|
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, 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.
|
