These four
chapbooks may not represent the best contemporary Canadian poetry,
but they do represent the determination of poets to be heard -
despite the general public's blanket indifference. They also represent
the subtle variety of voices of the next generation of Canadian
poets.
In this forth
chapbook, if I could be a bird i'd be a cat (his first
three were reviewed in DR
1.2), Jason Gallagher repeats his common themes and delivers
them with trademark wit and honesty. Writing in the Bukowski tradition,
Gallagher's poems often seem like simple reporting, like a simple
collection of observed facts, but they are generously more. Journalism
requires a "news angle"; poems something different.
Gallagher knows this instinctively, and his poems provide it -
this extra element, the tonal shifts that lift observations into
art.
if I could
be a bird i'd be a cat also sees Gallagher move bravely into
deeper thematic territory. Specifically, there are poems here
about a not-so-pleasant childhood and the narrator's re-evaluation
of that childhood through confronting memory and maturity. This
movement is encouraging for the future direction of Gallagher's
art. He has a fine base of gritty realism, and he is learning
to use that base as the foundation for his imagination's expansion.
Jennifer LoveGrove's
The Scorpion Wife is a chapbook of a single poem, which
contains one verse per page and one illustration per verse. In
the most basic terms, "The Scorpion Wife" is narrative
poem about a narrator who takes a bath, gets surrounded by scorpions,
then turns into a scorpion. Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
is an obvious precursor. The poem itself initially eluded me,
and I remain uncertain that I "get it." However, let's
just say the poem borrows some of Kafka's paranoia which it mixes
with more than a dash of surrealism. The book is finely made -
a true artistic production.
In Nitty
Gritty: The Film Noir Poems, Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg constructs
a sequence of poems around some of Hollywood's silver screen classics,
Double Indemnity, Rear Window, The Maltese Falcon and To Have
and Have Not. The results are both a tribute to a bygone era and
a satirical look at the sharp lines that era drew around gender
relations. Most of these poems, which glitter with humour, have
sex as their foundation, but it is a breezy sex, coated with the
decorum of lingering stares and sly innuendo. The final poem answers
the question "Why is it always night (and almost always raining)?":
"Because otherwise you would think/ that everything was not
evil under the moon." The tone here, as throughout this chapbook
is pitch perfect and delicious. Yum.
Finally, Harvest
by Hopi Martin is a nuanced collection of poems by a recent University
of Toronto graduate. As the title suggests, these are poems with
a special interest in landscape and loss. The poems are mostly
free verse (there are some haiku), and the landscape ranges from
northern Ontario to the Himalayas. Strong first poems from a poet
in motion.
Copies
of if I could be a bird i'd be a cat can be ordered by
writing Jason Gallagher at 57 Marie Anne W., Montreal, PQ - H2W
1B7.
Copies
of The Scorpion Wife can be ordered from Wayward Armadillo
Press at #2-95 Tyndall Ave. Toronto, ON - M6K 2G1.
Links
to Thirteenth Tiger Press and Junction Books are
provided above.
|