Scouts Are Cancelled: The Annapolis Valley Poems
by John Stiles
Insomniac Press, 2003
Reviewed by Darren Greer
Strawberry suppers.
A girl with her hair caught in the gears of a Ferris
Wheel.
A wheelbarrow full of gourds.
A white hen running through a field of corn.
These are some of the images from John Stiles debut
book of poetry, SCOUTS
ARE CANCELLED: The Annapolis Valley Poems (Insomniac
Press, 2002.). SCOUTS
ARE CANCELLED is a linked series of narrative poems
written in the
first-person by characters living in small town, rural
Nova Scotia. Each
poem is rich in Maritime idiom and imagery, and heavily
seasoned with
obscure local phrases such as "dumb as a sackful of a
hammers," "give 'er,
Jimmy" and "sumpin' fierce." Stiles use of rural
maritime dialect rings
true, and his images are clear and crisp, as he tells
the story of a greedy
land developer turning a local farm into a subdivision.
The collection's
strength lies not in the story, however, but the
depictions of rural
Maritime life, relayed in the often amusing, and
sometimes profound voices
of the local residents. The two voices most often
employed in the book are
Selby and Lio, teen-age boys whose no-holds-barred
gossip and ruminations
give an entertaining account of the private doings and
going-ons of their
neighbours. At its best, the collection is reminiscent
of Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology, and in the tradition of such
writers as Masters and
Faulkner, Stiles manages to imbue his collection with a
sense of the
universal under the alternating
banal/bizarre descriptions of
small town life.
SCOUTS ARE CANCELLED also contains one short story, "Me
an' Lio", which is
again narrated by Selby, though the use of vernacular
doesn't come off as
well here, and you get lost in the rambling, narrative
prose style. It is
the poems themselves, chock-full of idiom and incident
and a
straight-forward, everyman's lyricism, that linger and
resonate.
Darren Greer is a Nova Scotia-born writer living in
Toronto. His newest
novel, Still Life with June, has just been released by
Cormorant Books.
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