian policies is that he was \u201chigh-minded in public and pragmatic in private.\u201d So, he signed an atomic bomb atmospheric test-ban treaty with the USSR, while pursuing secret efforts both to subvert Cuba and engage Fidel Castro in d\u00e9tente.<\/p>\n In personality, too, JFK proved two-faced: all photogenic charisma on the hustings, but a reckless philanderer behind closed doors. His rhetoric echoed Winston Churchill, but his life mirrored Lord Melbourne, a Brit statesman, \u201cknown for his hedonism, intellect, and aristocratic style.\u201d JFK was courageous: He proposed \u201cthe most radical civil rights [i.e. black equality] legislation since the [US] Civil War, risking his reputation, presidency, and reelection.\u201d And he was inspirational, thinking up the moon mission, thereby marrying \u201cthe power of the presidency to the poetry of the stars.\u201d<\/p>\n When JFK dreams of visiting the scenes of his WWII South Pacific heroism and then travelling to Greece with his wife \u201cadministering\u201d to his every wish, he reveals both his romance of triumph and his lust for pleasure. He cut a James Bond figure: Lauding cool gadgets, cold calculation, and chic ladies.<\/p>\n His death did mark promise cut short. Thus, his mourners created \u201ca grief-stricken empire of asphalt, mortar, and brick so extensive\u201d that it could compose \u201ca web of lights\u201d observable from space. Clarke is a thorough scholar and a fine writer. It\u2019s a pity then that US poet Carl Sandburg is both \u201cSandburg\u201d and \u201cSandberg\u201d in the same sentence (p. 130).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n August Sander: Objective Romantic<\/i><\/p>\n by August Sander<\/p>\n Halifax, NS: Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, 2013<\/p>\n $29<\/p>\n Songs that Remind Us of Factories<\/i><\/p>\n by Danny Jacobs<\/p>\n Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2013<\/p>\n 64 pp. $19<\/p>\n August Sander (1876-1964) had the bad luck of trying to be an epic, German photographer while Germany fought\u2014twice\u2014to make Europe its vassal. His career was bookended\u2014and upended\u2014by war: It\u2019s impossible to eye his photos and not spy the shadows of contiguous horrors. His goal, to create a panoramic record of 20th<\/sup> century, German faces, became, accidentally, partly an epitaph to the daily life of Cologne, due to the 1942 obliteration of the medieval city by 1,000 British bombers. Usually painterly, with subtle sepia tones (not unlike Wallace MacAskill\u2019s florid, camera seascapes of 1930s Nova Scotia), Sander\u2019s photos can also be sharply black-and-white, issuing formidable clarity.<\/p>\n Both types of Sander pictorial were the subject of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery (MSVUAG) exhibition, August Sander: Objective Romantic<\/i>, held from 7 September to 20 October, 2013, curated by famed Halifax photographer George Steeves. Steeves\u2019 impressions of Sander\u2019s ambitions and frustrations unfold in an essay included in the MSVUAG exhibition catalogue, which features a selection of Sander\u2019s works, presumably those that Steeves believes exemplify Sander\u2019s aesthetic. However, these works also likely illuminate\u2014Steeves\u2019s\u2014own practice, which is, ironically, antithetical to Sander, for Steeves questions grandeur and realism.<\/p>\n Arguably, Steeves has focused on showing us the body, unvarnished, even innately unlovely, in its naked glory, and on stripping away static, gender concepts\u2014by cross-dressing or undressing his models. In contrast, Sander imbues his subjects with dignity verging on romanticism. I wager Steeves is impressed by Sander\u2019s establishment of an air of \u201cbenign equanimity\u201d in his subjects and his labours to carry on and preserve his art, even when \u201cviolence (is) roaring outside his own door.\u201d Steeves is captivated, then, by Sander\u2019s pursuit of Art for Art\u2019s Sake. In his historical fiction that closes the slim book, Steeves writes, \u201cObsession is freedom \u2026 if one is driven and selfish enough.\u201d This precept animates many great artists, whose immortality is achieved amid broken homes and broken hearts.<\/p>\n Steeves\u2019s essay omits Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi-collaborationist photographer and filmmaker; yet, her post-war, African ethnographic shoots mirror Sander\u2019s sociological archive. However, unlike Sander, she became complicit with politics, which Steeves sees as inimical to art. How fine it is that the MSVUAG has published this book, giving us access to a vital, last-century photographer and\u2014just as importantly\u2014suggestive insights into the \u201cobsessions\u201d of curator Steeves.<\/p>\n Songs that Remind Us of Factories<\/i> is Danny Jacobs\u2019 debut poetry collection. Raised in Riverview, N.B., and degreed in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Jacobs is the librarian of Petitcodiac, N.B. His work means the arrival of a new generation of poets, intrigued by the connective and alienating aspects of electronic communication and also experienced in the part-Babylon, part-Hell that is the call centre, a likely fiendish sort of McJob.<\/p>\n Jacobs wields well Dantean cum Orwellian jargon. A death results, then, not from \u201csome crossed- \/ signal in the cells,\u201d but the \u201cquick physics \/ of skid and drift: a road, sun catching on chrome.\u201d At work, making cold calls, \u201cPens \/ are contraband in the paperless environment.\u201d Humanely, \u201cCapital One\u201d permits \u201cseven minutes a shift\u201d for \u201cBathroom time.\u201d The lyrics that delve into the Newspeak of nanotechnology or describe the \u201cneocortex fold\u201d might be dismissed as avant-garde clich\u00e9. But a poem like \u201cMemo from Heaven, Re: The Lesser Saints,\u201d shows that Jacobs traces the satiric tradition of F.R. Scott: \u201cThey may bitch we\u2019re bureaucrats\u2026 \/ but relate \/ the logistics\u2014we\u2019re losing millions \/ and need to back our first-stringers, \/ the go-to guys from Sunday School\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not only the Canuck poet Scott who seems to prefigure Jacobs. One can also espy U.S. poet Robinson Jeffers and British poet Basil Bunting. Jacobs\u2019 forward-looking poetry looks back to modernism. Though the up-to-date vocabulary snags attention, the poems about relationships must matter most: \u201croots, braid the soil, \/ grow the shaky \/ beginnings of a tree.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Poetry, Pop Culture, Art and History Reviews George Elliott Clarke Afloat by John Reibetanz London, ON: Brick, 2013 87 pp. $20 The Family China by Ann Shin London, ON: Brick, 2013 74 pp. $20 In his eighth collection, Afloat, John Reibetanz, native New Yorker and now English professor at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1880,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"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\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1980,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions\/1980"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}