Simple Master
by Alice Burdick
Pedlar Press, 2002
The Human About Us
by Alice Burdick
BookThug, 2002
review by rob mclennan
Toronto born and bred Alice Burdick continues her forays into the small presses with two concurrent publications: the full-sized poetry
collection, Simple Master (Toronto: Pedlar Press) and the chapbook, The
Human About Us (Toronto: BookThug, c/o 33 Webb Ave., Toronto M6P 1M4).
After small and smaller publications for some time, including
previous chapbooks by Victor Coleman's The Eternal Network (Burdick was also an
editor there at the time), Nicky Drumbolis' Letters, and Stuart Ross' Proper Tales Press,
Simple Master, edited for the press by Ross, is Burdick's first full-sized collection.
It's easy to see the appeal, in poems with sexual and surreal edge, as she glides
slipshod through meanings and images, as in the poem "Space
Program" - "With the right crutch / at the right time, / you too can insert / your fingers into science / and come up with Answers!" (p 17).
Hardly passive, her pieces are certain poems of uncertainty, and
graspin, graceful lunges into sticky places, filled with questions and statements,
including "A museum is what you make it. / Ask any missionary." (p 30, "Archives
1"), or "Are you a listless woman who plans / and planes off
faith and hope with each false smile?" (p 36, "Giving Chase").
Her long piece in the middle of the book, "Spadina Way", is a localized symphony of noises, with all the coherence of a
ghazal, where meaning is less the issue than experience. In thirty-two stanzas, the only
thread is the loose-told location of the story, with its urban drawl, cabs and b-girls: "A cold wind blows down Spadina today. Straw baskets / and
prisoner-made plastic utensil must be tied down gently but firmly / with shiny pink ribbons, looped into bows. I swear I saw / three rabbis eat
spring rolls, with relish." (p 41). Unfortunately, with the length of the piece, the poem seems to wander a bit too much, starting to unravel after
a while. Burdick's strength comes in shorter, more focused bits, as in the piece "The
Floods": "Wild destroyer of grey skies. / The cloud washer is
always here / by me, above me, looking at us." (p 89).
In poems filled with weird puns and language alterations, such as "Donkey
Hotey" (p 43, "Spadina Way") and "Met, uh, four" (p 79, "Polly Ticks"), Burdick's writing can easily be seen as an
extension of the
Toronto surrealists that began to flourish in the 1980's, writers such as Kevin Connolly, Gary Barwin, Lillian Necakov and Stuart Ross, or even
earlier, to David W. McFadden and Victor Coleman. "Let's wear helmets for protection, / and use no lubrication. / It's raining so hard / the
blossoms bloom, then boom! hit the cement. / The young and old alike eat rice." (p 81, "Man-Sized Field Goal").
In the chapbook The Human About Us, published by Jay MillAr's
BookThug, Burdick's poems change their focus to more human qualities, and are far tighter poems, leading to the conclusion that this is more recent
work than Simple Master. "We sound like monkeys, / but we have a lot of the human about us. / It is a strange happiness / when we lie down and
hear words" (unpaginated, "The Human About Us"). In these, Burdick's wanderings are less loose, more deliberate, with much stronger lines and
breaks, talking of sharing DNA with rats and the sun, and what to do with bad men, with the same threads of
weird imagery and doom saying. "The church was built in one day. / But not the bodies." (unpaginated, "How
Pleasant It Is"). I like the direction Burdick is going in; unfortunately for Simple
Master, the strength and cohesion of
The Human About Us only announces the lack of it in her full-sized book, made up of
(seeminly) smaller bits. Hopefully her recent move to Halifax will give a second
collection that cohesion, perhaps even with poems involving water, ducks and other innocent things, twisted slightly in that lovely Burdick way.
rob mclennan: poet/editor/pub. ... ed. STANZAS mag & side/lines: a new canadian poetics
(Insomniac)...pub., above/ground press ...coord., Small Press Action Network - Ottawa (SPAN-O) ...snail c/o rr#1 maxville ontario canada k0c 1t0
www.track0.com/rob_mclennan * 7th coll'n - paper hotel (Broken Jaw
Press)
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