<\/p>\n
Anglo-Canadian poetry is, practically by definition, the work of the \u00fcber-literate, the over-educated, the extraordinarily degreed and\/or extra-doctorated, of the royally highest & most majestic I.Q.\u2019d, those who are Mensa Super-Elite, those most tartly, archly post-Modernist and ironically avant-garde, and those whose cunning linguist pursuits are most punning, most recherch\u00e9. English-Canadian poets tend to be highfalutin high-flyers, launched from the lightning rods of Ivory Towers, and winged with asterisks, end-notes, epigraphs, footnotes, glossaries, lexicons, and letters preceding and trailing their names. Woe unto the illiterate who may chance to open one of our so, so esoteric, mysterious texts, where jouissance\u2014the joy of intersects\u2014is hypens intercoursing with colons!<\/p>\n
Truly, Bruce Meyer belongs in that number, that elect grouping of Anglo-Can poets, who are bluestockings (women) and men-o-letters; I mean, the intelligentsia of the literati. Such poets are also archaeologists, economists, historians, poli-sci talking-heads, and, fundamentally, polymaths\u2014iconoclastically elastic in their vocabulary, forked-tongue with French, double-talkin in Latin, and sometimes tossin in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, just to show off their ambidexterity in classicist, tongue-twistin sayin. (Think of B\u00f6k, Bringhurst, Carson, W. Compton, Fetherling-as-a-redoubtable-archivist, Klein, MacEwen-as-a-linguistic-cabalist, NourbeSe Philip, Wah, Zolf\u2014just for starters).<\/p>\n
Yep, Meyer is one of the above: Erudite, a Mr. Know-It-All, a Dilton Doily \/ Hal 9000 \/ Brainiac, who\u2019s read all the classics, the best books by the best writers, and felt perfectly able to write alongside the very best of the very best because he\u2019s absorbed\u2014digested\u2014the International English canon (including central works in translation\u2014Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Li Po, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, etc.). Indeed, sensibly, the poet\u2019s home is a library\u2014by design. (I do not exaggerate; Meyer does not have a \u201chome library\u201d or a study where he keeps his books: In radical stead, his house is a library; he and his family live with and among books in a home-made cathedral of literature.) So, Meyer\u2019s authored more than 60 books\u2014with aplomb, with swiftness plus accuracy (like an Olympic, gold-medal archer\u2014able to hit the bull\u2019s-eye, no matter how daunting the odds). A third of that number consists of poetry, the questionably best of the select poems collected herein.<\/p>\n
I say \u201cquestionably\u201d because I\u2019m sure that this book could be at least twice its size without Meyer or any editor having to relax his most exacting standards. He\u2019s a consummate poet, a poet\u2019s poet, and his gift is evident in his unparalleled ability to ransack multiple, mental dictionaries for le mot juste and slot em in place to produce the precise image or indisputable proverb. These closing lines from \u201cCold Storage Beach\u201d are one example:<\/p>\n
Cold Storage Beach,<\/p>\n
named, accidentally, for an old warehouse
\nwhich stood at the mouth of Sesuit Harbour<\/p>\n
and vanished, timelessly, into nowhere but a word,
\nwritten down, part of a memory, but otherwise lost.<\/p>\n
Like George Fetherling, a collector of facts, Did-you-know artifacts, and Believe-it-or-not odds-and-ends, Meyer is also an encyclopedic anthologist. He appreciates profoundly, as he writes in another poem herein, \u201cOne good story or we are lost.\u201d Amen: No civilization can last without a store of commonly held stories, whether theological or historical\/political. Thus, Canadians cannot be Canadian without the sagas of Riel, Secord, Tecumseh\u2014or Tubman (first name: Harriet\u2014in case you\u2019re wondering).<\/p>\n
But that sentence also refers us, I wager, to the English poet who is most like Meyer, in my estimation, namely, Robert Graves (1895-1985). Recall his signature opening to his signature poem, \u201cTo Juan at the Winter Solstice\u201d: \u201cThere is one story and one story only \/ That is worth your telling\u2026.\u201d For Meyer, that \u201cone good story\u201d is, in his poetry, the result of dreams, of dreaming: All recurrent practices for this poet just as those two words themselves recur incessantly among his poems. For all of his intellectual gifts of explication, analysis, choice diction, and historical reconstruction, Meyer is also a poet of sensuality, of image: \u201cdawn breaking is a phrase \/ for dew upon weeping fields.\u201d He states his inheritance\u2014and legacy\u2014succinctly in these lines: \u201cjust being and dreaming \u2014 was there \/ any profession other poetry to place \/ a value on staring straight ahead[?]\u201d Elsewhere he declares his commitment \u201cto be part of dreams and poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps it\u2019s due to dream and dreaming that this poet, for all of his introvert introspection and individualist walkabouts, solitary in the dictionary or solo on the road, and that, for all his schoolin, he is not obscure. Take note of his nouns: They\u2019re so elemental\u2014rain, sun, bread, wine\u2014that they do not become ornamental (as is often the case in Dylan Thomas and Thomas Merton), but, instead, open up to the sentimental:<\/p>\n
I shall spend an evening drinking whisky
\nby fire beneath the crumbling stars,
\nand in that moment retrieve what echoingly
\nonce was human and should still be ours.<\/p>\n
(Also note that Meyer goes easy on the adjectives: He likes to let nouns be nakedly and patently themselves, without a whole lot of fine-tuning or detailing.) And so the new humanist\u2014the classicist\u2014is most satisfyingly human, humane, humanitarian, the lover as house-husband:<\/p>\n
Let us remember the mercy of fresh bread,
\nhow it called to us in our imaginations
\neven after it ceased to be and lived on inside.<\/p>\n
I should not belabour any Meyer echoes or mirrorings of Graves, save that our poet\u2019s phrase, about \u201clanguage \/ voweling with a joy\u201d (in \u201cDandelion Wine\u201d), may remind one of Graves\u2019s \u201ccool web of language\u201d (in \u201cThe Cool Web\u201d). There\u2019s that, but, also like Graves, Meyer is a poet accomplished in meeting the constraints of formalism (couplets, epigrams, ghazals, glosas, quatrains, sestinas, sonnets, vers libre), relishing the game playing and chance taking that rhyme, metre, and\/or stanza form dictate.<\/p>\n
Meyer is also skilled at rhetoric (\u201clying\u201d is how Irving Layton defines this craft):<\/p>\n
Ours shall be a story of misgivings and belief,
\na moment in the lives of strangers where one look,
\none gesture of reassurance would have meant forever\u2026.<\/p>\n
But that linguistic facility, the reverence for etymology (the DNA of words, the soul of literature), Meyer\u2019s Poundian pursuit of cheng ming (righteous terminology) adds to, does not detract from, the passion of the adoration.<\/p>\n
This foreword was supposed to be brief; and it is\u2014if held in comparison with the longevity of Meyer\u2019s art. He is not a flashy poet; but he is also no flash-in-the-pan. His poetry is the fulfillment of his keeping \u201cthe record of small things still possible \/ because they exist and are stronger than time.\u201d I believe that these poems hold such permanent strength.<\/p>\n
I end on a personal memory. Living in Toronto in the winter of 1983, completing what would become my first book of poetry, I made the rounds of various poets\u2019 circles and readings series. The one gathering where I was welcomed, heartily, was the one headed up by Bruce Meyer. I have to say this: He is an excellent poet, an exceptional poet, and an unstintingly generous, fraternal maker.<\/p>\n
Hear Now Alyssa Flint!<\/p>\n
An alphabet is letters held in control\u2014ranked and ordered, as if set in stone\u2014or wooden blocks. But not this Alphabet! Alyssa Flint smashes open the alphabet to let the individual letters kick off anxious blues, confessions, catalogues, denunciations, elucidations, fatalist guffaws, groans, hallucinations, indignant jokes, kerfuffles, lawyerly mumbles, nit-picking opinions, pontifications, querulous raps, sassy tantrums, unhappy valentines, woeful xxx, yapping zingers. Amen, eh?<\/p>\n
She\u2019s talkin at ya, philosophizin, tellin it like it is, tellin someone off, like a righteous tattle-tale. She\u2019s bearin witness about everything she can\u2019t bear anymore. And she don\u2019t care if you\u2019s offended!<\/p>\n
Her art? Spoke Word? Yessum. I mean the art of the non-stop revelation, the unfurlin Truth.<\/p>\n
She come at ya with raw news, the flow that\u2019s volcanic, the spew that\u2019s blazing as fire and brimstone. Cos her heart hurts.<\/p>\n
These poems be the fact of heartbreak, of nervous breakdown, of broken promises, of broken bones, outta broken home. The lines are lacerations, scratches, gashes, wounds. The words are blood drops\u2014straight outta the weak flesh of the heart, the lumpy folds of the brain.<\/p>\n
Here be a woman\u2019s witness of troubled girlhood, of lousy fatherhood, of a flawed mother, of evil lovers. There are allegations of abuse, insinuations of sins. The horrid facts of torturous life.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t just read this book! No! The poems are hammer-and-chisel, cutting into your heart, carving into your brain.<\/p>\n
Alphabet\u2019s gonna either change you\u2014or derange you, Africadian\u2014or would-be Africadian! Word up, y\u2019all!<\/p>\n
Richard Atkinson [with Joe Fiorito]. The Life Crimes and Hard Times of Ricky Atkinson: Leader of the Dirty Tricks Gang, A True Story. Exile Editions.<\/p>\n
Crime is terrible, traumatizing, terrifying. But True Crime is mesmerizing. That\u2019s likely why the wily straight-shooter Joe Firoto has teamed up with the Africadian\/Afro-M\u00e9tis once-upon-a-time, bank-robbing, risk-and-reward trickster Ricky Atkinson. This life story is irresistible; it\u2019s as sprightly as a slot-machine coin cascade and as irrepressible as a dude sprung from Sing-Sing or Kingston Pen. This book gives you the low-down on the High Life, the up-and-up on the low-lifes, the poop on the high muckamucks, and the scoop about the down-and-dirty, but never down-and-out. Canada\u2019s most successful bank-robber (though he\u2019s spent half his life behind bars), Atkinson is a charming rogue\u2014and the inventor of the \u201cspike-belt,\u201d which he used to hobble police pursuit. But is now used by police forces everywhere to blow the tires of speeding, suspect vehicles. Atkinson was also a Black Panther Party acolyte, as well as a pugilist. His life story runs along lines similar to That of Malcolm X\u2026.<\/p>\n
Harriet Bernstein. Irving Layton: Our Years Together. Inanna Publications.<\/p>\n
Harriet Bernstein’s memoir of her impetuous and tempestuous love affair with dynamic and deathless poet Irving Layton (1912-2006) is not only the record of a December-May romance (he was 62 and she only 26 when their amour began). It’s also mythic: Venus wooed by Vesuvius
\nin-the-flesh. After an ephemeral marriage to Stephen Shuster (son of the TV actor and comedian Frank Shuster), Bernstein became the lover of and inspiration to Spanish Flamenco master Antonio Vargas and to Italian \u201cspaghetti western,\u201d screenwriting legend Luciano Vincenzoni. But when “destiny”denied these passions, Bernstein developed what turned out to be a 7-year-long yen for Layton, 1974-81, which saw her serve as erotic Muse, publicity impresario, homemaking helpmate, and then, lastly, mother to their daughter, Samantha, herself a a writer and poet. Bernstein portrays Layton as a volcanic figure, spewing ink, spunk, and piss-and- vinegar, all to defend vigorous affections and militant opinions. He appears in these vivid pages as an irascible, cantankerous, lusty, would-be Ubermensch, all Mediterranean chutzpah and cojones, a sun-besotted, Byron, Hebraic, and as shameless as light. For her part, Bernstein loved that Nietzsche-spouting Apollo too well, not wisely, and finds herself grieving, endlessly, Layton’s endless preoccupation with his supposed ex, Aviva. In their sojourns about the Mediterranean\u2014Italy and Israel\u2014and the Americas\u2014St. Lucia and Mexico, Bernstein recalls, via colourful diary jottings, the births of Layton’s poems and books\u2014usually on a balcony overlooking a beach, and records also his frenetic pursuit of Nobel Prize laurels. Bernstein writes compellingly this page-turner of a memoir, conjuring up her flower-power, ban-the-bomb, and burn-the-bra young womanhood in Toronto and Boston, but also those idyllic Greek islands where Leonard Cohen would drop by, all wry and ironic and sipping retsina. Not only is Bernstein a vital witness to that most vital poet, Layton, his gusto and genius, she is also the chronicler of that era\u2014the 1970s\u2014when women were becoming feminists and English-Canadians were beginning to believe that they could truly be Nobel-global poets and filmmakers of Oscar-award consequence. For me, she herself becomes a kind of reverse-Elizabeth Smart, that Canuck woman writer who gave seemingly all of herself to the British poet George Barker. No, Harriet Bernstein always maintained a core independence from Layton, despite loving him indelibly, and this remains her own radiant, intellectual beauty, everywhere enlightening this sometimes tearful, and always wistful saga.<\/p>\n
Laurie Anne Fuhr. Night Flying. Frontenac House Poetry.<\/p>\n
This lyric collection scrutinizes the automatic surrealism of everyday life where \u201cdads turn into each other \/ trying to be Eastwood in civvies.\u201d The weirdness of the diurnal isn\u2019t expressed via whimsy, but is the result of acute perception: \u201ccarbon-copy suns sink through identical stormdoor windows.\u201d The attitude of the persona? She\u2019s a kind of gimlet-eyed ee cummings, chronicling and pinpointing painful absurdities and excruciating pleasures.<\/p>\n
Chantal Gibson. How She Read. Caitlin Press.<\/p>\n
How She Read is no subsidiary diary, but the output of an insurrectionist, a Black (Canadian\/Africadian) Woman who taketh the alphabet apart, who breaketh Imperialists into wimps, whimpering. Gibson is also a critical reader of visual art, and she reproduces full-colour canvasses of Black women\u2014by European \u201cmasters\u201d (get the pun)\u2014to tease out the insidious narratives of sexism and racism. But she also includes black-and-white photos of relatives and of Harriet Tubman\u2014General Moses\u2014to hail their resistive identities and purposes. Gibson\u2019s experimentalism recalls M. NourbeSe Philip.<\/p>\n
Erwan Larher. The Book I Didn\u2019t Want to Write. Locarno Press.<\/p>\n
The Book I Didn\u2019t Want to Write is the book that you must read, to better comprehend the epochal horror that unfolded at the Bataclan nightclub, Paris, when more than 120 rock-concert revelers were massacred by ISIS terrorists on November 13, 2015. A survivor of the attack, Erwan Larher uses his talent as a novelist to present a non-fiction account of the awful; to narrate fear, courage, chance, and fate; to take up the prose style of Don DeLillo and the poetic of Charles Baudelaire; and to note that \u201creality\u201d balks at news-cycle analyses, which are always on the outside looking in, always superficial. Larher is relentlessly soul-baring and truth-excavating in exploring how terrorism is both \u201cindividual ordeal\u201d and \u201ccollective shock,\u201d but also in discovering that surviving such a trauma challenged him to bear authentic witness. Larher balances his own probing thoughts with the responses of others-friends and family who share a social tragedy that has scarred all of their lives and liberties, just as it has injured all ours.<\/p>\n
Thomas Leduc. Slagflower: Poems Unearthed from a Mining Town. Latitude 46 Publishing.<\/p>\n
This debut collection of poetry from Thomas Leduc, the former Poet Laureate of the City of Greater Sudbury (Ontario), and who is himself the 4th-generation member of a mining family. This poetry ain\u2019t strip-mined, but is rooted in earth, hearth, and heart. In Slagflower, the poet retrieves true grit, the honest nugget (no fool\u2019s gold), and diamonds that are actually squeezed out of coal. Leduc is so skilled at heavy lifting, his touch is deft. You almost don\u2019t notice the toil\u2014the hard work of making\u2014that\u2019s produced this art, this sculpted masterpiece.<\/p>\n
Giovanna Riccio. Plastic\u2019s Republic: Featuring the Barbie Suite. Guernica Editions.<\/p>\n
In her third collection of poetry, Giovanna Riccio has written a tour-de-force of undeniable genius. Exploring\u2014interrogating\u2014the everywhere-at-once presence and everything-possible nature of plastic, Riccio riffs on Plato\u2019s Republic to examine, in \u201cThe Barbie Suite,\u201d the iconic \u201ci-doll\u201d whose global name-recognition is second only to God. If Mattel masterminded, in 1959, a bitch-goddess of a doll, with breasts that are accoutrements for, and arched feet that are no impediment to, High Fashion, so now does Riccio apply her own unconditional critique-in-verse, to break Barbie out of the mummification of her marketing, but also out of the stagnant, feminist pontificating that sees her standing as fallible as a pawn. Riccio answers the \u201cplastication\u201d of femininity with her own sardonic feminism, her own Platonic panache, to remind us that Barbie is so central a symbol that some human beings play dress up\u2014via plastic surgery\u2014to become as \u201cperfect\u201d as is the doll. Quirky, philosophical, and adventurous in form, Plastic\u2019s Republic is as avant-garde as an haute-couture runway and as cutting-edge as a surgeon\u2019s scalpel. Riccio deals effortlessly and yet forensically with subjects ranging from sexualization (\u201cdollification\u201d) of girls and subsequent (sexual) assault; body-image issues; plastic surgery; the mania for sex dolls; and plastic contamination of the oceans. This collection is one of the go-to must-reads of this century.<\/p>\n
E. Russell Smith. Bring Me My Arrows: Poems tracing the spectrum between doubt and certainty. E. Russell Smith.<\/p>\n
E. Russell Smith Anglo-Canadianizes\u2014domesticates\u2014audaciously the queries and quandaries of T.S. Eliot\u2019s Four Quartets, updating and relocating its metaphysical and theological concerns for our era and locales. From his Ottawa abode to ventures abroad and about, Smith reveals resonances between Scripture and the world, and expresses rapture in The Word, words, bird-watching, and other pastimes. Thus, a Good Friday visit to Peggy\u2019s Cove (NS), site of the September 1998 Swissair 111 crash, occasions this witness: \u201cThe whole Atlantic heaves and breaks \/ against this treeless Golgotha, \/ rooted in that relentless sea. \/ Centuries of ice and baptism \/ gloss old faults to minor hazards \/ crisscrossed like cracked porcelain.\u201d Smith\u2019s verse is quiet-toned, introspective, and confident in Art\u2014even when Doubt is admitted. And the collection is self-published, which is also a statement of faith.<\/p>\n
Eleni Zisimatos. Nearly Terminal. DC Books.<\/p>\n
Eleni Zisimatos opens Nearly Terminal with a Dantean warning: \u201cThe death of human consciousness is white.\u201d Yes, to venture onto these imposing white pages is to navigate a blinding snowscape where words are the sparse objects that poke out of the drifts, like inukshuks, suggesting directions and meanings that are impossible to pinpoint, to pin down, because they are jests of gestures, as revealing in their amplitude as are \u201cCut up clouds.\u201d Nearly Terminal recalls Dame Atwood\u2019s Journals of Susanna Moodie, but also John Thompson\u2019s barely there ghazals, all that blank space Blitzkrieg\u2019d by incandescent inklings, those dark flashes of insight amid the vacant, Arctic desert of \u201cSuch white,\u201d \u201cmuch despair,\u201d where winter means erasure, \u201ca white eclipse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fiction Reviews<\/strong>
\nA Samurai\u2019s Pink House<\/em>
\nThe Samurai is often associated with honour, courage, aristocracy\u2014and violence too. Being the military high men in feudal Japan, Samurais were bound to a strict code of conduct, the Bushido, literally meaning \u2018the way of the warrior\u2019. Their idealized behaviour demanded from them a bravery and a perfection where the softness of the emotions, those intelligences that want to exit the body-politic and its calcified duty, to break the cords that insist on keeping us tied down, could not be fully exposed, only occasionally allowed in acts of kindness and compassion expressed toward the \u2018weak\u2019 of society. Restraint and measure were the ways. Perhaps A Samurai\u2019s Pink House is about restraint and the measured ways too, albeit in a different fashion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3703,"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":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2217"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3954,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions\/3954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}