A Frame of the Book
by Erin Mouré
House of Anansi Press, 1999
Review by Ibolya Kaslik
To read Erin Mouré's poetry, one must decide on one's position of
deconstruction. Mouré's A Frame of the Book deals with, among other
things, deconstruction of self, identity and language. Poems are written
and then re-written, de-written and finally, unwritten in this process.
To name and describe things, the poet's task, is Mouré's main pre-occupation
as she notes in her 14 Description of Trees, the third poem in the book:
Description demands
its transformation to the letters,
the world did not conform
to description
with immediacy.
Mouré foregrounds the theoretical in order to establish the intellectual
and literary tradition within which she works in. Mouré locates
her constant dislocation and disassociation by quoting thinkers like
Lyotard,
Wittgenstein and Bacon. While the cerebral and theoretical quandaries
may be compelling from a literary standpoint, much of Mouré's writing
remains inaccessible to a wider audience due to the references and lack
of concrete narrative. Obviously aware of the audience she hopes to target,
Mouré seems to eschew "immediacy", the gut instincts that attract readers
to poetry:
Trying to forge an
upset frame of reference
Pulling the window
thru the door.
Meanwhile, the reader, in an attempt to understand what
Mouré's poems
are about, pulls her hair through her mouth. Extreme self-consciousness
is at the very core of Mouré's work and while this is an obvious enough
method for a deconstructionist, for readers who may not be so interested
in the various ways narrative can be undone, even its 'upsets' become
predictable.
Essentially, Mouré writes a poem - a dense, poem - and then re-writes
it over and over again. Or, she chooses an event, which is never explicitly
revealed and implies a significance that can only be guessed at, as in
a series of poems entitled, "Report from the Interior, a Swan Song". In
this poem, a child falls through the ice and the ensuing poems describe
the anxiety as well as the experience. As two people argue, later in life,
presumably, about the event, the dialogue emphasizes the tendentious nature
of recall:
When I was young,
I said. You were grown up already-
No, I was young too,
she said.
This lack of clarity, meaning, and headiness is frustrating because
it alienates readers who are not invested in deconstructing text or who
simply want to understand what is happening within the walls of the frame
without secondary sources.
It is also frustrating because, despite the fact that
Mouré appears
to be a poet's poet, she is a damn good writer who in moments of unselfconsciousness
can crank out a line that is viscerally pleasing, that grabs your gut,
and loosens the vice on your head. The erotic textures of her work are
most effective when they are not overwrought:
where I touched yr
shoulder spoke into the bone
A ship rose there
We steered by it.
There is an ephemeral physicality, a playful femininity with both
textual play and the sensual evident in Mouré's work and it is in these
moments where to reader feels truly connected to the work. For example,
"Astonish me a core of blood" Mouré writes, in 14 Description of Trees,
again, though there is no real image to cling to here, the power of "core
of blood" coupled with "astonish me" is a welcome respite for heady, impenetrable
lines like:
Now someone has uttered
the word 'Boltanski' in a yellow kitchen
Is this the form our
grief has taken.
While A Frame of Book may be just that, a container for nebulous
identity, fragmentation and poems jumbled and then shaken up, at times
it reads like an intellectual scrabble board, too confusing for non-players,
for those without an 'in' on the rules for play.
Ibi
Kaslik finally graduated from the English Masters program at Concordia
in spring 2000. Her work has appeared in "Matrix," "Hour" and "Peckerwood".
She dreams of one day owning her very own banjo.
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