And Sometimes They Fly<\/em> Robert Edison Sandiford is a rare Canadian writer, for he writes in self-chosen exile, as an expatriate journalist in Barbados, the homeland of his parents.\u00a0An African-Canadian writer, Sandiford was born in Quebec and raised in a Montreal suburb. He is, then, a child of Pierre Trudeau \u2014 bilingual, multicultural, intellectual, liberal.\u00a0Indeed, when Sandiford isn\u2019t writing journalism or fiction, he keeps his ink frothy by penning naughty scripts for adult-only cartoon strips, as well as short stories exploring the psychology of intimacy.<\/p>\n Twice a recipient of Barbados\u2019s highest literary honour, the Governor General\u2019s Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts, Sandiford is a gifted writer, and so he sets himself the task, in his first novel, of drafting a tale that unleashes creatures from Caribbean folklore like destructive Greek gods to terrorize 21st-century Barbadians (Bajans).\u00a0That verb, \u201cterrorize,\u201d is critical to Sandiford\u2019s debut novel, And Sometimes They Fly<\/em>, for it begins with a scene of Bajans in a Bridgetown bar, watching the Sept. 11, 2001, aerial terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., unfold on a local TV station accepting a feed from the United States.\u00a0Not only does this spectacular violence devastate two American cities and stun the world, it also resurrects Caribbean terrors (not mere terrorists), such as baccous and soucouyan and duppies, supernatural beings that wrought unholy, ungodly destruction.\u00a0In Sandiford\u2019s Caribbean mythology, 9-11 is a \u201cCataclysm\u201d that opens a portal for demonic beings to invade even such a sugarcane-green and rum-peaceful isle as Barbados.<\/p>\n Fans of African-Canadian novelists Nalo Hopkinson, David Chariandy and Andr\u00e9 Alexis, in particular, will see Sandiford follow in their footsteps by applying to Canadian and Barbadian settings the same folkloric beings that show up in fiction by this trio of authors.\u00a0But there\u2019s also a connection here between Sandiford\u2019s crafting of superbly thoughtful and playful erotica and his imaginative evocation of a world of diabolical thingamajigs and their heroic opponents.\u00a0Essentially, the novel \u2014 like the shorter fiction \u2014 explores passions and the passions that violate scruples, morals and boundaries.<\/p>\n And Sometimes They Fly<\/em> can also be thought a strange mashup of Toni Morrison\u2019s Song of Solomon (1976) and Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart (1960). In Morrison\u2019s tale, some African-Americans possess the ability to fly; in Achebe\u2019s tale, taboos and gremlins, indicative of cancerous fears and passions, corrupt the state.\u00a0Luckily, in Sandiford\u2019s romance, a trio of Elect (angelic) beings, guided by an Elder, intervene to save Barbados and, by extension, the world.<\/p>\n In this narrative, the characters David can fly, even to the moon (though he does find space \u201cchilly;\u201d); \u00a0Marsha is super strong (a Bajan bionic woman); and Franck has no excuse for not paying his bills on time, for he is, well, super fast.\u00a0But even if Superman, Wonder Woman and the Flash (so to speak) want to ward off the monster invasion, they are limited by the Elders: Milton, who is Miltonic, and Mackie, who is Machiavellian.\u00a0Three Witches, reminiscent of Macbeth\u2019s fortunetellers, also impede the would-be do-gooders.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve reviewed Sandiford before, and I find his past successes repeated in And Sometimes They Fly<\/em>. A cross between Joe Conrad and V.S. Naipaul, Sandiford is breathtakingly clear in his prose, and this commitment to realism serves him well in writing a story that could easily be a Twilight Zone episode:<\/p>\n “And a boy and a girl, fresh into their teens, kissed for the first time in the sea.\u201d Sandiford also turns in fine aphorisms:\u00a0 \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a plan \u2026 then the only plan you have is to fail.\u201d\u00a0And Sometimes They Fly is an adventure tale, a sort of Caribbean novelization of The Odyssey. Voices from Kibuli Country Dannabang Kuwabong is a Ghanaian-Canadian poet , who keeps a home in Hamilton (ON), but teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, and globetrots the Caribbean and Africa, tracing the invisible Trail of Tears that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade.\u00a0Kuwabong\u2019s fifth\u2014and newest book\u2014is Voices from Kibuli Country , which extends the concerns visible in his fourth book, Caribbean Blues & Love\u2019s Genealogy<\/em> ( TSAR, 2008): to address the haunting of the contemporary world by the ghosts of African Diasporic history.<\/p>\n Kuwabong takes up Malcolm X\u2019s command: \u201cRemember.\u201d Indeed, if Martin Luther King, Jr., may be interpreted as saying, \u201cForgive\u201d; X may be interpreted as having said, \u201cNever forget.\u201d\u00a0So, Voices from Kibuli Country<\/em> (the title refers to The Commonwealth of Dominica) is a chronicle of journeys, out of the claustrophobic, occasionally Negrophobic, immigrant headspace of urban Canada to, not sight-seeing, but insight-seeking, in Ohio, Puerto Rico, St. Croix (all U.S. territories), St. Maarten\/St. Martin, and Dominica.\u00a0Hamilton\u2014Steeltown\u2014is \u201ca smoky downtown\u201d and bellies \u201cHungry for crispy cold salad and sweaty Labatt\u201d; it is also the memory of ex-UN peacekeepers, \u201cwho saved our dreams in our wallets to purchase our escape \/ when news came of coups and counter-soups.\u201d\u00a0But the Canuck city is also full of folks, \u201cSputtering their interrogations of my origins on Concession Street.\u201d Kuwabong is bitter about being asked, \u201cWhere ya from,\u201d for that question, when addressed to Canadians of colour, is heard as a subtle questioning of (our) citizenship.<\/p>\n Kuwabong\u2019s English can sound stilted at times, as if it is a foreign language (\u201canguish\u201d says Black Canuck bard M. Nourbese Philip) that he has absorbed fitfully\u2014as more Latinate and abstract than it is grounded and earthy.\u00a0So, he can rattle out lines like \u201cWe all one and sundry receive our desired bags of absolution and penance,\u201d but also\u2014to my ears\u2014preferable phrases like \u201csquishy bag of guts,\u201d or a line in phonetic Ghanaian pronunciation: \u201cSo derfor we no get eni problem egen for wan wik for os\u201d (So therefore we no get any problem again for one week for us.)<\/p>\n Certainly, when Kuwabong echoes the great Afro-Martiniquan poet, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and less the too-stultified style of Anglo-Saxons like Auden and Eliot, he is magnificent.\u00a0So, one reads pithy, robust phrases: \u201ci fired invectives \/ i shout them down \/ i pushed them out.\u201d\u00a0Or one is spellbound by Kuwabong\u2019s use of repetition: \u201cPower: It is not in us to create \/ Power: it is not in us to transform \/ Power: it is not in us to donate,\u201d etc.\u00a0Consider also these lines: \u201cA woman named Hetty, my property \/ A likely BLACK NEGRO woman, my property\u2026. \/ She carried away with her my property \/ In the form of a child she bore for me, my property\u2026.\u201d\u00a0Or spy the effective repetition here: \u201cbut they died, the Caribs died \/ they died so we might know death\u2026 \/ death of our tongue \/ death of our culture \/ death of self to self.\u201d<\/p>\n Kuwabong\u2019s content is best when he is spewing discontent: \u201cScars are disgusting on the skin\u2026 \/ Scars are scary but sublime\u2026 \/ Scars unveil your body\u2019s lies \/ Scars complete your humanity.\u201d\u00a0When he is committed to scribing History\u2019s raw wounds, the imagery itself scars: \u201cMy poem will be a badly restored mashed-up sawn cartilage\u2026 \/\/ My poem \u2026 will not discriminate between fresh flesh and rotten meat.\u201d\u00a0Thinking of the Haitian earthquake, Kuwabong confronts the red \u201cblood for destruction,\u201d \u201cblack for salvation,\u201d and \u201cblue for forgiveness\u201d; in St. Croix, he recalls slaves suffering \u201cwhip lash and chain fire \/ broken shoulders on hot boulders,\u201d but also the European conquistadors and imperialists who \u201cdefeated their fear of beauty in a bottle of rum.\u201d<\/p>\n Kuwabong is a bard of fine talent, though I\u2019d like him to edit more and editorialize less, to strip the poems of rhetoric so as to accent raw power.\u00a0When his persona says, \u201cI have come because I want to be angry at history,\u201d I\u2019d like him to spit fire and pull down \u201cthe bastilles of consumption,\u201d and make sure \u201cno treacle is squeezed out here.\u201d\u00a0Plenty of time later to let \u201cthe flood waters of our love [snuff] out the fires of hate.\u201d<\/p>\n In Our Translated World: Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry When the Pan-Am games occurred in Toronto in July 2015, was I the only Torontonian irritated by the media\u2019s failure to notice that \u201cpanam\u201d is a Tamil word meaning, \u201cessential things\u201d\u2014like money or milk?\u00a0Well, let us read, In Our Translated World: Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry<\/em>.\u00a0This volume of English translations of Tamil-language poets from Sri Lanka, India, and world-wide (including Canada) introduces a corpus of literary gems. But it\u2019s also an exemplary study of how beautiful poetry emerges\u2014despite painful politics.<\/p>\n The book is the brainchild of Prof. Dr. Chelva Kanaganayakam, FRSC, who passed away, last November 22, 2014, on the very day of his induction into the Royal Society of Canada, a laurel honouring his stellar contributions to the study of post-colonial literature and the translation of Tamil works.\u00a0Tamil himself, Dr Kanaganayakam also embraced a Canadian identity, resulting in an apolitical attentiveness to\u2014and ecumenical acceptance of\u2014poetry by Tamils of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian background.\u00a0The rewards of editor Kanaganayakam\u2019s cosmopolitan approach are richly evident in this text, midwifed into being by translators Anushiya Ramaswamy, Maithili Thayanithy, and M.L. Thangappa.<\/p>\n In his intro, Dr. Kanaganayakam tells us \u201cTamils have endured, suffered, and flourished in a translated world.\u201d He finds, \u201cit is not time but space that shapes consciousness for Sri Lankan poets.\u201d\u00a0In this sense, Tamil poets resemble Canadian poets: More concerned with geography, with locating a Just Society, than with historical givens.\u00a0However, this collection suggests that Tamil poets are less interested in metaphor than are most Anglo-Canadian poets, and more interested in rhetoric, which is often, wrongly, given a bad rap because of the term\u2019s description of the hot-air speech of politicos.\u00a0Yet, poetry is, classically, a branch of rhetoric, and so it remains a pillar of the art\u2014along with imagery (metaphor) and musicality (cadence and\/or rhythm).<\/p>\n Tamil poets remind us of the awesome vitality of rhetoric\u2014the linguistic texture of philosophy.\u00a0See, for instance, the last stanza of Alari\u2019s poem: \u201c\u2026when someone is killed \/ what\u2019s the big deal? \/ Apart from the fact that \/ Someone else will be murdered.\u201d\u00a0The strength of the poem is not in metaphor, but in juxtaposition.\u00a0When Tamil poets use metaphors, they do so sparingly, to stress ideas immanent in a poem\u2019s syntax: \u201cWhen the lover became my wife \/ and children appeared \/ time, now a gale, swept me asunder \/ like fish out of water\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Mu. Ponnambalam\u2019s grammar reveals, with compact force, the storm of time that overtakes us, once autobiography becomes the fount of genealogy.\u00a0One poem that conjoins metaphor and rhetoric to great affect is Solaikkili\u2019s \u201cA Baby in Cap and Boots\u201d: \u201c\u201dThere will be a time \/ when babies will leap \/ out of wombs wearing \u2026 \/ Military caps, trousers, boots, moustaches \/ A knife at the hips.\u201d\u00a0Moreover, \u201ccoconut trees will bear \/ bombs in bunches\u2026.\u00a0 \/\/ If you planted watermelon \/ land mines will sprout.\u201d\u00a0An apocalyptic vision of civil war and\/or official oppression is given pastoral expression.\u00a0Isai\u2019s philosophical verse exists as rhetoric\u2014or vice versa: \u201cHunger is widely accepted \/ as sorrow number one\u2026. \/ It is the conflict between \/ one sorrow and another \/ we call history.\u201d\u00a0Strangely\u2014or not, Tamil verse has the same blunt elegance that constitutes classical Greek drama: \u201cmy brother stepped on [father\u2019s corpse] \/ to reach for the light-switch.\u201d Kalapria also says\u2014shades of Euripides and Sophocles, \u201cIt was convenient for mother. \/ She hid the money she had earned \/ in the lap of the corpse.\u201d<\/p>\n Leena Manimekalai\u2019s feminist poem is a pithy, but universal condemnation of misogyny: \u201cMaybe I was ten \/ when I first heard the word \/ whore. \/ I had no breasts then\u2026. \/\/ When I returned late from school \u2026, \/ when there was too much eyeshadow \/ on my eyes, \/ when in love I acquiesced \/ or rejected, \/ \u2026 when I became older, \/ many reasons \/ to be called a whore. \/ And now I am a whore \/ for writing poetry.\u201d\u00a0The other side of rhetoric is wit, and Tamil poets have such in spades. See Mukunth Nagarajan\u2019s lyric, \u201cChildren Playing,\u201d which, despite its title, is not child\u2019s play, but adult-oriented.\u00a0Anthologies and translations enlarge the availability of good poets and poems. Dr. Kanaganayakam\u2019s fine florilegium accomplishes this aim. Blind Items<\/em> The Physics of Allowable Sway<\/em> Everyday is, truly, International Women\u2019s Day. In appropriate solidarity, then, we should read verse collections by Dina Del Bucchia of Vancouver, B.C., and Marilyn Lerch of Sackville, N.B. But we should read these poets, not because of their sex alone, but because they are artists of distinction.<\/p>\n Del Bucchia\u2019s second book is Blind Items<\/em>. Strikingly, almost every poem is dedicated to amour with a celeb, from George Clooney to Meryl Streep.\u00a0Buying into these star-struck-voiced monologues is like eyeballing the cover of National Enquirer. The freaks and faults of the hyper-famous always seem glossy and airbrushed.\u00a0Anyway, \u201cbuying into\u201d is a keener act than \u201csuspending disbelief\u201d in approaching Del Bucchia\u2019s poems. She applies to poetry Andy Warhol\u2019s savvy investment in the commercial appeal of the mass-produced star, whether Marilyn or Mao.\u00a0Del Bucchia advises, in her Acknowledgments, \u201cPlease don\u2019t be weirded out by all the weird stuff in this book.\u201d Mind that.<\/p>\n \u201cLindsay Lohan\u201d presents the anonymous speaker loving L.L. in the back of a pickup truck. \u201cShe is so Hollywood, she doesn\u2019t even understand how real this is\u2026.\u201d\u00a0\u201cR. Kelly\u201d needs one line: \u201cI wake up salty and crusted with cocaine.\u201d\u00a0Describing her hook-up with \u201cDaniel Radcliffe,\u201d \u201ca malnourished chinchilla,\u201d the speaker feels, \u201cRound milk teeth nip my throat\u2026. He looks down at me, and I wriggle, arch, force a moan. Words stream out of his mouth\u2026. One, two, bloody hell, three\u2026.\u201d\u00a0\u201cBill Cosby\u201d was written before the entertainer\u2019s alleged misdeeds became tabloid fodder. Del Bucchia\u2019s imagery is prophetic: \u201cI never imagined I\u2019d be tangled in his vibrant abstract of acrylic, that I\u2019d rise from his bed, slip the sweater over my skin, run down for a pint of ice cream.\u201d\u00a0\u201cHow easy it was to instigate\u2026. His stilted strut and his exasperation, his scotch-cigar breath on my skin\u2026.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always been the same age as his youngest TV daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n Del Bucchia\u2019s voyeuristic prose poems startle, especially if one imagines that her \u201cLeonard Cohen\u201d is Leonard Cohen. Ditto for her \u201cAngelina Jolie\u201d and \u201cBritney Spears,\u201d whose \u201ccracked manicure grabs for my belt.\u201d\u00a0Will these poems still shock once their many A-list subjects pass through rehab to become has-beens? We\u2019ll see. For now, Del Bucchia dredges artfully the same pop-culture detritus mined so adroitly by Montreal\u2019s David McGimpsey.<\/p>\n Marilyn Lerch is a thoughtful, Zen-tutored poet. Read her third collection, The Physics of Allowable Sway<\/em>. She looks far beyond \u201cnow\u201d to ponder the fate of humanity and our planet.\u00a0Her book is self-published , but merits review because it is very good; its quality arises from the poet\u2019s simple commitment to speaking her truth, in her voice, without worrying about moralists, politicos, meddlers, and preachers.\u00a0Her style conjoins Walt Whitman\u2019s big-tent humanism and Margaret Avison\u2019s spiritual-informed, nature observation.<\/p>\n Lerch is a superbly quotable poet: \u201cSo much goes on without our knowing, \/ perhaps a new world without us \/ in the making\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 There\u2019s a hint of Blake in such wisdom\u2014and just as much expansive applicability.\u00a0In \u201cBarrachois Bay,\u201d closer to home, she writes deftly of \u201can unhindered sun horizon to horizon,\u201d \u201chow light quickens everything to more than itself,\u201d and then of the bay, \u201calmost asleep, \/ the moon up and lying on the water\u2026.\u201d The poem ends, \u201cAll sleeping now, under the moon\u2019s traveling light that is \/ older than the old Mi\u2019kmaq word, \/ Takumegooch, \/ where two waters meet.\u201d The observation is a meditation.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce I Dreamed\u201d is a powerful poem that deserves instant anthologization: \u201cOnce I dreamed \/ a slow, determined climb to bedrooms where, \/ one by one, I slew the family, \/ then from the bottom of the darkened stairs, turned and saw \/ processing down, in single file, \/ all the dead to be slain again.\u201d\u00a0The poem continues: \u201cAll my life I wanted to be good, \/ but killed and killed and bled and bled, \/ for letting go the wounds was death.\u201d \u00a0Lerch is a consummate poet, really, and must not be disregarded. Hear these last lines of the book: \u201cYou \/ whoever finds this, \/ if you still can, \/ feel the feeling of \/\/ how much we loved \/ Life.\u201d<\/p>\n Blue Sonoma 24 Poems Jane Munro\u2019s sixth collection, Blue Sonoma<\/em>\u00a0, is a celebration of poetry.\u00a0A B.C. poet, Munro projects a mix of Thomas Merton nature-observation-plus-spiritual-insight plus a John Thompson-style ghazal structure, though hers are not as gritty as his.\u00a0Munro\u2019s specialty is a pointillist examination of nature, then a startling juxtaposition or contrast, from which a poignant aphorism should arise\u2014implicitly, discreetly, as in the works of classical Chinese poets.<\/p>\n The contrasts between lyrical detail and grisly or gruesome context can be effectively jarring: \u201cMullions and muntins: true divided lights. Windows \/ lit from inside cast rhomboids on the roof\u2026. \/\/ A nurse probed the wound bed with a steel skewer. \/ Maggots cleaned out the abscess, then ate each other.\u201d\u00a0Romance and pain collide in these lines too: \u201cHands that bled from the thorns. My friend\u2019s \/ mother\u2019s wedding bouquet of hawthorn blossoms.\u201d\u00a0Munro\u2019s bittersweet vision is most intense in a sequence of poems for an \u201cold man,\u201d a beloved spouse, now suffering dementia: He\u2019s like \u201cA black bear \/ out in the rain \/ on Blueberry Flats\u2026. \/\/ Tell me, can a soul \/ fatten up for winter?\u201d<\/p>\n Love is tests, constant tests, or so Munro attests: \u201cIf you want to come visit, \/ I\u2019ll invite you. \/\/ My old man won\u2019t know \/ the difference \/ between you and billy-be-damned\u2026. \/\/ Roar up the drive. Spit gravel. Blow your horn. \/\/ I am gnawing through myself.\u201d\u00a0Is the poem an invitation to soothe-my-troubles adultery or is it merely the cry of angst of a loving wife brought to endure the chastity of being a caring nurse, of engaging in repetitious parley that seems to hollow out her soul?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a religious sensibility here\u2014the Taoism of the Chinese poets, the Catholicism of Merton, the Zen calm that happens as \u201cThe singing [finally heard] when we stopped to\u00a0listen.\u00a0I like Munro\u2019s riposte to Yeats\u2019s \u201cLake Isle of Innisfree\u201d: \u201cOld woman, Eros can arise \/ and go now beyond bean rows \/ and the hive for the honey bee\u2026. \/\/ It\u2019s only a cabin I\u2019ve built here.\u201d\u00a0Munro\u2019s title poem stands out for its unflinching study of a car accident: \u201cthe slumped driver silhouetted by my lights– \/ only the two of us on the road.\u201d\u00a0Munro is a fine poet, elegant in diction, gracious in tone. Perhaps now she needs a more distinctive style, to stand out from the general chorus of Anglo-Canadian poets, harmonizing way too much.<\/p>\n Marco Fazzini\u2019s book, 24 Poems<\/em>, exhibits a love of jazz. In his 24 Poems<\/em>, the Italian impresario, poet, Venetian English professor, and translator, Marco Fazzini offers two-dozen poems supported by beautiful, nature-oriented, colour photographs by Paula Sweet.\u00a0The book couples the original Italian verses with English translations (on one occasion, the translation process is reversed).<\/p>\n Scottish poet Douglas Dunn introduces the volume with the note that Fazzini \u201coffers a quieter and more meditative lyricism than many Anglophonic readers may be used to in a time of public declamation.\u201d\u00a0That may be, but to my ears Fazzini echoes the Rimbaud of \u201cLe Bateau Ivre\u201d: \u201cThat year, I started \/ laughing at us, at the corals \/ of our lives, atolls fringed \/ daily, with fresh scum\u2026.\u201d\u00a0The relationship between Fazzini and Rimbaud is simple:\u00a0 Both are voyagers.\u00a0 Hear Fazzini: \u201cdesire \/ is infatuated by horizons.\u201d<\/p>\n So, Fazzini considers the Shetland coast in violent imagery: \u201cThere was a wave that never slept\u2014 \/ thief and assassin\u2026. \/ It ground its teeth along the shoreline. \/ I listened as it crushed the debris \/ and wreckage\u2026.\u201d\u00a0Another poem offers these Final Destination lines: \u201cI go tomorrow to another harbour \/ where previously I\u2019d been, where I am already dead.\u201d\u00a0Elsewhere, the speaker allows himself to drift, carried along, \u201cwith a load of mistakes, \/ an urgent trembling \/ in my bones, tears, and a full \/ wineskin smiling in the hold.\u201d I\u2019m reminded of Rimbaud, again, but also of Otis Redding and his elegiac song, \u201cSittin\u2019 on the Dock of the Bay.\u201d\u00a0\u201cAlla Poesia\u201d tells us, one comes to poetry, \u201cthrough the chanting of a goddess, \/ who, above the dark page, \/ sings, \u2018good morning\u2019 \/ out loud to the stars.\u201d That\u2019s jazz!<\/p>\n Small Things Left Behind<\/em> Rotten Perfect Mouth Time to read Ella Zeltserman\u2019s debut book, Small Things Left Behind.\u00a0<\/em>These are autobiographical poems about tyranny, escape, immigration, and, nostalgia.\u00a0Born Jewish in the Soviet Union, a nation which crushed Nazi Germany, but also persecuted Jews, Zeltserman voices complex feelings toward the USSR.\u00a0Her lyrics speak to the joys of liberation by emigration, but also sorrowful remembrance of things past. Her elegiac elements gain pathos by being plain: \u201cI was born after Stalin\u2019s death. \/ I grew up during Brezhnev\u2019s vegetarian times. \/ I was so lucky.\u201d Thus, \u201cI missed being shot \/ in blood-stained prison basements, \/ having my remains dumped \/ into an unmarked grave.\u201d\u00a0A last photo session with parents ends, \u201cAll of a sudden \u2026 my mother gets pale \/ \u2014You are never coming home again\u2014 \/ She drops into a chair like a wounded bird.\u201d<\/p>\n Zeltserman catalogues what could be carried into \u201cFreedom\u201d: soap, precious lengths of home-cut silk, a hundred useless rubles; then notes the wondrous discovery of watermelon\u2014\u201cThe pink sugary heaven, sparkling like stars\u201d\u2014in Italy and also of \u201cemerald green\u201d grass \u201cin the middle of a scorching Roman august.\u201d\u00a0Landing in Edmonton, in 1980, Zeltserman adjusts to Canadian winter, then \u201cthe hot days [coming] at once,\u201d and to English, until one day, she realizes that, returning to the city, she is, \u201ccoming home: These words startle you. You surprise yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n Upon her Canadianization, however, the poet rediscovers familial memories of The Great Patriotic War (the Russian term for WWII), and the meaningful moments of childhood. Next, her lyrics exhale the ubi-sunt tones, the notes of Psalm 137.\u00a0\u201cThe military decorations glimmer \/ on the civilian jackets of old men and women \/ the wood around bursts with new life \/ green tender leaves unfurl \/ like the red flags we carry\u2026.\u201d\u00a0In \u201cmirage,\u201d she meditates: \u201cHouse\u2014a big open umbrella. My ambiguity \/ hides inside\u2026.\u201d Perhaps \u201cambivalence\u201d is a better word than \u201cambiguity\u201d?\u00a0No matter:\u00a0 Zeltserman is a poet who allows herself to feel torn, even if her new life is better than the old, Canada superior to Russia. Her Muse is Memory and the result is poignant.\u00a0Anyone who has ever felt displaced, or alienated, will feel at home in these poems.<\/p>\n Eva H.D.\u2019s first book of verse is Rotten Perfect Mouth<\/em>. Just beginning as a poet, her style is as aggressively ironic as Zeltserman\u2019s is wisely reflective.\u00a0Eva aligns herself with a 1970s\/80s punk aesthetic. Just as singer Declan McManus renamed himself for his idols, \u201cElvis Costello,\u201d so does Eva give a shout out to a great precursor, for her initials \u201cH.D.\u201d recall the signature of 20th-century U.S. poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961).<\/p>\n \u201cH.D.,\u201d in Eva\u2019s case, stands for Haralambidis-Doherty. Her decision to reduce her surname to the initial letters winks at literary history.\u00a0How does Eva H.D. write? Playfully, gamely: She understands that poetry can be\u2014and can do\u2014anything.\u00a0\u201cI am piling bricks in the Sahara. \/ When I am done, I will step to one side and say, \/ What desert?\u201d\u00a0A poem referencing \u201cCanadiana\u201d begins, \u201cThe wind is going a hundred \/ miles an hour, mewling \/ in the chimney like a vodka-thin drunk.\u201d\u00a0\u201cTeenage Stuff Forever\u201d\u2014definitely a punk title\u2014tells us, \u201cYou can sit on the road in the perfect summer dark \/ and listen to a married man rail against the prison \/ he has built for himself.\u201d<\/p>\n The constant effect of these poems is surprise bordering on surrealism: \u201cGive the girl October, please: her \/ aching knees, the muscle of scrambled \/ mind need rest, cool bricks & alleyways, steel- \/ coloured air\u2026.\u201d\u00a0E.H.D. is Greek in heritage, so maybe she\u2019s attuned to the surrealism of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909-90) as much as she is to the Hellenic imagism of the first \u201cH.D.\u201d\u00a0Her oddity is moving: \u201cI want to make a neat assortment of my life \/ like a spice store \/ everything in its place\u2026. \/\/ Maybe some lost soul [would come], inquiring after mutton \/ or oxtail. \/ I would shake my head. \/ This is a spice store, I would tell them, \/ and point them down the road, to the butcher\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Theseus: A Collaboration<\/em> The Poet bpNichol died in 1988 but continues to thrive in the influence he has exerted on Anglo-Canadian poets as varied as Michael Ondaatje and M. NourbeSe Philip, and on all who love experimentation in poetics; indeed, \u201cbeep nickel\u201d was almost a one-man avant-garde.\u00a0Yes, \u201calmost.\u201d In 1966, bp began to collaborate on a long correspondence-poem with his first editor, Wayne Clifford.\u00a0However, by omitting the dates of their stamp-and-envelope exchanges of material as well as signs of individual authorship, the poem (which originally existed in two parts) assumed a composite, organic sensibility, if not personality.<\/p>\n After Nichol\u2019s death, Clifford completed the first two parts of Theseus: A Collaboration<\/em>.\u00a0 He\u2019s added now a last third. The book seems seamless in blending its doubled author\u2019s singular wordplay.\u00a0Theseus is more smooth than clear: It\u2019s glass to be stroked for its texture, not a window on a view. To accept the work\u2019s jests and suggestions, nix the dictatorship of grammar.\u00a0Because Theseus doesn\u2019t communicate meanings clearly, the poetry becomes an art of beautiful phrases, the dance of imagistic clauses. So, \u201cthe slant I see \/ before night, your knee \/ caught in it, comes to mind.\u201d<\/p>\n But bp & Clifford also explore the play of ideas: \u201cBeast rears up in its sleep. \/ It senses the trickle of air \/ uncomplicated thru the throat. \/\/ Beast only asked \/ what language built itself \/ syllable by syllable into the scrub, \/\/ to grub out what meal it contains. Its claws \/ pried out by Mothertongue.\u201d\u00a0bp & Clifford attain an accidental, but rich lyricism: \u201cWhite without direction .., \/ blizzard of the poisoned vision, white of the stare into sun, white, white, a bottomless white, the page a \/ well of white in which memory falls away like a coin tossed \/ in\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n bp & Clifford amble vaguely within the labyrinthine Greek myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. The mythic underpinning underscores the poetry\u2019s maze of semantic surprises.\u00a0No churl should think that Clifford is getting a free ride on bp\u2019s posthumous back. The final section of Theseus\u2014all Clifford\u2019s work\u2014is fine in its own \u201cwrite.\u201d<\/p>\n Our Obsidian Tongues David Shook\u2019s first collection, Our Obsidian Tongues<\/em>, appeared in 2013, and is experimental too, but not for linguistic games, but rather for its deliberate stretching of credibility.\u00a0Reading Shook, one can\u2019t be certain what is surreal\u2014or real\u2014or a joke.\u00a0He follows Mike Ondaatje in this regard, and has a similarly exotic background, having grown up in Mexico City, gone to Oklahoma to specialize in endangered languages and to Oxford to study poetry. Maybe there\u2019s a touch of Malcolm Lowry\u2019s novel, Under the Volcano<\/em>, in Shook\u2019s meshing of fact and fiction.<\/p>\n Shook now lives in Los Angeles, a site of many collisions between the theatrical and the factual. He\u00a0presents several poems that purport to be found postcard messages, but with the recipient\u2019s name and address included. The scripts are grisly: \u201cHe was vomiting \/ by then, thin pink strings that striped the sand\u2026. \/ He heaved at night\u2026. \/ I\u2019ll just say it. Your husband died.\u201d\u00a0One could be tempted to address a postcard to the same individual and address, just to see what would happen\u2026.\u00a0Another postcard poem concludes vividly: \u201cThis evening we saw a boy wrestle \/ a gull to the sand. He held its wings, free \/ to fly at arm\u2019s length like a toy plane. Each \/ shoulder snapped. He blessed his meal\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Another poem, following the style of Nichol, presents two thick question marks (one inverted), representing a woman\u2019s breast and a pregnant woman\u2019s belly: The punctuation marks are the poem.<\/p>\n \u201cI Know Your Body\u201d recalls Ondaatje\u2019s \u201cCinnamon Peeler\u2019s Wife\u201d: \u201cIf you were a city \/ I would get lost every day \/ down some new corridor. \/ I would toss my map, hitchhike \/ your suburbs, wander your downtown.\u201d\u00a0Shook\u2019s showstopper poem is \u201cMutt Ghazal,\u201d a playful look at Mexican street dogs: \u201cNo dog \/\/ will win Congeniality, they\u2019re all bitches here.\u201d\u00a0Many poems\u2014untitled\u2014are glimpses, presumably, of Mexico City: \u201cthe sky over the city like a \/ tongue cream with thrush.\u201d\u00a0This handsome, hardcover volume, issued by London-based, Canuck poet Todd Swift, marks Shook\u2019s remarkable debut. Chamber Music: The Poetry of Jan Zwicky<\/em> Tim Bowling\u2019s Selected Poems<\/em>\u00a0canvasses 16 years of work, 1995-2011. To select one\u2019s elect poems is a provocative act, but so Bowling has done, though perhaps with the advice of an international, poetic brain-trust, including three Canuck \u201cDons\u201d\u2014McKay, Coles, and Domanski; two Yanks; and Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer, a Swede.\u00a0Whatever their influence, though, the elegiac strain of Bowling\u2019s lyre seems to conjoin plain-spoken, common-man, U.S. poet Carl Sandburg and the Brit poet and novelist of doom-n-gloom, i.e. Thomas Hardy.\u00a0However, the focus on region\u2014the B.C. salmon fishery and its baseball-style \u201cruns\u201d\u2014treated in clear, hard diction\u2014yields notes of the Irish bards Yeats and Heaney, but also the dour, Newfoundland poet E.J. Pratt.<\/p>\n Such influences link Victorian and early Modernist poetry, and Bowling is a visionary of the past. His preface admits he favours \u201ca place where the subjects are ancient\u2014family, nature, time, mortality,\u201d though he feels his images are \u201ccaul-fresh,\u201d conjuring up \u201cfreedom \u2026 and joy.\u201d\u00a0Yet, this \u201cjoy\u201d is muted, for these poems regret times past and lives lost, especially a father and a brother and next the widow and mother. Bowling likes to make the morbid limpid.<\/p>\n Salmon figure strongly as an overarching figure:\u00a0 Leaping, spawning, dying.\u00a0 Just like us.\u00a0This hardcover volume presents Bowling as a poet of distinction, and rightly so.\u00a0His imagery runs to the classical: a man unknowingly leaves \u201ca line of blood,\u201d as he walks, \u201ca line the pull \/ of his finger on the salmon\u2019s gill began, a stream \/ along its scales that drips off its tail and marks \/ a black spine for the moonshadow he drags behind.\u201d\u00a0 It echoes Homer, as do perhaps Bowling\u2019s lines about \u201cthe beautiful flesh of the inside of the throat \/ going all the way down to the cry of joy and terror.\u201d<\/p>\n The single image catching the essence of Bowling\u2019s verse is, \u201cand night falls \/ when it falls \/ like dirt off the sides of an open grave.\u201d\u00a0Bowling\u2019s work is first-rate, but will set one brooding on mortality. If his lyrics seem one-note, each is played consummately; yet, for some, the thematic monotony will seem\u00a0 dulling.<\/p>\n Another selected work is Jan Zwicky’s Chamber Music, which covers her publications from 1989 to 2011.\u00a0Zwicky\u2019s work is midwifed by two editors: Montreal poet Darren Bifford and Halifax poet and lecturer Warren Heiti. Their selection of her poetry likely has her blessing; but it does have her \u201clast word,\u201d for Zwicky also appears in a closing interview with her editors.<\/p>\n A philosopher by training, Zwicky is celebrated for her fusion of lyricism and contemplation of the complex worries of self-conscious life. Moreover, her cerebral verse is touched by ho-hum duties and intensively penetrated by music and nature.\u00a0Zwicky can be read as a perfect exponent of mainstream, Anglo-Canadian verse: Professorial, environmentalist, abstractly sensual. She blends the classical, ironical intellectualism of Anne Carson with the nature-oriented meditations of Thomas Merton.<\/p>\n Her book is thinner than Bowling\u2019s, but more various, if less rich in feeling – \u00a0I stress that \u201cif.\u201d\u00a0Bifford and Heiti posit that Zwicky attempts hybridity, showing that \u201cpieces of narrative\u201d or \u201canalysis\u201d can be worked into the (lyric) pattern of the world.\u201d They also find that, in Zwicky, \u201cwe witness \u2026 a testimony of the primary imagination,\u201d thanks to, in some lyrics, the repetition of specific nouns.\u00a0The gents argue well, but I can\u2019t help but see the accidental (?) collusion between Zwicky\u2019s \u201clyric philosophy\u201d and the philosophical lyricism of Ezra Pound\u2019s \u201cPisan Cantos.\u201d Maybe the Pound infiltration is what, for me, aligns Zwicky with Basil Bunting\u2026.<\/p>\n Still, Zwicky has her own strong voice: \u201cOn a bad day, you come in from the weather \/ and lean your back against the door\u2026. \/\/ you must believe and not believe; \/ that door you came in \/ you must go out again.\u201d\u00a0\u201cSomeone is running \/ fingers through their hair. \/ The fingers \/ are like fish, they flicker \/ upstream while the current \/ purls around their backs \/ and falls away.\u201d\u00a0 Beautifully, \u201cThis \/ is what you do sometimes \/ because you cannot put your hands \/ around your heart.\u201d\u00a0Chamber Music is a fine tune-up to Zwicky\u2019s symphonic oeuvre.<\/p>\n The Year of Our Beautiful Exile Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra Two new Gaspereau Press titles feature poets responding to Nature. Monica Kidd\u2019s The Year of Our Beautiful Exile ($20) logs a response to the Great Alberta Floods of June 2013. Elena Johnson\u2019s Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra ($18) records her residence at a remote, Yukon ecology station.<\/p>\n Kidd\u2019s collection is her third. Also the author of two novels, Kidd grew up on the Alberta grasslands.\u00a0It\u2019s easy to see affinities between her laconic lyrics and note-like prose poems and the style of that progenitor of experimental, Prairie poetry, namely, Robert Kroetsch\u2019s Seed Catalogue (1968).\u00a0Kidd acknowledges precursor, Western Canada-based poets of Nature and (more-or-less) Zen, I mean, Jan Zwicky and Don McKay. They have their influence, but Kidd\u2019s whimsy reminds me of Richard Brautigan as well as the folk-blues surrealism of Bob Dylan\u2019s Basement Tapes (1975).<\/p>\n The book splits into fifths: Travel lyrics, the flood poems, poems meditating on naturalist Charles Darwin, and concluding lyrics, over two sections, that feel autobiographical.\u00a0\u201cHere wilderness is biblical,\u201d Kidd writes, and one realizes the Genesis flood as the primeval Apocalypse. So the power outs and office towers stand \u201cempty and dark. \/ Muddy water (lapping) at their footings.\u201d\u00a0The imagery echoes news footage of Hurricane Katrina-struck New Orleans: \u201cBodies appeared in the strangest of places\u2026. \/ Draped over railings, suspended in cages over the roiling water. A power pole dangling from a crane like \/ a giant crucifix twirling on a gossamer thread.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNobody thought about the fish. Stranded in parking lots, \/ ball diamonds\u2026. Backhoe buckets. A kitchen sink. A toilet bowl\u2026.\u201d\u00a0That\u2019s what disaster looks like: Weird juxtapositions. Think Halifax, December 6, 1917: Molten iron raining from the sky.\u00a0In the Darwin pieces, he\u2019s quoted, but Kidd philosophizes: \u201cremove the \/ entire residue of man, and the earth would remain, \/ a husk of twitching bug feet.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWhat is a garden but a republic of poppies\u2026? \/ \u2026 I have found that love will grow \/ amidst the shattered crockery.\u201d<\/p>\n Because Kidd\u2019s preferred form is, by definition, prosaic, it\u2019s difficult to distinguish her work from lushly detailed journalism. However, there is no such problem with the lyrics: \u201cLong after the swimmers are gone, the water \/ remembers, slapping and slapping against \/the walls of the pool, forever going nowhere.\u201d\u00a0Kidd\u2019s poetry is, ultimately, a half-sardonic, half-joyous, study of life.<\/p>\n Johnson has been an intermittent park naturalist, field ecology researcher, editor and translator.\u00a0 Born in New Brunswick, she resides in Vancouver, B.C. Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra is her debut collection of poetry.\u00a0As her title suggests, these poems read as notes\u2014jottings\u2014of the observations available to Johnson, during her month among the ptarmigan and caribou, the rain and snow, July 15-August 13, 2008, at an eco research facility in Yukon\u2019s Ruby Range Mountains.<\/p>\n Like Kidd, Johnson seems to follow the laconic example of Kroetsch\u2019s Seed Garden in assembling her spare and\/or skinny lyrics about the flaura, fauna, vegetation, and meteorology of her encampment.\u00a0Like Kidd, too, Johnson has found a kindred soul in McKay, but also in the Black Mountain(eering) poetics represented by Gary Snyder, a style of verse emphasizing openness of eyes to observe, lungs to project, page to accommodate, and words to wander.\u00a0\u201cDoes it cohere?\u201d Ezra Pound asks near the conclusion of his epic Cantos. The answer for him (who sits at the base of Black Mountain works) is a qualified \u201cNo,\u201d while the answer for Johnson, for her work, is \u201cYes.\u201d Then again, because her reach is not so long, her grasp is more certain.<\/p>\n So, there are fine images: \u201cWildflowers one knuckle high\u201d; \u201ca sheep\u2019s horn \/ a hook that parts the sky\u201d; \u201cA few spruce scraggle the bottoms of slopes\u201d; hoary marmots are lured \u2018with urine,\u201d caged, measured, surrender to research \u201ca piece of the left ear\u201d; and, perhaps in revenge, \u201ceye our backpacks, \/ steal a sandwich. \/ Chew our boots while we nap in the moss.\u201d\u00a0This book is exquisite, imagist, picturesque: \u201cTwo sandpipers clear \/ the brook\u2019s edge, where \u201cI tilt my bottle in.\u201d\u00a0The book design? Well, that\u2019s awesome, especially the endpapers.\u00a0 And the Mauritius font. Forecast Sue Goyette’s The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl<\/em> reads superficially like nonsense verse, as if The Owl and the Pussycat<\/em> had fucked with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds<\/em>.\u00a0But Goyette’s fifth volume of verse is actually based on a true and sad story: In 2006, a 4-year-old Massachusetts girl died from prolonged exposure to a cocktail of prescribed, psychiatric drugs, intended to treat her bipolar condition and ADHT. In the end, her parents were convicted of her murder.<\/p>\n Goyette takes this story and reimagines it as Alice-in-Oz-land so to speak, so the girl is a ghost; Poverty is a bully; and a bear symbolizes love.\u00a0 Goyette’s language slides or glides toward surrealism, the fantastic.\u00a0 “The girl refused to be afraid when she climbed \/ on high things. Her mother shaved the legs of the furniture \/ and, along with some cough syrup, stewed it \/ with a few of the girl’s father’s beer caps.”\u00a0If this imagery seems unreal, it is supposed to be so. Horror comes sugar-coated, or accompanied with Teddy bears, reminding one of the piles of dolls left behind at Auschwitz by child Holocaust victims.\u00a0 We get a child’s eye view of disasters as they are narrated and investigated.<\/p>\n “The doctor made herself comfortable and hung her diplomas \/ in the witness stand. An hour to someone with your disorder, \/ she explained, requires a backhoe and an apology.”\u00a0The hardship of the back story is softened by Goyette’s playfulness: “The girl’s father cocked \/ his gun and aimed at the ceiling, firing at the tin cans \/ that were guarding against winter, firing off on the pets \/ he had never been allowed. He heard a young girl \/ squeal every time his gun went off. You like that? he asked her.”<\/p>\n To critique the style of this poetry, one could say that the original tragedy is mitigated by the recourse to the bizarre nature of a picture book story.\u00a0 However, Goyette’s narrative verve carries one along, suspending disbelief, but never sorrow for the events unfolded.\u00a0 “The jury had heard how the girl’s father rasped his stubble \/ on the silk of the illegal drugs he’d been taking. The mother had spread silence like lard the night before the girl had died.”<\/p>\n Clara Blackwood’s second book of poetry is Forecast<\/em>. Her work dovetails nicely with that of Goyette’s, for where the latter is concerned with revisiting childhood perceptions, Blackwood looks at ‘reality’ with the eyes of a mystic.\u00a0She is unambiguously committed to the idea that there are realms beyond what is obvious and physical.<\/p>\n Blackwood references\u2014reverences\u2014other mystical poets, such as Margaret Avison and Gwendolyn MacEwen.\u00a0 But I can’t help but think of Stephanie Bolster’s sensibility being present here too, mainly because Blackwood is so effortlessly clear: “I believe a strange force-field surrounds \/ the high-rise I live in. \/ This would explain the insanity, the jumpers, baby-danglers, \/ elevators opening between floors, \/and my perilous love life.”<\/p>\n There’s a disarming simplicity and directness in Blackwood. If you think yourself skeptical regarding mysticism, Blackwood gives you no chance to insist upon ‘reason’: “I am not sure why you called me spooky. \/ Far more inexplicable things \/ were happening that evening– \/ the candle extinguishing itself, \/ the scent of anise infusing the room \/ from nowhere.”\u00a0The poet is witty too. When volcanic ash forces delays in European flights, her personal destiny is forecast by pop songs: “Ten minutes before departure \/ Queen’s ‘A Kind of Magic’ plays… \/ and I think Yes, this is a kind of magic \/ that I’m here on this cushy, blue seat \/ not exiled to a sleeping mat, \/ calling loved ones in a panic.”\u00a0Read Blackwood and believe.<\/p>\n The Thunderbird Poems Armand Garnet Ruffo, an Aboriginal Canadian poet, anthologist, essayist, and filmmaker, limns the life and art of Norval Morrisseau (1932-2007), the alcohol-bedevilled, Ojibway genius, in The Thunderbird Poems (Harbour, $19).<\/p>\n Thanks to his 2014 biography, Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing into Thunderbird<\/em>, Ruffo knows intimately the aesthetics and spirits and demons of the artist\u2014whose canvasses sit at the summit of Canadian painting.\u00a0The Thunderbird Poems are thus a masterful exercise in lyrical empathy.<\/p>\n Ruffo sees himself as part of an insurgent second-generation of First Nations intellectuals who are rearticulating the internal integrity of Aboriginal cosmologies, even in their spirited competition with historically oppressive Christianity and Occidental philosophy.\u00a0Ruffo\u2019s previous bio-in-poetry studied Grey Owl<\/em> (1888-1938)\u2014the Englishman who assumed an Ojibway identity, so the poet is well-prepared for relating the complicated mixture of Catholicism, astral-spirit-travel (Eckancar) mysticism, and Ojibway Faith that animates Morrisseau\u2019s vibrant and intensely vivid art.<\/p>\n Imagine earth, water, air, and fire\u2014and symbolic Nature spirits\u2014accorded Day-Glo, radiant brilliance.\u00a0In his intro, Ruffo says he strove \u201cto let the paintings determine the content of the poetry\u201d; so, rather than write only \u201cekphrastic\u201d lyrics (poems about paintings), Ruffo presents the experiences that compel Morrisseau\u2019s works.<\/p>\n The poems are framed\u2014as it were\u2014twice: Ruffo sets an italicized paragraph of factoids and occasional quotations atop each lyric; next, the title of each poem refers to an actual Morrisseau painting.\u00a0Each painting-titled poem partly describes the pertinent, Morrisseau work, but also reflects on his psychology, spirituality, and life events.\u00a0We end up with portraits of portraits that are also self-portraits of a man who believed he had been Bear-Spirit-touched, but was also a Thunderbird-Spirit shaman.<\/p>\n Ruffo employs a flexible, talkin\u2019 free-verse lyric, at times utilizing blocks of prose.\u00a0 He follows the long-poem styles of Mike Ondaatje\u2019s Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) or Peggy Atwood\u2019s collage of art and word, The Journals of Susannah Moodie (1970).\u00a0However, while Ondaatje\u2019s Billy is a double for Ondaatje, and Atwood eyes her Susannah as a crazed interloper in the Canuck wilderness, Ruffo regards Morrisseau with non-judgmental acceptance\u2014I mean, with something like fraternal\u2014Native\u2014affection.\u00a0The result is memorable, visionary, visceral, original, and productive of great life-writing.<\/p>\n In \u201cDeath the Devourer of Human Flesh, c. 1964,\u201d Ruffo sees Death\u2019s \u201cready teeth\u201d and \u201cdripping tongue,\u201d produced by \u201cLines of primordial power radiating like hunger.\u201d He instructs us: \u201cLook inside \/ the white chamber \/ of its stomach. \/\/ It\u2019s coming and there is nothing you can do about it.\u201d\u00a0I think the poem would end most powerfully here, rather than with the final stanza that dissipates the menace portrayed so indelibly earlier.<\/p>\n If I must question an element in Ruffo\u2019s approach, it would be this occasional tendency to overwrite\u2014or to repeat bio elements in the initial notes.\u00a0But I quibble:\u00a0 These Thunderbird poems shake with thunder and shimmer with light.\u00a0See \u201cWhite Man\u2019s Curse, 1969\u201d: \u201cPockmarked bodies. \/ A pattern of dots for disease. Plague. \/ One brown hand leading the other. \/ Green for brain. Red for art\u2026.\u201d The cultural genocide of the Residential School system is mirrored in this symbolic line of type: \u201c\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020\u2020.\u201d<\/p>\n Not only is the crucifix reduced to grave marker here, one also reads, \u201cThe feel of groping flesh still suffocates him.\u201d\u00a0Morrisseau was sexually victimized as a boy, and was alleged to have abused one of his own sons similarly. He did drugs, drank too much, and was charged with abandoning his children. How many of his ills stem from the residential-school concentration camps?\u00a0\u201cWindigo, 1979\u201d is one of the strongest poems in this superb work: \u201cWhite-haired giant stuffing his sharp mouth, his greedy guts \/ an oily ocean\u2026. \/\/ Read all about it: white-collar thieves turned into porn stars. \/\/ Sometimes he sits on a bench with an empty bottle of fuel \/ and weeps into his hands\u2026.\u201d\u00a0This review is too short to do Ruffo justice. I can only say, \u201cBravo!\u201d<\/p>\n Collected Poems British poet Basil Bunting\u2019s arch quip, \u201cA man who collects his poems screws together the boards of his coffin,\u201d introduces rightly Len Gasparini\u2019s Collected Poems (Guernica, $25), for Gasparini views his book as \u201can open coffin.\u201d<\/p>\n A Collected Poems is a daunting work, for it is the poet taking a long view of his work and trying to position its best showing in the even longer view of posterity.\u00a0The Italian-Canadian, Windsor, Ontario-raised, working-class, Bohemian, intellectual Gasparini is a striking poet to read in this regard\u2014across the theatrically funeral gathering of a Collected\u2014because his work studiously avoids any pretentiousness or Ivory Tower (poison) ivy.<\/p>\n If these verses are his bones\u2014entombed metaphorically here\u2014they are dancing.\u00a0Indeed, Gasparini is rock\u2019n\u2019roll\u2019s offspring: \u201cI had \u2026 an exciting adolescence. My teachers were Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Jack Kerouac.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s easy to read these epigrams (generally short poems treating poignantly or wittily a theme) as lost liner notes to a classic Dylan album or as spontaneous footnotes to Kerouac\u2019s On the Road.\u00a0\u201cOne hand on the wheel \/ of a \u201957 Chevy ragtop \/ custom-painted a metallic blue \/ so deep and liquid, \/ it looked like you could sink your arm into it \/ straight to the elbow\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Gasparini is up-front accessible, unabashedly nostalgic: \u201cThe teen queens of my adolescence [I\u2019d prefer \u201cteens\u201d]\u2014 \/ where are they now? Carol, Joyce, Jeanne\u2026. \/\/ We\u2019re dancing to \u2018Drip Drop,\u2019 by the Drifters. \/ A boogie-and-shuffle rhythm \/ magnetizes us to each other\u2026. \/\/ Who are they now? Wives, divorcees, widows, \/ mothers, grandmothers\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the fifties ended there was nothing but \/ leftover life to live.\u201d\u00a0Yes, but, there was Gasparini, continuing to hone his art, to conjoin the familial heritage of Dante with Ginsberg\u2019s \u201chydrogen jukebox\u201d; but also to merge the techniques of Imagism with comments on workaday\u2014even grungy\u2014life.\u00a0So, \u201cGus the Greek is a short-order cook,\u201d Toronto, circa 1964, who \u201cwears out \/\/ the night prowling the taverns in search \/ of women as lonely as he.\u201d\u00a0Niagara Falls is \u201cHearts. Hymens. A crapshoot.\u201d\u00a0In a hospital, \u201cThe erect stems \/ of hygienically arranged flowers \/ soon droop; \/ the leaves drip \/ intravenously; and the petals, \/ like tinctured swabs, \/ drop.\u201d<\/p>\n Such verses compare well to the street-life sagas of Charles Bukowski or with the scrupulous, social satire of F.R. Scott. Irving Layton shows up in one poem, and his womanizing, no-claptrap brio informs Gasparini\u2019s own style.\u00a0But the poet doesn\u2019t only ink epigrams; he also grants us superb poem-studies (akin to a fine cartoonist suddenly offering a capacious, breathtaking, landscape painting).\u00a0See \u201cElegy,\u201d which is a showstopper poem, based on a news report about a woman who climbed into a Port Hope, Ontario, tree, in September 1975, died, and went undiscovered until the leaves fell, exposing her decomposed body.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the long Ontario autumn nights \/ she shrank into herself\u2014 \/ a stiff, dry branch \/ \u201cKnistersque\u201d is not only Gasparini\u2019s homage to the neglected, Canadian imagist, Raymond Knister, but is proof of his delight in sharp-eyed depictions, even if sordid or tawdry, as in \u201cImage, Afterimage\u201d: \u201ca seagull casts its gleam \/ on a girl in a white bikini \/ sunbathing on the beach.\u201d\u00a0True to his laconic taste, Gasparini pens good one-liners: \u201cToronto\u2014home of the homesick\u201d; \u201cWhat is memory but an emotion \/ On vacation\u201d; \u201cBeware of adjectives; they bleed nouns\u201d\u2026.<\/p>\n This Collected Poems is a properly hefty 300 pages, covering 16 collections and including more than 200 poems. It is an excellent read, and convicted in its themes\u2014sex, cities, song, plus liquor, \u2018ligion, and livin\u2019.\u00a0But the poems that are consistently strongest are, arguably\u2014mysteriously\u2014those that brood on Nature.\u00a0 Gasparini is the hipster as\u00a0naturalist\u2026.<\/p>\n African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) died young, but left a body of work – millennium of pieces that may well endure for millennia more.\u00a0If he himself is not in heaven, his canvasses command stratospheric prices that prove him a star in the firmament of modern art, right up there alongside Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol, the great contemporaries whose fame and wealth and status he coveted.\u00a0That Basquiat broke into the Manhattan art market by breaking all its rules is all the more remarkable given that he was black and seeking upward mobility by making art that exploits cartoons, ads, and pages torn from Gray\u2019s Anatomy.<\/p>\n Looking at a Basquiat painting is like cruising a city street, one\u2019s eyes absorbing fragments of billboards, fashions, colours, headlines, street signs, all jumbled up.\u00a0Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now\u2019s the Time,\u00a0<\/em>the catalogue of a 2015 exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), presents six essayists, including editor Dieter Buchhart, all tussling with the multifarious meanings of Basquiat\u2019s art, which is part anti-capitalist agitprop (but drawn as if by a demented Walt Disney) and part anything-goes collage, emphasizing junk found on a Harlem street or slang overheard in a SoHo caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n That the essayists are men underlines the male-orientation of the AGO show. Says Buchhart, Basquiat chose to stress \u201cfull-body portraits\u201d of black men as \u201cboxers, sufferers, saints, angels, and fighters.\u201d\u00a0Add Basquiat\u2019s adoration of jazz men and Hip Hop dudes, and one begins to see that, for white male critics, acquiring art by the Rorschach-Test-dreadlocked painter is a way of purchasing street cred, a reversed snobbery.\u00a0Still, nothing detracts from the art, which exudes timeless relevance. Take, for instance, Irony of a Negro Policeman (1981), which is a jarringly coloured satire on the relatively powerless black cop deputized to further disempower the powerless black poor.<\/p>\n Change Basquiat\u2019s phonetically spelled (on the painting) \u201cPLCEMN\u201d to \u201c\u201dPRZDNT,\u201d and the painting becomes a black leftist critique of the Barack Obama Presidency, the man himself impotent to end police killings of black youth.\u00a0Discussing Anthony Clarke (1985), Buchhart observes, \u201cClarke\u2019s body is \u2026 brutally cut through by an orange line that \u2026 follows one of the wooden planks of the painting\u2019s ersatz frame.\u201d\u00a0Really, the painting is an appropriation of the U.S. flag, hung vertically. If viewed horizontally, however, Clarke becomes a type of Emmett Till, the black teen lynched in Mississippi in 1955, his head and face grotesquely disfigured in the assault.<\/p>\n I will submit that Basquiat\u2019s many distorted black heads\u2014a combo of Boris Karloff\u2019s Frankenstein monster and the British children\u2019s book Golliwog character\u2014recollect the trauma that was Till\u2019s murder\u2014as well as the police beatings and shootings of many other (young) black men.\u00a0Buchhart\u2019s commentary on a Basquiat and Warhol collaboration, Don\u2019t Tread On Me (1985), registers Basquiat\u2019s allusion to an American Revolutionary War flag. But he could note that the red and black of Warhol\u2019s dollar sign and the green of the viper (Basquiat\u2019s contribution) recall the colours\u2014ironically\u2014of Marcus Garvey\u2019s Pan-Africanist flag.<\/p>\n Though Buchhart, Glenn O\u2019Brien, Francesco Pellizzi, Olivier Berggruen, and Franklin Sirmans stress Basquiat\u2019s homage to a who\u2019s who of artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and sports figures, other connections go unseen.\u00a0Thus, Afro-Modernists Wilfredo Lam and Romare Bearden are never named, though it is impossible that Basquiat would have ignored their oeuvres.\u00a0 Similarly, the artists who drafted the weirdo punk-funk album covers (such as those of Parliament-Funkadelic)\u2014namely, Pedro Bell and Bruse (sic) Bell\u2014are omitted.\u00a0Nor does any essayist bother to think through Basquiat\u2019s probable debt to Vaudoo (not \u201cvoodoo\u201d) as well as his triple-linguistic heritage.\u00a0Christian Campbell\u2019s essay is powerfully poetic and radiates insights. Yet, even he doesn\u2019t see that Basquiat\u2019s black heroes are boxed in. The painting that glorifies sprinter Jesse Owens\u2019s triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is steeped in the colours of the Nazi flag\u2014red, black, and white\u2014with gold braid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction, Poetry and Art Reviews And Sometimes They Fly by Robert Edison Sandiford Montreal, QC: DC Books, 2013 $19. PP. 186 Robert Edison Sandiford is a rare Canadian writer, for he writes in self-chosen exile, as an expatriate journalist in Barbados, the homeland of his parents.\u00a0An African-Canadian writer, Sandiford was born in Quebec and raised in a Montreal suburb. He…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby Robert Edison Sandiford
\nMontreal, QC: DC Books, 2013
\n$19. PP. 186<\/p>\n
\n\u201cHospitals in the Caribbean, like hospitals in the movies, all looked the same \u2026 as dingy as their Hollywood counterparts were scoured; as open-air as those onscreen were shut-off.”<\/p>\n
\nIf you\u2019ve not read Sandiford before, this novel is a good place to start.<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Dannabang Kuwabong
\n<\/span>Toronto, ON: TSAR, 2013
\n<\/span>$20, pp. 96<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam
\nToronto, ON: TSAR, 2014
\n$24, pp. 200<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\nby Dina Del Bucchia
\nLondon, ON: Insomiac, 2014
\n$17, pp. 112<\/p>\n
\nby Marilyn Lerch
\nDevon Avenue Poetry Books, 2013<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Jane Munro
\nLondon, ON: Brick Books, 2015
\n$20, pp. \u00a079<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Marco Fazzini
\n<\/span>USA: CreateSpace, 2014
\n<\/span>$14, pp. 58<\/span><\/p>\n
\nby Ella Zeltserman
\nEdmonton: U of A Press, 2014
\n$19.95, pp. 88<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Eva H.D.
\n<\/span>Tooronto, ON: Mansfield Press, 2015
\n<\/span>$17, pp. 80<\/span><\/p>\n
\nby bpNicol and Wayne Clifford
\nToronto, ON: Book Thug, 2014
\n$18, pp 104<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by David Shook
\nLondon, UK: Eyewear Publishing, 2013
\n$21, pp. 66<\/p>\n
\n
\nSelected Poems<\/em>
\nby Tim Bowling
\nGibson, BC: (Nightwood Editions
\n$23, pp. 160<\/p>\n
\nedited by\u00a0Darren Bifford and\u00a0Warren Heiti
\nWaterloo, ON:\u00a0Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014
\n$19, pp.102<\/p>\n
\nby Monica Kidd
\nHalifax, NS: Gaspereau, 2015
\n$19.95, pp. 80<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Elena Johnson
\nHalifax, NS: Gaspereau, 2015
\n$17.95, pp. 48<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe Brief Reincarnation of a Girl<\/em>
\nby Sue Goyette
\nMontreal, QC: Guernica, 2015
\n$20. pp. 61<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Clara Blackwood
\nMontreal, QC: Guernica,
\n$20, pp. 108<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Armand Garnett Ruffo
\n<\/span>Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 2015
\n<\/span>$19, pp. 108<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Len Gasparini
\n<\/span>Montreal, QC: Guernica, 2015
\n<\/span>$25, pp. 304<\/span><\/p>\n
\nstuck in the wind\u2019s throat\u2026. \/ the skeletal tree became her catafalque \/ in which she sat fully-clothed\u2014 \/ a scarecrow uprooted\u2026.\u201d\u00a0A plainly worded lyric, \u201cAfter the Divorce,\u201d describes that alienating status:\u00a0 \u201cYou pop a Valium \/ and feel its white fuzz \/ floating your nerves \/ like tiny parachutes.\u201d\u00a0\u201cOrchard\u201d presents \u201cRow after row after row\u201d of \u201capplesapplesapples,\u201d and then \u201ca girl\u2019s bare legs \/ peep through the foliage.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nJean-Michel Basquiat: Now\u2019s the Time
\n<\/em>edited by Dieter Buchhart
\nToronto, ON: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015
\n$35, pp. 208<\/p>\n