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Letter to TDR
Subject: Shane
Neilson's review of After Acorn
July 2000
Dear Danforth Review:
Thank you for publishing a review of my chap-book collection of short pieces,
AFTER ACORN. I want, however, to point out a couple of errors I think your reviewer,
Shane Neilson, makes, and also to note a couple of things he ought to have mentioned.
Mr. Neilson accuses me of using bad grammar, and of failing to identify properly
the memorial anthology from which I quote in the essay "Acorn Absorbed."
The examples he gives of the first fault are not grammatical errors, although
the sentences may qualify as "turgid prose" in Mr. Neilson's book.
As to the second, the title of the book I'm quoting from in the first section
of "Acorn Absorbed" forms the first four words of the first sentence
of the essay.
Mr. Neilson does not say so, but the pieces gathered together in AFTER ACORN
are book reviews, talks, and short meditations, and the whole in no way purports
to be a full scholarly treatment of either Milton Acorn or his works, in competition
with the books of Ed Jewinski, Richard Lemm, or others, as Mr. Neilson seems
to imply. Additionally, I make it very clear that the initial inspiration for
many of the themes developed in the chap-book was a series of conversations
I had with the poet between 1974 and shortly before his death, a fact Mr. Neilson
also fails to report. These omissions may not be "unforgivable" sins
against the spirit of book-reviewing, but they do, perhaps, constitute a violation
of one of its chief canons; i.e., the duty of informing potential readers of
what is in a book.
- Terry Barker, Willowdale, ON
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