Poetry
Reviews
Part of TDR’s Behemoth
Gargantuan Canadian Poetry in Review
Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century
edited by Roger Farr
Capilano University Editions
One of the first publications in the new CUE Books series (Capilano University Editions, out of The Capilano Review) is the anthology
Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by Roger Farr. Meant to be the first third in a larger project, the first two feature poetry, and the third, to feature poetic statements by writers featured in the first two volumes, all of whom have appeared as part of the ongoing Open Text Reading Series hosted by the Creative Writing Program at Capilano University (nee Capilano College) in Vancouver. As editor Farr writes in his introduction:
Editing an anthology of contemporary avant-garde poetry is an inherently risky undertaking as the criteria one invokes in collecting the work are often destabilized by the works themselves. This is especially true when such writing is yoked together under the sign of an apparently shared national identity. I have always thought there should be a fallacy named after the practice of identifying a body of writing with the state-formation that governs its authors. Echoing Charles Bernstein’s observations about “poetic voice,” I would argue that when it comes to poetry and poetics, any alleged quality of “Canadian-ness” is merely a possibility, or an affect—not an essence. So while
Open Text is indeed a collection of poetry by Canadian citizens, it is not a collection of “Canadian Poetry,” and makes no attempt to stake a claim for a “New Canon” or even a “New Poetics” on that territory.
A list of the contributors to this volume, working an interesting range of geography and style, include Annharte, Oana Avasilichioaei, George Bowering, Rob Budde, Louis Cabri, Peter Culley, Jeff Derksen, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Maxine Gadd, Claire Huot & Robert Majzels, Larissa Lai, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Jamie Reid, Darren Wershler, Lissa Wolsak and Rita Wong.
There have been a number of interesting publishing enterprises to start up lately, and this certainly isn’t the first to come out of a journal (Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, for example, the longest running independent publishing house in the country (according to their own claim) came out of Fiddlehead Poetry Books and The Fiddlehead), with recent forays into publishing for West Coast Line bringing LineBooks (and finally, an available backlist for Michael Barnholden’s Tsunami Editions) and Snare Books out of Montreal’s Matrix magazine.
And considering all the years that parts of the west coast avant-garde felt a closed group, now there’s no way to complain of a lack of opportunity. With all these enterprises popping up across the country, could they do anything but enrich?
-rob mclennan
Taking Shape
by Edward Carson
The Porcupine’s Quill
Love, as shaped by the wind and the movement of the earth, is the theme of Carson’s poetry in this book. He explores the nature of love and its manifestations, both personal and general, through metaphor and experience. He does it thoughtfully, philosophically, and with extraordinary delicacy of language.
He understands that, with love:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX…. There is much
more to learn, and more than we know to
leave behind,
but knowing very little, we urge on this
new thought
of the gathering wind and the shape of it
all around us.
p.9
What is known is never enough, therefore it is left behind in order to pursue new thoughts of love which, like the wind, is only visible by what it touches. The wind as a metaphor for love is prevalent in these couplets, how it takes ‘its shape from all it greets …// a makeshift voice …’ (p.9)
Carson gives no simple answer to the shape or essence of love, rather suggests that there is
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX… only the faint
shape of things taking shape, the simple
proof of slow
continents reaching out to meet another,
touching for the first time.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX… This time
around we will break away from one shape,
only to find another.
p.11
The gradual recognition of love between two people is revealed as a shift of land-masses, the geology of relationships that move in an eternal dance, ‘a shifting// of thought.’ (p.13) Unlike Shakespeare who, in his 116th sonnet, says that ‘Love alters not with [Time’s] brief hours and weeks’, Carson says that
XXXXXXXXXX.. the speed of that
XXXXXXXXXXtransformation is so
fast, yet so slow, that the thing that it
is
and the thing it becomes, begin and end
together.
….
The trick is to be so still that no one
knows we’re moving.
p.28
Time is relative, love moving with lightning speed and yet with a gradual coming together.
Carson’s vocabulary is simple but precise, leading the reader to ponder deeply of the nature of love for themselves. In ‘The more real// our love seems, the more misleading it must be.’ (p.13) he states the paradox of the relationship of love, that it is real to the lover, yet it often leads to false conclusions, to seeing the world through the clichéd rose-coloured glasses.
He understands quixotic love, that it is ‘a geometry of thinking and doing’ (p.27), that thinking of the beloved is to respond to the beloved. He goes on to say ‘My winter comes out of me and brims to the full,// leans over to give you a kiss whole square and deep.’ (p.27), i.e. that his inner coldness erupts, overflows, and bestows the warmth of spring through love.
The endless paradoxes of love are the subject of these poems, the slow growth, swift passion, the known response, unknown dimension:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX… Some things are made to
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXbe
something opposite and true, made to be
one thing after another,
again and again, some love that is now,
and some that is not.
p.37
Fortunately, Carson does not seek for a final answer but leaves the reader
with knowledge shared and insights gained, ‘We learn to be the sum and minus of this story,// the uncertain edge in the shape of things to come.’ (p.45) We learn as two lovers to be the total, and as individuals to be less than a couple, with the future unknown.
Taking Shape is poetry to be treasured, savored, read, and re-read, a gift to the lover and the loved.
-Joanna M. Weston
Suddenly, So Much
by Sandy Shreve
Exile Editions
XXXXXXXXXX…A Douglas fir rises into the silence, exhales
the resin scent of a permanent wound—its ridged bark
worn away by bears
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwho approach this tree, step
by measured step, sink into a lineage of tracks…
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXobserve the meticulous ritual,
then scratch their backs…
XXXXXXXXXXa hint of wonder in this place,
a mysterious ursine way preserved in these huge prints,
as if the bears must honor
XXXXXXXXXXthose who have gone before
Ritual, precision, wildness, wonder—these are the means by which Sandy Shreve finds new power in her fourth collection of poems,
Suddenly, So Much. Improvising upon the ‘measured step’ of forms such as the pantoum, triolet and sonnet, and techniques such as deep indentation in “Footsteps,” excerpted above, she creates time-shifting, wonder-inducing effects.
In some poets’ work, formal structure and technique can force and weaken content. In Shreve’s work, however, sonnets rhyme subtly, haikus flow and free verse shows off a sinuous lyricism made possible by assonance, consonance and breathless enjambment: ‘Something as simple as an orange/ exposed./ One curlicue strip/ tease of peel, voluptuous/ fruit, flamboyant on foil,/ chrome light soaked with this/ disrobing.
Even the crystal goblet/ sweats…’ These lines from “For the Love of These Oranges,” an homage to the painter Mary Pratt, achieve the same liquidity of light-on-glass for which the painter is famous.
Sometimes Shreve sways like a heron on a black branch ‘at the edge of a bleak and moonless future filled/ with a nightmare menace,’ yet somehow regains her ‘precarious balance, holding onto hope.’ In most of the poems on this theme, hope is found by looking again, feeling again after a period of numbness or despair. This returning movement is the pulse of the collection, appearing in refrains in the form poems and implied in the free verse Tai Chi series that describe the body in mindful, repeating gestures.
The final poem, “Whisper Songs,” hints at a more mysterious dimension beyond hope-despair. The masterwork of the collection, it takes the form of a corona or crown of seven sonnets in a pattern of terza rima end-rhyme (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.), in which the final line of each sonnet repeats, with some variation, as the first line of the next. This rhythmic structure moves the poem forward and back to create a three-dimensionality that houses the reader in a charmed space that invites contemplation and, ultimately, allows the co-existence, a beat apart, of the horrors of the daily news and the awesome ‘irrepressible now.’
Suddenly, So Much testifies to the new power afforded the poet when she plays within the traditions of form and craft. The result is a collection to read, study and savour.
- Leslie Timmins
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