The Catch<\/em> Fiona Sampson\u2019s reputation is sunlight preceding her. The British poet has twice been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages. She has been awarded the Cholmoneley Award, the Newdigate Prize, and the Zlaten Prsten prize of Macedonia, among others.<\/p>\n A professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, Sampson edits the prestigious British answer to America\u2019s Poetry magazine, namely Poem. She is among the most blessed of poets in that, as a practitioner and as an editor, she is likely conversant with all the potential glories of contemporary verse in English\u2014and in translation. Given her Ivory Tower location and her salon commitments as a journal editor, it is very surprising that Sampson\u2019s latest book, The Catch, is characterized by lyrics that seldom range beyond a page and whose diction is children\u2019s storybook elementary. In this book, Sampson gives us existentialism as pseudo-nursery rhyme. If comparison is germane here, the poets that Sampson seems to be taking up as backing vocals to her songs are British plainsong types\u2014Philip Larkin, John Betjeman, but with a bit of the edge that one associates with William Blake, Ted Hughes, and Basil Bunting.<\/p>\n One key to reading this work, Sampson\u2019s eighth, is to note the double meaning of her title. There\u2019s \u201ccatch\u201d\u2014as in harvest, gleaning, snatching, find; but there\u2019s \u201ccatch\u201d\u2014as in snag, trap, or a troublesome detail. Frequently, in these poems, then, Sampson presents a superficially \u201cnormal\u201d and\/or comfy, everyday scene, and then reveals a subtle \u2018catch\u2019 or complication. The first poem accomplishes this pictorial destabilization nicely. \u201cWake\u201d celebrates the arrival of our daily light. Even so, \u201cstems stay half hidden \/ in a dark \/ that won\u2019t give up the night \/ where roots go down\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n The poems contrast light and dark consistently, unendingly: Revelation arrives, but shadows continue: \u201cand you too inside the car \/ your hands dark \/ on the wheel your dark \/ eyes wide \/\/ haven\u2019t you arrived \/ once again at \/ astonishment \/ at the brink of dream?\u201d \u201cLate\u201d reminds us that we are belated in our failure to live our lives for ourselves: \u201c[you\u2019re] \/ useless afterwards \/\/ when you find \/ it was your life \/ you murdered \/ your own life\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n What Sampson names, consistently, is the subtle theology, the private theology, that unfolds when lovers lie together, unawares yet of what their love could entail: \u201cSee how they sleep first he turns \/ away and then she turns \/ after him or now she turns \/ her back and he follows \/\/ rolled by an imperative \/ deeper than sleep \/ he rolls over like a wave \/ that turns itself over \/ sleepily with the sea\u2019s deep \/ breathing with its rhythm\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n What Sampson knows? That you are fragile and that all we love is contingent. See \u201cSyringe\u201d: \u201cSuch sweetness. And such loneliness.\u201d But: \u201cPain comes singing \/ down the vein \/\/ its high erratic song \/ pealing in the darkness of my room.\u201d The problem, for us mortal creatures, as Sampson sees, is that we cannot make the leap from worldly suffering to divine obliviousness. What we have is our animal fact of being: \u201cShe smells of salt. As if \/ the smell of her conception \/ were still on her\u2026.\u201d Recognize: \u201cThe human body is a heavy machine. \/ Such stillness \/ when the motor shudders and stops.\u201d Nor do animals cease to be enlisted as symbols of our undeniable carnality: \u201cshe remembers and we forget \/ the smell of blood \/ always in her muzzle.\u201d<\/p>\n As splendid\u2014as fine\u2014as is The Catch\u2014throughout, the closing sequence of a dozen poems is superlative. \u201cCob\u201d confesses the interconnectedness of what is beautiful and what is useful: \u201ca loaf made from corn \/ because the crust of things \/ rises and fall like breath \/ in the flanks of beasts.\u201d \u201cField\u201d maintains a promise of transcendence: \u201c the creatures \/ track their errands \/\/ dark as the veins that track my calves \/ the hayfield sighs and stirs \/ and closes over itself \/ taking its miraculous light \/ into itself.\u201d<\/p>\n The meditations are self-interrogations. In \u201cHere,\u201d \u201cyou will go on here \/ even after \/ you have left although \/ you just arrived.\u201d That sums up the lifespan: Three score and ten, and you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n Fiona Sampson is a wise, witty, erudite, and earth\/world-infatuated poet. She can do anything\u2014and does everything. The Catch is yours. No \u201ccatch.\u201d<\/p>\n Teeth: Poems 2006-2011<\/em> driftword<\/em> B.C. poet, George Bowering, is Institutionalized Revolutionary Poetry; his work is both perfectly canonical and perpetually new. See for yourself by checking out his umpteenth collection, Teeth: Poems 2006-2011. Bowering\u2019s 80 now. In his Yeatsian years, he muses inescapably\u2014but not morbidly\u2014on death and decline. Also Teeth is an impressive array of forms, from haiku to blues to free verse. Also enjoyable are Bowering\u2019s patented, startling juxtapositions of the classical and the casual, the everyday and the weird, pop cult and high-brow literature. The poet jump-cuts, jazz-improvises with, college allusion and comic incident: \u201cI fell on my face \/ where Dante trod. Florence \/ gave me nothing \/ to grasp. Old stones \/ are not poetry then.\u201d Remembering a chum\u2019s nickname, \u201cZonko,\u201d Bowering imagines him authoring \u201ca smudgy, crooked print job, poetry \/ Dalhousie University will never read.\u201d One refrain-driven lyric eavesdrops on a black-comic moment: \u201cThe anaesthetic wore off. I heard two doctors arguing. \/ \u2018You\u2019re his family doctor. YOU pull the plug!\u2019 \u2018No, YOU were the surgeon. You pull it!\u201d<\/p>\n Another refrain-based poem offers this memento-mori image: \u201cI opened the Venetian blind. My entire Grade 12 class was out \/ there, some in wheelchairs, several dead, all singing inaudibly.\u201d<\/p>\n A senior practitioner of the looser, slangy poetry that flowed into English Canada via the Black Mountain and Beat Movement experiments of postwar U.S. verse, Bowering is an expert of the image-made-lyric. See this untitled poem: \u201cThe way a woman looks down \/ while she\u2019s hooking her bra together \/ in front, \/ then turns it \/ around her body and \/ puts her nude elbows out \/ and then quietly lifts \/ a little black strap \/ over each shoulder.\u201d<\/p>\n A long poem purports to eulogize a grandmother: \u201cI was reading Olson \/ and drinking Molson\u2026. \/\/ How would you like, \/ my granny said \/ to be Charles Olson\u2019s typewriter?\u201d Mimicking a (Wilfrid) Laurier (University Press) Poetry Series book, Teeth concludes with a Judith-Fitzgerald-conducted interview with Bowering. Answering her thoughtful questions, Bowering is always flowering, seldom glowering. Wanna be a poet? Have \u201ca love for oneself as a stranger to oneself.\u201d<\/p>\n Born Henrik Brand in \u201csubarctic Canada,\u201d croc E moses is the nom de plume of the now-Cape Town, South Africa-based musician, artist, and performance poet. His first commercially published book is driftword (UNISA, $20US), which includes a CD in the back flap. The grandson of one of English Canada\u2019s greatest mid-20th-century literary scholars, namely George Whalley, croc E employs spoken poetry to critique and comment on contemporary South African politics, particularly how \u201cthe majority who are a minority \/ live under democratic apartheid \/ does inequality have to be the source of our diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n croc E reverses the path of the fine South African poet Arthur Nortje, who immigrated to Canada, 1967-70, but died in London, UK, in 1970. (University of South Africa Press\u2014UNISA\u2014has also published Nortje.) But croc E follows Nortje who, himself, adopted a free-spirited, Spoken-Word vibe, in his last months of life, in Toronto here and in Oxford there.<\/p>\n Some may not like the plainness of croc E\u2019s raps, but such is the empowering poetics of free-speech-put-to-a-rhythm-and\/or-a-beat. How else can you \u201cget bored with your subconscious, cheat on your blindness\u201d? Too, \u201cpropaganda \/ = fear of poets.\u201d The best counter-propaganda is Truth, which is what croc E aims to deliver, including some self-criticism: \u201cthe hardest thing to admit \/ is i have been complicit \/ in the cold war of freedom.\u201d Indeed, \u201cI\u2019ve been eking out a private freedom \/ a freedom to fool myself\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n The style of these pieces owes much to Bob Marley, the Pop Poet of the Third World, whose verses have taught the oppressed everywhere that their scriptures and folk beliefs and plain-talk world-views are both poetry and a valid people\u2019s political economy. Whenever elections unfurl, with its bold-face lies and histrionics, remember to stay tuned to Truth: \u201clook after your poetry \/ and your poetry will look after you \/ look after your imagination \/ and your dreams will look after you.\u201d The Seasons<\/em> Rachel Zolf\u2019s fifth book of poetry, Janey\u2019s Arcadia, is an insurgent read and an insular\u2014involuted\u2014read. Born in hell-raising Manitoba (site of Marxist mayors, the Winnipeg General Strike, and a Riel Rebellion), Zolf knows Prairie Canucks are a product of Canada\u2019s Department of Immigration and Colonization, which sought to replace Natives with European peasants, granting them \u201cfree land.\u201d<\/p>\n To entice colonists, the federal government employed propaganda. So, Zolf\u2019s cover reproduces a bureaucracy-approved, fascistic image of a rosy-cheeked mom, a chubby blond babe in her left arm, her right raised in a pseudo-Nazi salute. The background is Janey\u2019s Arcadia\u2014her Promised Land (seized from Natives)\u2014of wheat bales, fatted calves, foraging chickens, plus a tidy farmhouse, outfitted with a barn, garage, and shed.<\/p>\n This image is important because Zolf seeks to rip away the pastoral, family-values fa\u00e7ade and reveal the real (and continuing) violence of colonization, including the practice of cultural oppression against Indigenous Canadians, but also of actual, race-inflected misogyny amounting to the serial killing (or time-lapse mass murder) of Native women.<\/p>\n Zolf illustrates the violence of the settler regime in two ways. First, she uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to reprint \u201cold, acid-worn\u201d texts; the result is \u201chauntological error\u201d: Words end up deformed, interpolated with non-alphabetical, typographical ornaments and symbols. So, for instance, the lines, \u201cThe advancement of Goad\u2019s Kink \/ is intrinsically tied \/ to how full we are of Jes$s,\u201d can be read as a sly comment on sexual abuse of Native children by Christian missionaries. \u201cGod\u2019s Kirk\u201d\u2014church\u2014becomes, instead, a reference to \u201ckink\u201d and a sex-toy; \u201cJes$s\u201d suggests that the churches are fleecing their flocks\u2026.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, \u201cThe Indians have never been troublesome\u201d becomes \u201cThe Indigns have never been trouhlcsonie\u201d: The spelling change suggests that \u201cIndians\u201d are \u201cIndignant,\u201d while the next odd word suggests holes (French: trou). Zolf\u2019s second technique is to engage a multilingual diction. Her access to Greek, Cyrillic, Cree syllables, Cherokee, the International Phonetic Alphabet, plus Yiddish, English, and French permits her to mash up terms and collide cultures.<\/p>\n The poetry echoes reality: On Winnipeg streets, \u201cpeople smile at you in English, but speak in Russian,\u201d or are \u201cstiff-tongued Germans, ginger-headed Icelanders, Galicians, Norwegians, Poles and Frenchmen\u2026.\u201d Between the challenging poems and the deliberately distorted prose, there is relief: Pages of handwritten women\u2019s names, so easy to skim. But, no! There\u2019s no relief from politics. When \u201cHelen Betty Osborne\u201d appears (128), we must guess that the names we are reading are those of murdered and\/or missing Indigenous women\u2026.<\/p>\n Janey\u2019s Arcadia is a daunting read; plough it twice to find its riches. Oh, if only prize-winning Zolf had placed her explanatory back pages up front. To know that \u201cJaney\u201d is a mash-up of \u201cJaney Canuck\u201d (a white Anglo heroine) and Kathy Acker\u2019s \u201cJaney Smith\u201d (a punk character) eases the strangeness of the text. But, Zolf is following experimental, Canuck poet M. N. Philip, so she must want us to feel disoriented (hear the pun on \u201corient\u201d)\u2014just like \u201cIndians,\u201d misnamed by genocidal, homicidal Occidentals\u2026.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Bruce Meyer deserves more space than I\u2019m allotting. The Poet Laureate of Barrie (Ontario) has written, following the 1959 example of Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, 100 love sonnets\u2014whispers of love\u2014for his wife, Kerry. The Seasons is Meyer\u2019s umpteenth verse collection. He is a poet of grand thought, not grandiloquent expression, so his verse flies under the radar, so to speak, but is no less dangerous\u2014like a stealth bomber. Quartered like Vivaldi\u2019s Four Seasons, each sonnet sequence connects nature, season, love, and family. \u201cFlannel\u201d exemplifies Meyer\u2019s approach: \u201cThe wind \u2026 \/ claws at the house and whines to come in. \/\/ It merely wants to be warm at last\u2014 \/ To slip its hand inside your button front\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The Seasons is a book to curl up with\u2014in a Friendly Giant armchair\u2014with one\u2019s sworn spouse. His poetry is cuddly and comfy\u2026<\/p>\n Thrilling Cities<\/em> Sex and Horror: The Art of Emanuele Taglietti<\/em> Fictional spy James Bond\u2019s creator, Ian Fleming (1908-64), was first a newspaperman before he was a novelist, but was always a traveller, and, unable to feel quite at home in England after World War II, settled in Jamaica. Fleming is a British novelist, but he was really, by inclination, a West Indian thriller writer. In any event, his success with the Bond novels brought him a commission from the Sunday Times, in 1959-60, to visit glamorous cities, infamous for schmoozing and boozing and\/or gambling and\/or gangsters, and scout out the most notorious dens of iniquity and moral hazard and write them up as alternative tourism sites.<\/p>\n The Eiffel Tower is all very well and good, but Fleming knows that many discerning folks would prefer Paris\u2019 down-to-earth entertainments, such as the burlesque and risqu\u00e9 attractions of Pigalle. Such is the point of the newspaper columns collected in Thrilling Cities ($15, Thomas & Mercer): To guide voyeurs, tired of Picassos, to the women mud-wrestlers of Hamburg, the poetically named masseuses of Hong Kong, and the cheap, large-pour martini bars of New York.<\/p>\n Reprinted in 2013, the columns still seem fresh, the cities and travel experiences still pretty much as they are now (though with no \u201curban renewal\u201d\u2014mass demolition of downtowns\u2014and no glowering airport security types). The secret behind this \u201cin-the-know\u201d feel is Fleming\u2019s savvy use of slang (much of which holds up: helicopters are still \u201cchoppers\u201d), but more to the point is his understanding that most human beings are not saints and might seek pleasure as much as\u2014ahem\u2014enlightenment when on a jaunt or a tear. So, Fleming\u2019s HK is massage parlours and naughty cinemas \u201c(with colour and sound!)\u201d and ads for women such as \u201cMiss Emerald Parsley\u201d and \u201cMiss Ten Thousand Fun and Safety.\u201d In the column-closing section, \u201cIncidental Intelligence,\u201d Fleming alerts us that the Peninsula Hotel, in Kowloon, is \u201cthe Number 1 hotel for visitors to the [British] colony\u201d (which HK was, up to 1997).A night at the hotel, 56 years ago, went for HK$70 (single) or just CDN$12. Today, the cost ranges between CDN$800-$1000.<\/p>\n From Asia, Fleming jetted to America the Efficient (his highest praise for the superpower), where Honolulu offered (around about the time President Obama was conceived) \u201cmen either bulging or scrawny [and] women unshapely, blue-rinsed, rimless-glassed, and all with those tight, rather petulant mouths of the pensioned American.\u201d Yes, Fleming is sexist, classist, and blithely racist: Blacks are hapless \u201cnegros\u201d; Jews gave pre-Hitler Vienna \u201can atmosphere in which the intellect appears to flourish astonishingly,\u201d but are still smeared as having been \u201cpoor\u201d citizens, though this insult receives\u2014and can have\u2014no justification. But this is Fleming\u2019s garish, Space Age, and nasty Cold War world, where trade is smuggling, investment is gambling, \u201clove\u201d is trysting, and reportage means dressing up sleaze with glitz.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a world where (white) might makes right and so-called family values have no reality outside Walt Disney\u2019s fabrications.Maybe that\u2019s the best way to view Fleming\u2019s Bond\u2014as the antidote to the smarmy, smiley-face satisfactions of Disney.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Emanuele Taglietti (1943-) would be the perfect artist for illustrating Bond novel covers or movie posters. Sex and Horror: The Art of Emanuele Taglietti is a lush presentation of the Italian artists\u2019 luscious canvases for movie posters and \u201cpulp\u201d comic books. Given that his grandmother was aunt to the fine Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, it\u2019s likely genetic fate that Taglietti has become famed for his own visual art, though it is deliberately\u2014deliciously\u2014lurid. A typical image is a buxom beauty, supremely scantily clad, presented as the prey of an ogre, a fiend, a gangster, or a swashbuckling swordsman or a pirate.<\/p>\n Occasionally, the villain is female; occasionally, the damsel is the heroine. Nevertheless, the devilishness or derring-do is accomplished in a state of partial undress or d\u00e9shabill\u00e9 (what it means to be disheveled). True: One could dismiss this art as being of a piece with much adolescent (heterosexual) male fantasy, or as simply being Kitsch. Okay: But it\u2019s still \u2018watchable\u2019\u2014not as eye-candy, but as eye-tonic averting the catatonic\u2026. Appreciation: Selected Poems<\/em> Anna Yin hails from Nanjing, China. Immigrating to Canada in 1999, she is now the inaugural Poet Laureate of Mississauga, Ontario. Born in Chongqing, China, Chuan Sha studied in England, then came to Canada in 1999. Settled in Scarborough, Ontario, his poetry has international appeal.<\/p>\n Yin\u2019s sixth verse collection is Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac<\/em>. She\u2019d planned to write a book titled, \u201cThe Year of the Snake,\u201d for 2013 was a year of faith-testing crises. However, other Chinese astrological fauna came to mind, resulting in a more expansive work. Indeed, Yin is the poet as seer. Her models are other bards with an eccentric and\/or imagist bent: Anna Akhmatova, Basho, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, William Carlos Williams\u2026.<\/p>\n She also shadows Sylvia Plath: \u201cSomeone from our childhood mistook me for you\u2014 \/ his apology blew me back into midnight.\u201d A friend has become une-dame-de-la-nuit: \u201cYou drifted away into a night lake\u2014 \/ with feathers blackened by dark lust, \/ with slim neck hooked by golden bait.\u201d In another poem, the speaker says, \u201cYou are tired of his \/ molding, over and over, \/ thrashing, nailing \/ into you.\u201d There\u2019s a fierce feminism here, reinforced by readings of Dot Livesay and Dame Atwood. Though it\u2019s tricky following Yin\u2019s wicked, impressionistic juxtapositions, her painterly imagery is deliciously lustrous.<\/p>\n See her haiku poems: \u201cyou stare at a white house\u2026\u201d \/ white smoke lingers \/ among white-framed windows\u201d; \u201crecalling a poem \/ his shadow and mine expand \/ on Brooklyn Bridge.\u201d Do not ignore her acute aphorisms: \u201cDeath. What is it like? \/ No one takes a close look.\u201d<\/p>\n Yin is endlessly perspicacious, endlessly compelling: \u201cThe autumn gusts feel warm \/ as if it\u2019s spring\u2026. \/ last night by accident I cut my finger\u2026 \/ slowly, on the rice paper, red roses grew.\u201d She brings to Canadian poetry a sense of classicism and aestheticism and minimalism, all nicely mixed up with sensuality.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Chuan Sha\u2019s partly English book, Appreciation: Selected Poems<\/em> is hefty at 400 pages, pricey, and priceless as a record, via Chinese commentary and English translations, of the impressive works of a man who is currently Director of the Chinese-Canadian Poets Association.<\/p>\n Li Yong Yin\u2019s intro attests to Chuan Sha\u2019s \u201cpassion (for) wildness, \u2026 madness for beauty, and (revels in) love and lust.\u201d The critic feels \u201cthe essence of (Walt) Whitman, and also the spirit of Allen Ginsberg.\u201d Chuan Sha\u2019s verses do hover between Victorian Romanticism\u2014delight in Love and Nature\u2014and Beat Movement passions, namely Sex and Travel. (Compare his works with two last-century classics by Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveller in London [1938] and The Silent Traveller in New York [1950].)<\/p>\n Chuan Sha\u2019s lines describing yearning and loss are striking: \u201cTragedy came when adults took control \/ The heart became sullen \/ The voice frozen \/ Like a fossil\u2026. \/\/ Your hair combed in bangs \/ You gazed with shining black eyes \/ At the water pushing the boat into the east.\u201d \u201cChristmas\u201d is une-belle-dame-sans-merci, who struts, \u201cBarebacked, with a low dress, flaunting provocative legs from under the short skirt,\u201d while \u201cthrongs of corpses circle about \u2026, flirting.\u201d The speaker feels she\u2019s \u201ctaken away my heart from which blood still drips\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n A visit to London (UK) reveals, \u201cReflection of silver and platinum \/ Blondes\u2019 blue eyes sensual legs and breasts \/ Arrays of naked bodies lying in the Nature Club \/ Civilization is but a moon floating \/ On the surface of the sea.\u201d Echoes of Gabriel Garcia Lorca and Arthur Nortje resound: \u201cYour black hair pours down covering \/ your pure white body.\u201d How many other fine, Chinese poets go unheard among us, silent in English, but singing lustily in Chinese? Them that have ears, why, they will hear.<\/p>\n Standard Candles<\/em> Fifty Scores<\/em> Alice Major\u2019s ninth verse collection is Standard Candles. The Scot-Canuck ranges widely\u2014cosmically\u2014across subjects in this handsome, substantial (164 pages), and beautifully accomplished work. A \u201cLate\u201d Metaphysical might be the best way to describe Major, for her poems often employ scientific terms and metaphors to elaborate her truths and ideals. However, the poems remain accessible, for the science references get explicated either in situ or in several pages of Notes that close the volume.<\/p>\n Nicely, some poems are simply descriptive. \u201cThe god of teapots\u201d is \u201ccorpulent and unworried,\u201d accepting \u201cwhat pours in\u201d and next pours out: \u201camber, tan, sepia, \/ the percolations of brown, \/ the brewed color of peat, \/ muskeg, spruce bog, \/ wetlands.\u201d Similarly, in \u201cFour questions for winter,\u201d we learn snow\u2019s identity: \u201cMoon\u2019s admirer and echo, \/ friend of white owls.\u201d This is plainsong imagery. The poem ends magically: \u201cWhere do I love you? \/ Here.\u201d<\/p>\n To name poets that Major resembles, one must list the philosophical Jan Zwicky and the science-oriented Jan Conn and\/or the Christian Platonist Peg Avison or the Gothic Outdoorswoman Peg Atwood. Yet, Major\u2019s more playful and more moving than this quartet. The unpromisingly titled, \u201cRectangularization of the morbidity curve,\u201d is, really, a fine elegy, one that escapes from actuarial concepts to picture dying as a swansong: \u201cThen I think of curves\u2014the gull\u2019s wing drawn \/ from lifting shoulder to the tapered tip \/ trailing its final feather into air. A line \/ lovelier, perhaps, than that sharp edge \/ of rock plunging to ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n The last poem is humorous: \u201cGod submits a grant application to the Canada Council.\u201d Anyone who has ever applied to the granting agency for funds to support an artistic project will appreciate God\u2019s dilemma in seeking money \u201cTo create a world.\u201d Answering the \u201cDetailed (Project) Description\u201d that the Canada Council demands, God pledges \u201ca multi-disciplinary, cross-genre work,\u201d so as to produce \u201ca self-sustaining, performative experience based on the geometry of the sphere.\u201d Moreover, the work will involve \u201ctheoretical mathematics\u201d and \u201ctheatrical techniques.\u201d The actual performance\u2014an installation\u2014will take a week to set up. God\u2019s grant is approved, and She is awarded the maximum amount: $25,000. She is pleased, but She wonders how she will live on that, for her masterpiece will have to last for at least 14 billion years.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Standard Candles<\/em> (an astrological term) is a trove of non-standard\u2014exceptional\u2014poems, whose brilliance is not \u201cbee violet\u201d (a zoological term), but blazingly evident. The Albertan Major was Edmonton\u2019s first Poet Laureate. Her laurels ain\u2019t gilt, but pure\u2014Troy-ounce\u2014gold. Arthur Bull is the antithesis to Major. The Nova Scotian poet doesn\u2019t want to microscope stars or telescope trees; he wants to hear, instead, the jazz of everyday doings. Fifty Scores is just that: 50 ways of listening to the heavenly sounds of earthly existence. These poems could be yoga instructions for the ears.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s #5: \u201cOn a windy day, stand by a brook in the woods near the ocean. \/ Move your attention from foreground (brook) to middle ground \/ (branch-wind cracking-soughing) to the background (surf), before \/ gradually letting the small sounds of the forest break in.\u201d<\/p>\n #7 is modeled on soul singer James Brown: \u201cFind an echo in the valley or against a building, and test it, measuring \/ the interval with the loudest, shortest wordless sound your voice can \/ make. Yell once, twice, three times, four times, as far as you can go \/ and still get back to its complete echo.\u201d<\/p>\n #11 is a cuisine soundtrack: \u201cWhile chopping vegetables like carrots or parsnips, attend to the \/ \u2018sshh\u2019 of the knife going through with the \u2018kkk\u2019 as it hits the cutting \/ board, arranging the rhythm and tempo to the sound of oil heating in \/ the wok.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve added line-breaks, but the pieces are prose poems. Who does Bull echo? Experimental composers like John Cage and R. Murray Schafer. Plus whimsical poets like bill bissett and ee cummings.<\/p>\n #39 is fun: \u201cWhile undressing someone else, follow the sequence of clothing \/ music: Velcro, snaps, zippers. This also works as a duet.\u201d Looking East Over My Shoulder<\/em> Michael Lista and Jill Jorgenson are quite different poets, but both share connections to East End Toronto: Scarborough for Lista and old East York for Jorgenson. However, Lista\u2019s Scarborough, a childhood haunt, is full of ghosts. His second book, The Scarborough, could be Halloween reading. But the monster conjured is all too real. Lista memorializes Good Friday-to-Easter 1992\u2014when schoolgirl Kristin French fell prey to a hubby-wife murder-duo, whose evil crimes terrorized Ontario. Indeed, the guy had been the fiend of Scarborough, assaulting dozens of women.<\/p>\n Lista\u2019s strategy in his book is to ignore the killers, but to recall the civic and pop culture which served as backdrop to their cold-blooded, videotaped violence. The tone of the collection is ironic, bleak, smart, and despairing: \u201cprayers of rescue rise to no messiah\u201d; \u201cThe world: a hell of a place to be alive.\u201d It\u2019s a Diane Arbus universe: Her pics of damaged people\u2014shabby, alone, freakish\u2014would be ideal for this vision of \u201cScarberia.\u201d Or, really, the poems could be read as \u201centertainment\u201d between the acts of a George F. Walker play, which also focus on broken folks from east Toronto, on moral creeps and emotional cripples.<\/p>\n A poem that maps deftly this neon-lit, billboard-placarded waste land is \u201cFowl\u201d: \u201cThe girl from Scarborough liked being slapped \/ Down the hall from where her mother slept. \/\/ A big, hard-working hand, anybody\u2019s \/ To come medicinally down, antibody \/\/ To the slow infection of her Western face\u2026.\u201d \u201cSome birds don\u2019t migrate. Above, two lonely fowl \/ Scream across the sky their only vowel.\u201d<\/p>\n The deliberate monotony of the rhymes accents the depressing soullessness of this domestic, suburban oppression. Escapism offers no relief. \u201cKing Kong\u201d presents the love-struck, cinematic ape as a tragic hero: \u201cBlack bees bang down, bang steel, and burrow him\u2026. \/ Confused, setting down his unwilling bride, \/ Kong, on the wrong side of a killing, died.\u201d Nor does poetry\u2014art\u2014salve the troubled psyche: \u201cThe old masters knew it: just crack the [poem] \/ With a few hard stanzas, and it\u2019ll break \/ Like a compliant egg, spilling its everything. \/ What the poem refuses the poet takes.\u201d<\/p>\n Lista is clear-eyed and sharp-eared; he can make a poem say and do whatever he likes. Yet, his study of the Bernardo-Homolka outrages of a generation ago ends in easygoing\u2014thus displeasing\u2014stoicism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jorgenson\u2019s Looking East Over My Shoulder is like dawn breaking after the nightmarish reality that Lista describes. Assuredly, her outlook is sunny, but not Pollyanna. She finds joy in nature, neighbourhood, family, friends, her labour and her lover. While Lista enlists\u2014rightly\u2014infernal Dante and damned poets like Rimbaud, Jorgenson takes the spirited\u2014and spiritual\u2014Gerard Manley Hopkins as her model, letting alliteration letter her hearty feelings. \u201cLeaky lychees. \/ Even the good ones, thin soft skulls cracked and peeled, \/ exposing wee firm brains translucent white, wet, are \/ kind of weird. Alien bird. And it appears I\u2019m not so fond \/ of the watery sweetish-sour Anjou-pear-ish, \/ foreign strange on my Caucasian tongue, after all.\u201d<\/p>\n Another connection to Hopkins\u2014and perhaps Margaret Avison\u2014is a strain of mysticism in Jorgenson. Her poetry emerges, not from classroom study but outdoors rambles, and the musing allowed while working as that endangered species, a letter carrier. The result is poetry that\u2019s winsome, welcoming of everyday experience: \u201cEast\u2019s pink casts pink on west\u2019s vast bank of cloud \/ west\u2019s vast pink cloud bank now casts back pink \/ on east\u2019s west flank of house\u2026.\u201d It\u2019s only a sunrise; but it\u2019s a very specific sunrise, given vivacious observation.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, Jorgenson notes, \u201cIt\u2019s now officially fall. \/ I knew it had to happen \/\/ sometime after all. I pluck from my foot \/ a single stuck dewy oval leaf, \/ no end to this day\u2019s \/ gratuitous bejewelling.\u201d Lovely the rush of energy in these lines: \u201cbutterflies bow out \/ fritillarian flare of orange, a fleet, \/\/ \u2026 and here\u2014 \/ plea appeased, at least\u2014 \/\/ through the window \/ a sea of pastel petals plays, at ease, then sleeps.\u201d Is Jorgenson too pretty here? Maybe. But it\u2019s a first collection: More spring than fall in its feeling.<\/p>\n Karyotype<\/em> Kim Trainor\u2019s debut poetry book prefers not births, but deaths\u2014mysterious and\/or violent\u2014and the need to remember those slain (if indirectly by starvation) and\/or missing.<\/p>\n Her collection conjoins Halloween and Remembrance Day: The recollection of the organized violence that is war and\/or tyranny demands a remembering of horror, terror, courage, and grief.<\/p>\n The title of Trainor\u2019s book, Karyotype (Brick, $20), refers to \u201cthe characteristic chromosome complement of a species,\u201d and, specifically, in the titular poem, to the attempt \u201cto extract intact DNA from \u2026 several mummies\u201d exhumed in China, including \u201cThe Beauty of Loulan,\u201d a 4,000-year-old female who died, aged about 40.<\/p>\n The titular sequence makes two recurrent points: 1) A cadaver can\u2019t reveal the soul: \u201cBut where is she, \/ in the blue-stained karyogram \u2026 \/\/ this Beauty of Loulan, this beauty?\u201d<\/p>\n 2) Every violent death is possibly martyrdom: \u201ca newborn found in Burns Bog. \/ He was wrapped in a towel at birth \/ and thrown away. Is there a myth \/\/ that can explain this suffering\u2026 \/ or is it the usual story\u2014 \/\/ just one more sacrificial victim?\u201d<\/p>\n Trainor pens the struggle of poets to bear witness: Liu Baiqiang \/ sentenced to eighteen years for \u2018Counter-Revlutionary Incitement\u2019 \/ \u2026 attached words to the legs of locusts \/\/ \u2026 Long Live Freedom!… \/\/ and flung them over the walls \/ of his prison, into the air.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cField notes: Arras 1917\u201d focuses on the treasure of a slain, Great War soldier\u2019s notebook: \u201cNo man\u2019s land is written over \/ in your cramped hand.\u201d<\/p>\n Fast forward to the Spring 2003 \u201cCoalition of the Willing\u201d War Criminals\u2019 Iraq Invasion: A speaker, watching TV news, sees \u201cpale slivers of tracer fire in the desert, \/ missiles scattered like black seeds, \/ a pale red stain on the horizon that pours back into the dark.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAsh\u201d recounts the 1990s Serbian torching of Bosnian libraries: \u201cA few books \u2026 \/ could still be read one last time as pages floated down \/ black letters burning on grey. \/\/ You could \u2026 \/ catch them in your hand like snowflakes \/ and read the words as they melted to ash.\u201d<\/p>\n Like John McCrae\u2019s \u201cIn Flanders Fields,\u201d Trainor teaches us that Remembrance is vital.<\/p>\n Emily Pohl-Weary\u2019s second verse collection, Ghost Sick (Tightrope, $20), is subtitled, \u201ca poetry of witness.\u201d She doesn\u2019t chronicle foreign warfare, but rather the violence of Toronto\u2019s unacknowledged ghettoes, Ontario\u2019s prisons, and supposedly comfy suburbs.<\/p>\n Pohl-Weary\u2019s gritty vernacular got game, got street cred: \u201cAll the pretty ghetto girls \/ cried and puked vodka in the gutter \/ while their man-boys were shot like rabid dogs\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Holocaust witness poet Paul Celan, Pohl-Weary checks tabloids, billboards, newsflashes, for the language to bespeak domesticated violence: \u201cHe was twelve \/ she a statistic \/ This city explained the nonsensical by calling her a whore \/ As if opening her legs was enough \/ to justfy her murder\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCall Me Crab Apple Girl\u201d is an elegiac dramatic monologue in the voice of Ashley Smith (1988-2007), who was before the courts, severally, beginning at age 13 for pelting a postie with fruit because she believed he\u2019d stolen \u201cmy neighbour\u2019s welfare money.\u201d In the year of her death, a suicide now officially ruled as homicide, Smith was transferred 17 times among 11 institutions.<\/p>\n Pohl-Weary captures Smith\u2019s alienation and despair brilliantly: \u201cI fight for food, air, fight for sense, to be alone \/ Fight the way the guards look through me\u201d; \u201cI find small ways to remember I\u2019m alive \u201c; \u201cPinned \/ to an entomologist\u2019s spreading board \/ Cocooned butterfly in wrapping \/ I\u2019m no longer Ashley \/ I am pepper sprayed, battered\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThose Who Died\u201d sums up the importance of bearing witness: \u201cWhen you\u2019ve been on the sweetest date \/ feel loving and open \/ think of those who died\u2026. \/\/ Wounded and angry \/ they fought, but were killed anyhow \/ tossed in graves with no tombstones\u2026. \/\/ Remember that you live where they did not. \/ You are the survivor and the advocate. \/ You must live for those who died.\u201d<\/p>\n Pohl-Weary credits Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal for influencing \u201cThose Who Died.\u201d But its last lines also remind one of McCrae\u2019s \u201cIn Flanders Fields\u201d: \u201cTo you from failing hands we throw \/ The torch. Be yours to hold it high.\u201d Hastings-Sunrise<\/em> Keith Garebian\u2019s fifth book of verse, Georgia and Alfred, treats the lives of artists\u2014namely, painter Georgia O\u2019Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In contrast, Bren Simmers focuses on the art of living\u2014in apartment, neighbourhood, and city\u2014in her second collection, Hastings-Sunrise.<\/p>\n Garebian pays homage to O\u2019Keeffe (1887-1986) and Stieglitz (1864-1946) as pioneering U.S. artists in their different media and as a sensual couple, with O\u2019Keeffe serving as Stieglitz\u2019s model.<\/p>\n The poems suit this ekphrastic era. Many Canadian poets are busy pondering visual art, with Armand Garnet Ruffo\u2019s book about painter Norval Morrisseau (1932-2007), The Thunderbird Poems serving as exhibit A.<\/p>\n Garebian\u2019s free verse format is anchored by footnotes and fleshed out with found poems gleaned from real-life letters or biographies or critics\u2019 second thoughts. The lyrics are as documentary as they are confessional.<\/p>\n O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s \u201cfound\u201d lines are sometimes painterly: \u201ccharcoal\u2014[is] a miserable medium \/ for things that seem alive \/ and sing\u201d; \u201cStem and leaf \u2026 \/ sheens of shape \/ have subtle possibilities for my brush \/ Words would guillotine them.\u201d<\/p>\n Stieglitz\u2019s \u201cfound\u201d lines are functional to the point of being perfunctory: \u201cAll lived moments are equally true, \/ equally important.\u201d<\/p>\n The poetry is most vivid when Garebian isn\u2019t documenting, but trying to sketch\u2014or snap\u2014the inner lives of his subjects as lovers and\/or artists:<\/p>\n \u201cCamera Work\u201d has us glimpse Stieglitz thinking, \u201cSay platinum, gum bichromate, carbon, etc. \/ light an economy of mood \/ shadow its imprint.\u201d<\/p>\n The love affair is neatly pictured: \u201cIn high summer her shanty \/ studio is glutted with apples. \/\/ Their shine fills trees all morning, \/ burdened boughs straining \/ with the weight of this light \/ that falls on her nakedness [posed for him] like fever.\u201d<\/p>\n Roughly 2\/3 of the poems deal with Stieglitz looking at O\u2019Keeffe and snapping her or other models, to conclude that males are fixated on coitus and\/or the eternal feminine. Is this news?<\/p>\n O\u2019Keeffe focuses on Nature: \u201cShingle dissolves into leaf, \/ and the shell is a white memory. \/ Shining praise for the design in things.\u201d<\/p>\n Fine lines are found in this collection, along with some\u2014including the \u201cfound poems\u201d\u2014that are just pedestrian.<\/p>\n More grit and sparks might have appeared had Garebian explored the illicit love between O\u2019Keeffe and another artist, the African-American poet Jean Toomer.<\/p>\n Bren Simmers\u2019 book should be required reading for every member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau\u2019s Cabinet, for she plots the angst of thirty-somethings facing low-wages, high debts, zilch pensions, and zero hopes for affordable houses.<\/p>\n Settled in Vancouver, a city where middle-class homes are high-rent apartments, Simmers simmers with discontent: \u201cFrida [Kahlo] had a bridge, \/ Georgia [O\u2019Keeffe] had Ghost Ranch. \/ Virginia [Woolf], you understand, \/ I dream of four walls.\u201d<\/p>\n Trying to decide whether she belongs in her neighbourhood, Hastings-Sunrise (now yuppified as \u201cEast Village\u201d), Simmers maps the number and locations of swing sets, Xmas lights, footpaths, autumn tree colours, and open doors.<\/p>\n Trying to decide whether she should be married, Simmers weighs pros, cons, and offers proverbs: \u201cAsk yourself, What is the next necessary thing? Then do that\u201d; \u201cbe that crow. \/ Grow feathers, hollow bones, \/ scavenge a different wealth \/ from notes, berries, books.\u201d<\/p>\n Simmers style is to skitter twittering observations, ricocheting from one concern to another: \u201cFive percent down \/ has spawned sprawl, smog \/ and bank foreclosures\u2026. \/ This tenement marks us as \/ ordinary cosmopolitans.\u201d<\/p>\n The domestic must be navigated like any terrain: \u201cOur routines don\u2019t align without effort. \/ I crave quiet into afternoons; my love plays \/ double bass in our one-bedroom. All \/ the negotiations over headphones, time alone\u2026. \/ I still covet a fireplace, a hammock \/ doors we can close.\u201d<\/p>\n Simmers inks literally a pedestrian poetry of how B.A.\u2019s and M.A.\u2019s make lives for themselves in downscale neighbourhoods threatened by gentrification.<\/p>\n She has written the 2015 equivalent of Dennis Lee\u2019s Civil Elegies (1972), if crossed with Robert Kroetsch\u2019s Seed Catalogue (1968).<\/p>\n Ghosts and Girls of Fiction House<\/em> Teacher\u2019s Pets<\/em> Ghosts and Girls of Fiction House ($30 US, Yoe Books) is a hardcover collection of 1940s Ghost Gallery comic books, reproduced in gorgeous, primary colours, in coffee-table format, reminding us that this form of pop\u2014pulp\u2014culture required a pool of gifted artists, if not quite so gifted writers.<\/p>\n In his foreword, Craig Yoe recalls that, as a teen, he loved Fiction House comic books, featuring \u201cspace-vixens, lady pilots, and leopard-clad lasses\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Yoe registers that, in the 1940s, Fiction House specialized in \u201caviatrixes, outer space ladies, and \u2026 Me-Jane-You-Tarzan characters [in] tight-fitting civilian clothing\u201d and pitted these cartoon feminists against poltergeists and banshees.<\/p>\n These audacious, bodacious, and curvaceous heroines won the enmity of moralists, such as Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, warned Yank adults that letting youths read comic books, with their suggestive situations and titillating illustrations, would lead to deviancy and delinquency.<\/p>\n In his intro, Michael H. Price notes that Ghost Gallery \u201cyarns\u201d mix crime with horror, allowing heroes and heroines to confront \u201cflesh-and-blood miscreants\u201d as well as ectoplasmic foes.<\/p>\n Like Yeo, Price denies that the damsels are \u201cmere decorative ciphers.\u201d No: They are staple allies with male detectives and he-man types, battling phantoms and Frankensteins, demons and Draculas, related to \u201cthe early 1940s resurgence of horror movies as a moneymaking staple of the Hollywood studios\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Yeo and Price understand that these classic comics are racist (and exploitative of \u201csexiness\u201d), but they are products of their time.<\/p>\n How does a typical Ghost Gallery plot unfold?<\/p>\n Check out Jumbo Comics #56 (October 1943): The ghost of Josh Butler haunts \u201cPa\u201d in \u201cGunsmoke Hollow,\u201d a backwoods shantytown perfect for an Alice Munro story.<\/p>\n Fearing that a spectre has ambushed her dad, Millie\u2014a blonde in a magenta dress best described as peek-a-boo rags\u2014writes to square-jaw Drew Murdoch to come to her aid.<\/p>\n Drew arrives, but Pa is dead, and Drew soon battles shotgun-toting rednecks. One foe is not a phantom, just a dude\u2014a moonshiner in cahoots with another distiller.<\/p>\n Next, the hicks are dead\u2014and Millie, a sudden kidnap victim, is freed, and Drew leads two women to safety.<\/p>\n The stories are outlandish, the ink-and-paint garish, and that\u2019s their charm.<\/p>\n Crystal Hurdle\u2019s second book of verse is a novel-in-poetry, Teacher\u2019s Pets ($22, Tightrope).<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a comic book, but the tale is easily campy; its free-verse narrative tells of the Venturers, an extra-mural, extracurricular, school camping group, and their adventures in the Great Outdoors\u2014and in the buff.<\/p>\n The stuff of secondary school becomes the media for these dramatic monologues: hallway gossip, diary jottings, report cards, horoscopes, essay bits, lists of essentials.<\/p>\n The poetry is accessible, witty, and \u201cPG-17\u201d in orientation. Thus, \u201cExcursion List\u201d includes, not only DEET, but \u201cprophylactics.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNatalie Wong\u201d testifies to hanky-panky amid the sleeping bags: \u201cMr. Waggoner\u2014no, Cam\u2014at the tent\u2019s entrance, \/ at the foot of my air mattress, \/ at\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Hurdle asks that we use our imaginations to fill in the blanks or to draw the obvious conclusions: The teachers are predators, but the teens are not babes-in-the-woods (pun intended).<\/p>\n \u201cMary Beth Tansy\u201d witnesses that Cam \u201csounded almost like God, \/ and the way he touched my body later was reverent, \/ as if I were something holy\u2026. \/ Not grabby like my step-dad or all of the boys before.\u201d<\/p>\n In a later poem, Mary Beth recalls, \u201cthere was a rim of pleasure around the pain\u201d and that Cam \u201cput his hand over my mouth so I wouldn\u2019t cry out\u2026. \/ His hand tasted musky, but his kisses are honey.\u201d<\/p>\n English teacher Letitia Henry marks Candace Hunter\u2019s haiku that reads, \u201cin the starry tent \/ he kisses constellations \/ along my backbone\u201d: She thus learns that her sometime lover, Cam, has been intimate with the teen.<\/p>\n This poetry is a mash-up of Vladmir Nabokov\u2019s Lolita and Peggy Atwood\u2019s Journals of Susanna Moodie: Naughty and knotty imagery that makes \u201croughing it in the bush\u201d a double entendre.<\/p>\n But the central debt is to Edgar Lee Masters\u2019 Spoon River Anthology, whose centenary was in 2015.<\/p>\n A creative writing prof at Capilano University, Hurdle knows her stuff. Teacher\u2019s Pets is a Grade-A accomplishment. English-Canadian poets are downtown types or suburbanites, whose idea of the Great Outdoors is to ponder camping trips, with an e-reader in one hip pocket and a flask in the other.<\/p>\n Perhaps the above sets a context for the cigar-store-Indian-splintering, poet who is Dr. Rita Joe, C.M.<\/p>\n Born Rita Bernard in Whycocomagh, Cape Breton Isle, in 1932, Joe grew up as a disenfranchised minority (Mi\u2019kmaw) within a disadvantaged majority (the Scots) who were themselves a minority ethnicity within Nova Scotia entire.<\/p>\n To be the voice of an oppressed people, Joe could not ink pretentious poetry. She was homespun to the point of being deliberately homely, eschewing Ivory Towers to talk of the Rez, her beloved Church, and the ghosts of Mi\u2019kmaq elders gone on.<\/p>\n The Blind Man\u2019s Eyes: New and Selected Poetry (Breton Books, $18) is a vital reminder of Joe\u2019s particular excellence, and publisher and friend Ronald Caplan\u2019s choice of Joe\u2019s pieces is effective.<\/p>\n Passing away at age 75 in 2007, Joe left a true, literary legacy, but it has been misunderstood.<\/p>\n Read superficially, she seems simplistic. But much more is going on.<\/p>\n For instance, in \u201cI am the Indian,\u201d Joe identifies herself as \u201cIndian\u201d and as bearing a \u201cburden\u201d that has an \u201cinvisible line\u201d\u2014one that she cannot \u201cdrop\u201d because she remains dissatisfied with the quality of her hefting.<\/p>\n Joe\u2019s burden is both race and art, or the articulation of race versus erasure. Joe tells us her \u201cminor self-war has turned into a mountain, I cannot reach the top. The top being my own satisfied conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n Her \u201cburden\u201d is the necessity of reconciling her various heritages\u2014Mi\u2019qmaw, Anglo, Catholic, Nova Scotian\u2014with Indigenous Faith and the aloof aesthetics of modernism.<\/p>\n In other words, Joe follows an existentialist ethos, the idea of Double Consciousness (cf. W.E.B. Du Bois), of being a poet and having to express \u201cNativism\u201d\u2014not parochial nationalism, but a belief system that appreciates earth and roots, ecology and psychology, geography and genealogy.<\/p>\n In (re-) reading Joe, note a complex of ideas haunting lines that are prima facie plain. Yet, her accessibility is that of William Blake, a clarity that is dazzling because it is infused with the light of mysticism or spirituality.<\/p>\n \u201cHis face I see on the cloud\u2026. \/ The dust I would wash off his feet \/ If he asked.\u201d<\/p>\n Joe sees angels, hears voices, has visions, and all are presented as truth: \u201cDuring the night\u2026 \/ I moved from the bed to the chesterfield \/ During the night I had dream paralysis \/ In my mind I asked for someone\u2019s touch\u2026. \/ In my dream my husband bent his head to kiss me\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Joe is constantly constructing in her poetry a wigwam cathedral\u2014or chapel\u2014wherein thought passes \u201cBetween two minds\u201d or is \u201cSwinging to and fro \/ From English to Native\u201d (see \u201cAnkita\u2019si\u201d [1999]).<\/p>\n A characteristic of poet-mystics or mystical poets is the tendency to fetishize \u201cI,\u201d for it is the eye of the visionary, the eccentric, the uniquely gifted, the genius, the Seer, who is empowered via vatic attributes to relate glimpses of the Divine.<\/p>\n Joe titles a book, We are the Dreamers (1999), but there is usually only one oracle in her poems: Herself\u2014or her persona.<\/p>\n Joe\u2019s tone is subtle, quiet, almost withdrawn. She whispers, muses, meditates.<\/p>\n But she jests too: \u201cI want my country to know \/ Natives are No. 1, then mounties, then finally the snow\u201d (\u201cIn Order of Line\u201d). The miniscule \u201cm\u201d for \u201cmounties\u201d is a sly cutting down to size of a police force with a history of legalized Terrorism against the First Nations. Even in joking, Joe may imply an impolitic critique.<\/p>\n In keeping with her modernist heritage, Joe is an Imagist.<\/p>\n See her 1978-era poem about the making of moose butter: \u201cAfter the meat is removed \/ The bones of the moose are collected, \/ Pounded with rocks \/ Reduced to powder, \/ Then placed in a kettle \/ And boiled well, \/ Bringing the grease atop\u2026.\u201d The poem moves as nimbly as might a documentary filmmaker\u2019s camera.<\/p>\n Joe\u2019s story, \u201cThe Legend of Matlan,\u201d echoes the opening of Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear, but then edges into delightful, Hans Christian Andersen territory.<\/p>\n How to end? With one of her last poems: \u201c[J]ust ask the next person \/ Did she die? \/ Then smile, because I\u2019ll be happy \/ At least you asked.\u201d<\/p>\n de book of Mary: A Performance Poem<\/em> Tell: poems for a girlhood<\/em> Two new poetry works view women as the pivots of theology and equality politics. de book of Mary: A Performance Poem is Jamaican-Canadian Pamela Mordecai\u2019s vison of Mary, mother of Jesus and thus of divinity, in the first book of an epic trilogy. Tell: poems for a girlhood is Mauritian-Canadian Soraya Peerbaye\u2019s study of the social meaning of the murder of Reena Virk, a teen of South Asian descent, who was beaten and drowned in Saanich, BC, on November 14, 1997.<\/p>\n Mordecai\u2019s verses hew to gospel-truths, but also respect both the poet\u2019s Jewish heritage of scepticism and her roots in Jamaica\u2019s Afro-spiritual-accented and ganja-scented Christianity. So, this story of Mary unfolds in three-line stanzas, but in the lingo of Jamaican nation-language or patois.<\/p>\n However, Mordecai keeps only hints of Jamaican English, so that the Canuck reader can follow the tale easily. Then again, de book of Mary is meant to be performed, to be read aloud. In performance, one should hear the accents accurately.<\/p>\n Mordecai insists that a female perspective on Mary is more trustworthy than the male: \u201cnone \/\/ of you lot never carry a child. \/ YOU all pump us up \/ so casually \/ and den for \/ nine long month \/ we must haul de belly.\u201d<\/p>\n After Mary receives the portentous news of archangel Gabriel, Mordecai allows God (\u201cJah-Jah\u201d) this feminist insight: \u201cNever mind old time ways, never mind \/ how she young, woman not nobody property. \/ She free to decide on her own destiny.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon, Mary narrates Jesus\u2019 childhood. When Jesus is born, \u201cde baby [is] wrap up tight \/ in warm clothes lying down in an animal trough.\u201d The boy is mischievous: When his pet cat devours a neighbour woman\u2019s plate of fish, Jesus laughs and says, \u201cMiss Ruth, why don\u2019t you go back inside \/ make sure your fish missing for sure.\u201d Miraculously, as Mary reports, Jesus \u201cjust clap him hand \/ and put de fish \/ back on her plate. Come evening, she tired \/ to talk bout her dinner tasty.\u201d<\/p>\n Mordecai covers Jesus\u2019 ministry, crucifixion, and the persecutions of the first Christians, as told by Mary, in the manner of a folk gospel. One is reminded of African-American poet James Weldon Johnson\u2019s folk sermons, God\u2019s Trombones (1927), which liberates Ebonics by letting God parley \u201cde\u201d vernacular\u2026<\/p>\n Reena Virk\u2019s murder\u2014brought on by 8 assailants (including 7 girls, 5 of them white)\u2014haunts Soraya Peerbaye, for she is also South Asian, and was herself a girl-immigrant to Canada in the 1970s. So, Tell relates two \u201cbrown\u201d girlhoods: Virk\u2019s\u2014and Peerbaye\u2019s. But the story tracks the police procedural, the why\u2019d-they-do-it narrative of Virk\u2019s homicide, then the why-do-we-suffer-so critique of Canuck racism and sexism that informs Peerbaye\u2019s own bio.<\/p>\n The antique precedent for Tell is John Milton\u2019s Lycidas (1637), which mourns the death by drowning of Milton\u2019s friend. But that death, for all its pathos, was accidental. Virk\u2019s wasn\u2019t, but marine imagery still applies: \u201cThe graze and drag of her, \/ clumsy, obstructive in the divided \/cares of eelgrass.\u201d<\/p>\n Peerbaye employs official, forensic reports: \u201cBloody discharge from the nose\u2026 \/ bruised cheek, bruised \/\/ mouth and chin, dark red \/\/ bruising about her lips\u2026.\u201d Such lines, balanced with the poetry\u2014\u201cThe pathologist\u2019s hands, along \/ the throat\u2019s interior \/ the tongue, the bone below\u201d\u2014achieve equal resonance. Peerbaye retorts\u2014at times\u2014to the autopsy.<\/p>\n When a pathologist says Virk\u2019s corpse has a \u201cwrinkly \u2018washerwoman\u2019 appearance,\u201d Peerbaye recalls, \u201cthe brown-skinned washerwomen, back on the island, \/ standing up to their thighs in water, in saris.\u201d Thus, she links the sexist work assigned to Mauritian women with the racist violence that brown-skinned Virk suffered here.<\/p>\n Similarly, when Peerbaye uses the trial testimony of the two persons accused of Virk\u2019s murder, it makes her muse on her own life.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Go check Kelly\u2019s jacket,\u2019 said Warren. \u2018She said her jacket \/ reeked, like blood, like rotten fish.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Peerbaye remembers, \u201cI could feel the strangeness of standing inside a body \/ looking out\u2026. \/ I felt as though I were standing in a doorway \/ to myself, decoding \/ how to enter.\u201d<\/p>\n Tell is a powerful addition to the canon of Canadian true-crime, poetry texts. Look it up. All Alone at the End of the World<\/em> Basma Kavanagh\u2019s second full-length poetry collection is Niche (Frontenac House, $16). Herein the Brandon, Manitoba-based, N.S.-born poet imagines a world, wherein Nature tames humans and reclaims our inventions.<\/p>\n This radical, ecological sensibility\u2014rejecting the passive dying off of other creatures because of our pollutants, poisons, and greed\u2014is voiced immediately.<\/p>\n \u201cCall the caribou with miles of open bog, with strands and snarls of woods, \/ and no black roads to bar their wandering.\u201d Let Nature live, outlive, survive, all our tampering.<\/p>\n But Kavanagh also desires to preserve the small-scale and the local.<\/p>\n In \u201cHow to Skin a Hamlet,\u201d she imagines the killing off of a town: \u201cCut carefully through the skin, around the \/ butcher, the grocer, the tailor, the cobbler, just behind the polluted harbour. \/ Remove the railroad, the wharf, and all mature trees. Cut out the \/ reproductive organs and discard the guts, also any stray musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n The politics revisits E.F. Schumacher\u2019s Small Is Beautiful (1973), but also Rachel Carson\u2019s enviro manifesto, Silent Spring (1962). Kavanagh notes the influence of Campbell Hardy\u2019s Forest Life in Acadie (1869).<\/p>\n The poetry recalls Catherine Owen\u2019s powerful complaint against ecocide, The Wrecks of Eden (2002), but also hews to surrealism, or to touches of Dr. Seuss and\/or Richard Brautigan (think Trout Fishing in America [1967]).<\/p>\n \u201cIn April, at night, you watch for dark-shelled dinosaurs. They \/ climb the beach with the tides, you flip them if the waves turn them upside \/ down\u2026. \/\/ Soon, your heart will be red: rust red, mud red, lust red.\u201d<\/p>\n The prose-poem is a favoured device in Niche.<\/p>\n Free verse allows, though, for song: \u201cif we die, if we die, what dies with us? \/\/ Will earth be less without our books and huts, our thumbs and cars\u2026? \/\/ \u2026. Will all our relations come crowding back, \/\/ fill the gap when we leave? Will they grieve us, wish to be praised \/ and needed, their joyful, greedy, story-tellers finally speechless?\u201d<\/p>\n Decrying our \u201cgadget-rich gallop \/\/ to apocalypse,\u201d Niche is rage against the machine, and praise for Nature\u2019s sheen.<\/p>\n Lesley Choyce is not a daunting read. The New Jersey boy turned Nova Scotian Bohemian-surfer-bard-prof-back-to-the-land-publisher-wit is so gracious in spirit, so mellow in attitude, and so welcoming in tone, that he is daunting to review.<\/p>\n Not only does he merit kudos for his gentlemanliness, but his poetry is cheering and love-and-life-affirmative, even when there are rare hints of gloom. Above all, his words seem poignant, honed, and honest.<\/p>\n Full disclosure: Choyce published my first and third poetry books and my first anthology. However, I\u2019m reviewing All Alone at the End of the World (Extasis, $24) because it\u2019s a 2014 book and it\u2019s now early 2016. Too much time has passed\u2014too-quickly\u2014already.<\/p>\n So, to the point: Choyce\u2019s 86th book serves up once more his patented gifts. The neighbourly, disarming voice; the story-backed lyricism that elegizes the wistful\u2014and moving\u2014accounts of life\u2019s indelible passages; not to mention his humility in writing poetry that others might ignore.<\/p>\n As the book\u2019s title suggests, the poet, now in his sixties, is looking back at his life and looking forward to eternity (or oblivion), whatever its architecture.<\/p>\n The meditations sound as touchingly thoughtful as Alden Nowlan\u2019s poems, or as fantastically absurd as Brautigan\u2019s visions.<\/p>\n The first poem tells of the poet\u2019s tumble into a well: \u201cIf you were nearby watching, you would have seen \/ the head and shoulders of a man \/ whose expression clearly spoke of \/ his shock \/ at the decline \/ of all things, \/ his toes wriggling \/ in the cool spring water\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHindenburg Over Halifax\u201d chronicles the passage of the swastika-flagged airship over Halifax on July 4, 1936, and the awe of a Haligonian who will one day kill a soldier sporting \u201cthe same stark symbol emblazoned \/ on the drifting dirigible \/ above.\u201d<\/p>\n Glimpsing his late mother\u2019s \u201cfinal, lonely shoes,\u201d the poet visualizes his parents teaching him to walk: \u201cshe and my father holding the hands \/ of my tiny self \/ and urging my success \/ step by step \/ trying to prepare for a world \/ I was never quite ready for.\u201d<\/p>\n Choyce words again. Well-chosen words again. Good stuff!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiona Sampson\u2019s reputation is sunlight preceding her<\/strong>. Fiona Sampson\u2019s reputation is sunlight preceding her. The British poet has twice been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. Her poetry has been translated into more than 30 languages. She has been awarded the Cholmoneley Award, the Newdigate Prize, and the Zlaten Prsten prize of Macedonia, among others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2021,"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\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2124,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/2124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue21\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby Fiona Sampson
\nLondon, UK: Random House, 2016
\n80pp, $10.15<\/p>\n
\nby George Bowering
\nToronto, ON: Mansfield, 2013
\n115 pp, $17<\/p>\n
\nby Croc E. Moses
\nPretoria, SA: Unisa Press, 2015
\n64 pp, $20, with CD<\/p>\n
\n
\nJaney\u2019s Arcadia<\/em>
\nBy Rachel Zolf
\nToronto, ON: Coach House, 2014
\n136 pp, $16.51<\/p>\n
\nby Bruce Meyer
\nErin, ON: Porcupine\u2019s quill, 2014
\n128 pp, $19.00<\/p>\n
\nby Ian Fleming
\nUSA: Thomas & Mercer\/Amazon, 2013
\n250 pp, $15.00<\/p>\n
\nby Emanuele Taglietti
\nLondon, UK: Korero, 2016
\n160 pp, $36.00<\/p>\n
\n
\nSeven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac<\/em>
\nby Anna Yin
\nWindsor, ON: Black Moss, 2016
\n116 pp, $17.00<\/p>\n
\nby Chuan Sha
\nShijiangzhuang, China: Heibei Education Press, 2010
\n401 pp, \u00a3104.00; $213.00<\/p>\n
\nby Alice Major
\nEdmonton, AB: U of Alberta Press, 2015
\n164 pp, $20.00<\/p>\n
\nby Arthur Bull
\nToronto: Teksteditions
\n$17.00<\/p>\n
\n
\nThe Scarborough<\/em>
\nby Michael Lista
\nMontreal, QC: Vehicule, 2015
\n68 pp, $18.00<\/p>\n
\nby Jill Jorgenson
\nToronto, ON: Cormorant, 2014
\n96 pp, $18.00<\/p>\n
\nby Kim Trainor
\nLondon, ON: Brick, 2015
\n96 pp, $20.00<\/p>\n
\n
\nGeorgia and Alfred<\/em>
\nBy Keith Garebian
\nToronto, ON: Quattro, 2015
\n80 pp, $18.00<\/p>\n
\nby Bren Simmers
\nGibson, BC: Nightwood, 2015
\n96 pp, $19.00<\/p>\n
\nby Various, Maurice Whitman, Matt Baker
\nUSA: IDW, 2015
\n152 pp, $30.00<\/p>\n
\nBy Crystal Hurdle
\nToronto, ON: Tightrope, 2104
\n150 pp, $22.00<\/p>\n
\n
\n The Blind Man\u2019s Eyes: New and Selected Poetry<\/em>
\nby Rita Joe
\nSydney, NS: Breton Books
\n106 pp, $18.00<\/p>\n
\nby Pamela Mordecai
\nToronto, ON: Mawenzi, 2016
\n151 pp, $21.00<\/p>\n
\nby Soraya Peerbaye
\nSt. John, NL: Pedlar Press, 2015
\n100 pp, $20<\/p>\n
\n
\nNiche<\/em>
\nBy Basma Kavanagh
\nCalgary, AB: Frontenac, 2015
\n$16.00<\/p>\n
\nby Lesley Choyce
\nVictoria, BC: Extasis, 2014
\n90 pp, $24.00<\/p>\n