A Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing
the Poem
by Susan Ioannou
Wordwrights Canada, 2000
Reviewed by Richard Stevenson
This one will never replace Mary Kinzie’s A Poets Guide To
Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing,
University of Chicago Press, 1999) – the Cadillac in Prosody/Poetics
Academic Tomes – or classics like similar works by Fussell, Turco,
Skelton, Williams – but it is focused, clear, precise, concise, and
user-friendly, like the stalwart pocket text of Strunk and White, and
its approach is the same: give a few principles of composition --
examine the basics of prosody, image, rhythm, meter, rhyme, free verse
phrasing, etc. – give a little hard-won advice on style and rhetoric
– types of metaphor, rhetorical and cinematic strategies with image,
trope, mode; it even has advice and interesting speculation by practitioners
on sources of poetic inspiration and material; strategies
for breaking writer’s block, developing deeper, more complex voice and
style.
I like it a lot, and would heartily endorse it as a primer for almost
any level of poetry workshop: it’s well thought-out and the reader
gets lots of meat and potatoes, no inspirational fluff or flatus.
This book is lean and clean: it shows poet wannabes where to go and
how to get there; it doesn’t promote any ism or champion any
particular school or approach to literary criticism or the poem. It
gives the readers the foundations of Modernism; shows us what the
Imagists, Objectivists, Post-Modernists of various stripes have taught
us about linguistics, voice, line, variable foot, open form,
proprioceptive language calisthenics, etc. It illustrates with Modern
and contemporary Canadian examples.
What better way to get the student writing than to focus on
perception and language construction; to have the writer revel in the
plasticity of sound and image while pushing the connotative and
denotative meanings of words? This is a good book by a good poet and
perfectly-priced for the financially-strapped student. It is written in
a fresh, colloquial but precise prose style that demonstrates the
verities and virtues of which it speaks. The clockwork pinwheels of
metaphor glisten and spin throughout.
Richard Stevenson’s twelfth collection of
poetry, Live Evil: A Homage To Miles Davis (Thistledown Press,
2000), has just been published. He teaches Creative Writing, Canadian
Literature, and Business Communication at Lethbridge Community College
in southern Alberta. |
