There is a subtle pleasure in pigeon-holing people. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t do it with such gusto. It appeals to our sense of order and perhaps even justice to believe that humanity could be classified by vocation, proclivity, or coolness. We rely so naturally upon stereotypes, they seem fertile if unexploited territory for poetic exploration. But the title of Gabe Foreman’s new collection of poems, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People, makes a promise that its contents don’t quite keep.

Foreman’s poems are playful and experimental in an almost childlike way, but the encyclopedic concept of the collection reins in rather than expands on his creativity. Rather than take advantage of our natural passion for taxonomy by relishing stereotypes or, on the other hand, debunking their allure, Foreman uses them to frame a collection that is really closer to a concept album than an encyclopedia. These poems, named for different types of people ( “Control Freaks,” “The Lovesick,” “Underdogs”), lose as much as they gain from their association with one another.

The variety in the collection is impressive and makes for many surprises. In addition to couplets, stanzas, and prose, poems take the form of eye charts, Venn diagrams, mad libs, and a recipe for “Tough Cookies.” Many seem to have been born out of constraint-based exercises. Sometimes surprising and moving poetic leaps result, as in a trio of poems where the National Audubon Field Guide to Insects and Spiders’ entry on mayflies is used to describe “Adulterers,” “Frequent Flyers,” and “Day Traders”: “To reproduce, thousands of male stockbrokers perform a kind of dance, flying up and down in great swarms.” The tone is light, but the overall effect is more ambiguous. To make a poem out of a game of Hangman may seem like a joke, but the somewhat ominous message revealed in “Doodlers” is not quite funny.

As is often the case with constraint-based poetry, where accident is favored over intention, incongruous and unpremeditated images can emerge. Yet the spontaneity of Foreman’s leaps can feel compromised by the form of the collection as a whole. The poems’ titles limit rather than expand them. Foreman’s images are often delightfully or disturbingly Surrealist, yet he keeps himself on a frustratingly short leash. One wonders whether the poems would have been better served if they hadn’t been forced into such a formulated, predetermined group. As it is, rather than anchoring the collection, the concept of an encyclopedia contributes to a lack of clarity that hampers the weaker poems.

Some of the deftest moments in the book happen when the poems refer to one another, such as “Organ Donors” and “Transplant Survivors,” who seem to share the same doubts about the hereafter. These moments of echo create a thread that begins to open the collection to itself, but they are too rare to create a real sense of cohesion. Perhaps its unfair to ask an arc of a reference book, but like any encyclopedia, while this one includes some fascinating entries, it doesn’t feel as whole as other books do.

Abby Paige is a Montreal writer whose recent projects are chronicled at www.abbypaige.com

Ken Babstock, until recently poetry editor at House of Anansi, was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize for his last collection, 2007’s Airstream Land Yacht. Early press indicates that Methodist Hatchet is likely to receive similar attention. One reviewer has already declared Babstock “the best Canadian poet of his generation.” It will take decades to assess whether such declarations hold water, but in the meantime they suggest that Methodist Hatchet will be a bellwether for contemporary Canadian poetry.

According to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a bad dancer is said to have “Methodist feet” and a “two-edged (two-faced) axe” is called a Methodist hatchet. Apparently Methodists aren’t altogether popular on The Rock. But when Babstock (who was born in Newfoundland, but moved away while still an infant) chose the phrase as the title for his fourth and latest collection of poems, it was not to declare any religious or even regional allegiance, but rather to embrace duplicity as a poetic ideal. Babstock’s poems cut both ways by design. They vacillate between meanings, two-faced perhaps, but each face equally sharp and controlled.

At first blush the book’s title also evokes the directness of the axe, the most straightforward of tools. In Babstock’s case, though, Methodist Hatchet indicates something quite different: he’d rather go far afield in search of a strange word than pick up a simpler and more obvious choice nearer by. He prefers the difficult word to the easy, the colloquial to the common.

Sometimes this can create the feeling that he’s reaching, as in “Ledger,” where the indulgent self-involvement of youth is described as “The sour cotton-batting-and-vinyl / / trauma of irreducible young man’s narcissism. / Such drama.” Such drama indeed. Instances such as this make one wonder whether more clarity might get better mileage. Usually, though, Babstock is able to deliver his baroque flourishes with enough fluidity to seduce the reader into finding them, while not exactly conversational, natural in their own cerebral way.

If the book is united thematically, it is by Babstock’s conception of what a poem should be. The poet seems more interested in how a poem moves than where it’s going, favouring journey over destination. A few poems explore Canadian places, vaguely political themes, or philosophy, and one is dedicated to the late writer David Foster Wallace, but Babstock mostly uses these topics as pommel horses on which to perform his verbal gymnastics. The poem exists for itself, not to deliver a message, and the aural alchemy that occurs when words are combined takes precedence over meaning. The collection is almost a barrage of language, poems sometimes so thick with sound it’s difficult for the reader to find a way in.

In the title poem, the speaker, listing other Methodist epithets, describes the act of hewing with a two-faced axe. The dense description creates a surface so smooth, it’s easy to slip out of comprehension:

These poems don’t invite entrance so much as negotiate their own slow surrender. The less one tries to extract from them, the more they tend to give.

As with much contemporary poetry, the pleasure of these poems is intertwined with their difficulty. Challenging poems draw attention to the linguistic climate that surrounds us, where brand names are verbs and LOL has been added to the dictionary. They invite us to listen more closely, to bring the discernment of reading poems into our habits of reading the world. The rewards, however, are often more intellectual than sensual. One might say it’s a double-edged sword. If this is the direction that “the best” Canadian poetry is headed, one wonders how much of a readership will follow, potential pleasures notwithstanding.

Abby Paige is a poet and playwright.

Some poetry is on a strict diet: spare and controlled; not-saying and half-saying; healthy silences leaving lots of white space on the page like the white space on an empty plate. It can all leave a reader feeling hungry, and sometimes that’s how the reader wants to be left. But when in the mood for a juicy, greasy, unctuous, metaphorically caloric poetic experience, this reviewer recommends Joshua Trotter’s debut collection, All This Could Be Yours.

Crowded with sound and cluttered with allusions, Trotter’s poems are studies in abundance. They work on the same intimate and playful level as nursery rhymes, drawing the reader in with clever wordplay and creating a musicality so irresistible, meaning insinuates itself like a subtle flavour. What results is a bewitching combination of familiar pleasure and strange surprise — plenty for the brain to chew on.

To describe the book as a poetic binge is not to suggest that Trotter is just hot-dogging. While his colourful language packs the poems like a Chinese buffet, he often turns to traditional recipes when it comes to form (the sonnet in particular), rendering them with loving flare. Much contemporary poetry written in form can feel stiff, but Trotter is able to employ form so naturally that it melts into the poem, providing structure without drawing attention to itself. Iambic pentameter gives many poems, like “Shiftwork,” an air of time-tested familiarity:

Obscurely, yet most surely called to praise

the swaths and swathes of late September wind,

in what tributary might the warship

of my worship heave-to and pay tribute?

The lines invite recitation. Trotter’s vocabulary is so lush and his syntax so complex, that rhyme, when it appears, seems inevitable, never forced, as the poem’s closing stanza attests:

This is the season of things gone awry,

this is the high treason of birds: They fly.

This is the sea-run in which we take turns

in the wheelhouse, crank-calling the engineer.

This is the reason we swab in our sleep

as geese, sobbing, sweep the ceiling of day.

The richness of the language is almost old-fashioned, but it manages a weirdness that is refreshingly new.

The collection’s preoccupation with the sea adds to qualities of both ancient wanderlust and childlike wonder. While the poems possess the swagger and bravado of a sailor, they are also profoundly animated by a superstition and longing that comes from years of floating out in the open ocean, powered by nothing but wind. Many of the poems’ speakers, adrift on wind and water, seem to scan the horizon looking to solid land. Even self is slippery. We have no choice, the poet seems to conclude, but to place our faith in the buoyancy of our craft (pun intended) and the waters in which we attempt to set sail. There is an Absurdist tang to this resignation, echoed in the silliness of some rhyme schemes, as well as in some of Trotter’s titles (“Home and Derange,” “Praying with Matches,” and “Prophets and Losses”). But he strikes a prophetic tone more often than a nostalgic one, suggesting there might be hope just over the horizon or, at least, that in embracing the absurd we might find a kind of freedom.

Like a pushy waiter, the book’s flap is long on promises, inspiring more scepticism than confidence. But don’t let the dining room staff deter you. It’s what’s going on in the kitchen that will impress. Trotter, a recent transplant to Montreal, serves up hefty portions of poetic nourishment. Just remember to come with an appetite. And maybe keep a book of haiku on hand, to cleanse the palate.

Abby Paige is a writer, based in Montreal.

Who is more attuned to the details of his art than the taxidermist? Life is not in the body’s overall fact but its odd postures and subtleties of expression, the animating powers of its inhabitant. Despite its Victorian creepiness, there is something naïve and optimistic about taxidermy: its sincere wish to interrupt inevitable decay, to detain fleeting life and preserve the vibrancy exhaled with the last breath. There is something hopeful, and perhaps even wise, in its effort to convince us that the living and the dead aren’t all that different.

Not all of the poems in Aurian Haller’s new collection, Song of the Taxidermist, have to do with taxidermy, but most contemplate the body with a similar sad and hopeful fascination, seeing it both as an object to be observed and a being to be inhabited, then abandoned. Many of the poems in the collection are ekphrastic; that is, responding to a work of art. Ekphrasis can be a great exercise to hone a writer’s skill for description, but the results are often less than satisfying for the reader. It’s a challenge to communicate the impact or spirit of an artwork through words, and to make a poem that can stand on its own when its creation depended on another work. Yet Haller does this well. “The Swimmers” is a group of seven poems that contemplate paintings by Betty Goodwin, whose work often used the human figure to evoke absence, loss, and emptiness. But a deep knowledge of Goodwin’s work isn’t necessary to understand or appreciate the beauty of the poems. The poems, ultimately, are not about the paintings, but about the acts of perception and encounter. Goodwin becomes master and muse; her canvases, her end of the conversation. The paintings haunt the poems without robbing them of energy.

Interestingly, “Four Ponies,” a quartet of poems based on photos of toy horses, works less well primarily because the images to which the poems respond are provided. The images pull focus, tempting us to find the poem within the image as the poet found it. Reading becomes a scavenger hunt.

To the extent that taxidermy is art, the title poems (I and II) are also ekphrastic, contemplating a series of preserved animals and, later, even more macabre écorchés, or “flayed figures,” eighteenth-century sculpture made with skinned human cadavers. (Think “Bodies: The Exhibition,” pre-plastics.) These poems point to our weird but undeniable desire to look by combining the experiences of looking at art, looking at animals, and looking at dead things. With well-rendered images, Haller highlights how the body is object and not-object, being and thing. Indeed, the crux of the taxidermist’s art is the struggle against the body’s thingness:

[…]  Ears and lips shrivel into a snarl, the sunken

Nose, jutting penis; eleven operations by candlelight

to give the body back its natural poise because we’re

not made of clay with its riverbank-way of giving

in when pressed. Flesh remembers how it pulled

the bones out of bed in the morning, punching a kid

on the bridge after the heat wave, rain and blood

sweet relief — even here on a table in this cold room.

These themes are explored as poignantly and more personally in other poems that are not strictly ekphrastic. Yet the subjects of these other poems — a grandmother at the sink, a son’s tonsils, the remains of a rat splattered by traffic in the middle of the street, for example — are contemplated by the poet with equal attention, leading us to wonder if these are also works of art in a sense and inviting us to look at everyday objects with the same reverence with which we look at works of art. Perhaps the act of looking itself can elevate an object above the simple fact of its being. Perhaps the poem is a naïve and hopeful attempt to preserve the beauty of the finely observed moment. In this way, Haller converts ekphrasis into a kind of elegy for the empty space between a viewer and his object, the poet and his poem, the taxidermist and the taxidermee.

Abby Paige is a poet and playwright, based in Montreal and at http://www.abbypaige.com.

If you have ever attempted to trace your own genealogy, you know it is not a simple matter of careful, cosy research. It is an active struggle against the forgettings, omissions, and concealments of previous generations. No matter how pristine the pedigree, every family has a few skeletons, packed away in cottony half-truths that over time harden into fact: that man who lived with Uncle Earl was his roommate; it’s an error on grandma’s birth certificate that makes it look as though she was born out of wedlock; and Aunt Marie spent a lot of time outdoors, which surely accounts for her dark complexion. When we tell the story of our families — of ourselves — it is not just we who speak, but a splintered chorus of past and present truths, lies, and errors.

In this sense, Gail Scott’s latest novel, The Obituary, is a ghost story. The author playfully acknowledges as much, declaring, “Rest assured, dear X, a tale’s encrypted mid all these future comings + goings … Circumstantially, I am posturing as woman of inchoate origin [problematically, I can hear you saying]. To underscore how we are haunted by secrets of others.” It is partly through its “encryption” that the tale explores and enacts how past and present live side by side, on the city map, in our architecture, and perhaps most of all, in our language. Typically, the sentence is a unit of narrative, built through syntax to create a sense of linear time. In Scott’s work, however, sentences fragment, loosening the relationship between clauses and calling on the reader to piece moments together. Consequently, The Obituary is also a mystery of sorts. Is our main character, Rosine, in her shrink’s office? Lounging in her Mile End triplex? Riding the #80 bus up Avenue du Parc? Is she a fly on the wall? Or the feminist historian who footnotes the text? The coexistence of these possibilities makes the narrative both elusive and worth coming back to.

Scott is constantly searching for innovative ways to reveal what is said and unsaid, absence as a kind of presence, and the influence of past events on the present moment. Her prose is anything but seamless. By design it trips the reader up in order to make time feel more expansive than in a conventional novel, to let a multiplicity of voices speak, and even to allow backtracking and back-talking, as when a footnote takes exception with the chestnut that “In this land everyone an immigrant,” or when Rosine remembers her mother scolding someone “For saying you, Grandpa, speaking Indian Cree to Great-Grandma Dousse.”

Rosine’s — and Canada’s — indigenous roots are perhaps the weightiest ghosts here. While Montréal is the novel’s setting, it is also the canvas on which many erasures and lies of omission have been acted out. This is partly the natural evolution of a city: when one building burns down, another is built on its foundation; street names are changed; deeds and leases change hands. But when we live in a space where someone else lived before us, we also live with them — with their dirt, their shoddy repair jobs, their neighbours who liked them better than us. Traces of what came before — or what presently is, but is denied — hide in plain sight. The myth of Montréal as a city divided simply between francophone and anglophone obscures the more complex reality, in which aboriginal Canadians and others play an important part. Here, absences speak and, as in a well-researched family tree, those voices erased by the shame or arrogance of previous generations press forth. If an obituary is an account of a life, Scott’s seeks to gather the forgotten and omitted details left to the margins, the ghosts that haunt us and make us who we are.

Abby Paige is Vermont-born and Montreal-based writer and performer, whose current projects are detailed at http://www.abbypaige.com/.

“What shall we make of Leviathan?” asked D.G. Jones in Butterfly on Rock, his 1970 volume of critical essays. In the book, Jones argued against a “garrisoned,” colonial impulse he saw at the centre of Canadian literature, which favoured the masculine over the feminine, the rational over the natural, the intellect over the body. “The puritanical ethic which starves the body to feed the mind has no place for love,” he wrote, “for it demands that man love perfection, and no man is perfect.”

The only solution was for artists to go beyond the walls of the garrison, face the terrifying wilderness, and embrace the darkness within nature and our own beings. What to do with Leviathan? Jones would go on to answer his own question: “Swallow him.”

During his half-century career, D.G. Jones has authored almost a dozen poetry collections. Now his collected poems, The Stream Exposed with All its Stones, traces the artist’s struggle to reconcile the sensual and the reasoned, sound and sense. Like any volume of collected works, the book is more box set than greatest hits album, but if a few poems fail to dazzle, the whole delivers a nuanced picture of the poet’s development. Beginning as a young modernist, who asked in his first collection, “Do poems too have backbones?” Jones has gone on to test the flexibility of form and to grow the bolder voice of a mature poet who has swallowed Leviathan, and digested him, too.

A long-time resident of the Eastern Townships, Jones often turns to weather, seasons, and the natural world to build his metaphors, but his poetry is not a simple celebration of nature. While the man-made world is violent and chaotic, the world of nature, although gentler, is indifferent to the human drama, as he hints in this passage from the poem “What Is Interesting,” from his 1995 collection, The Floating Garden:

the waves, says Pierre, after passing the graveyard

in squalls—what did he say (we’d moved

to ashes as a conversation piece), the waves

suggest heroic acts (we are driving

through a pastoral landscape, still

the virtue of ABS brakes is that they compensate

for unequal resistance, like the tao

or the free market, I mean

this is a lake in a blizzard in december

in canada, metaphor is in the shape and lick of the waves

and their pompe et funèbre hue, whew! the rest

is metonymy, hanging in there

in difference) the picturesque

becomes sublime, you could die in this

preparation for a white Christmas, this

greeting card

what is interesting is skidding from snow

to ashes to blossoms, greetings

of dark jubilation, the waves, the waves now clapping

of an excellent tragedy

The poem dances between the mind’s chaos and its order, the interior and exterior worlds. The voice is neither naïve nor knowing, but searching, which lends vivid ambiguity and tension to Jones’ work.

The dance between convention and invention is another source of tension. Jones’ work begins with form and evolves toward freedom, but a freedom defined by his own formal conventions and affinities. Sparse capitalization and punctuation, unpredictable diction, and far-flung allusions are used so systematically that they become formal rules of their own, yet contribute such looseness that language becomes slippery, and meaning, hard to hold onto. The result is a controlled stream-of-consciousness that recalls Berryman and Ashbery (as Jones seems aware in his “Imperfect Ghazals” and “Picking Up a Little Ashbery”), but with a clearly Canadian inflection.

In his brief introduction to The Stream Exposed with All its Stones, W.J. Keith observes that, in part because of his prolific background as a translator, “Jones draws freely on what for many, alas, will be an unshared background.” Bilingual readers are less likely to be flummoxed when Jones jumps between languages and images, but others are just as likely to appreciate that Jones is ever interested in a third way, rather than a binary choice between man and nature, form and free verse, English and French, lyrical evocation and flat telling. When he founded the bilingual literary journal, Ellipse, in 1969, Jones expressed the hope that the review would “generate a more intimate commerce between the two languages.” That commerce is alive and well in his own work, and not merely because he detours into French now and then. If Jones is a major lyric poet on the Canadian scene, his influence promises to be even more enduring in Quebec for this reason. He invites us outside the garrison into sometimes difficult territory — the wilderness of intimacy rather than that of solitude.

Abby Paige is a poet, playwright, and performer. She lives in Montreal.

The Oxford English Dictionary recently revealed the latest list of words newly granted access to its pages, including vuvuzela, staycation, and yes, bromance. It will be a while before your spellchecker recognizes these additions, but the OED’s editors’ periodic recognition of the vernacular, pinched from sources as different as climate science and Jersey Shore, is a delightful reminder that the dictionary is first and foremost a compendium of linguistic cannibalism. English speakers are weirdly willing to pick up a foreign word and run with it, make their own alterations — even use it to mean the exact opposite of is original intention.

Howard Richler would call this promiscuity rather than cannibalism, as the title of his new book, Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words, suggests (not to mention that of his earlier volume, A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top). A self-described logophile, Richler has the detective’s zeal for digging up dirt, a librarian’s reverence for reference books (the OED in particular), and an almost crippling weakness for puns. In Bedfellows, he uncovers the origins of roughly 250 English words, grouped thematically, from those “You Never Knew Came From Unmentionable Body Parts” to those “You Never Knew Came From Persian.” You may be delighted to learn that mistletoe was so named because it resembled bird droppings. Perhaps you’ll be relieved to finally understand how avocado and lawyer came to be the same word in French. And you may swoon with gratitude for the full two-and-a-half page dossier of that mysterious anglophone utterance, okay. If you’re a word nerd yourself, you’ll likely sympathize with the enthusiasm with which the author has obviously pored over his dictionary, even if you find a few of his puns groan-worthy.

Each entry describes how a word evolved from its origins to its current usage, and Richler does a good job making his entries accessible and entertaining. While he is an excellent writer, the format of Bedfellows can make his prose difficult to appreciate. The words seem to have been selected merely according to Richler’s whim or perhaps his thematic requirements, then organized into groups of ten to twelve, and each given its own paragraph-long biography. Since the entries are not strung together with segues, the book ends up feeling only slightly less episodic and disjointed than a reading of the dictionary itself. Happily, the index makes it possible to jump around to entries of special interest to you; at least you can choose your episodes.

Richler’s tone is decidedly light, which works when he’s writing about words like petard and hot dog, but can rub the wrong way when it comes to more loaded language. The fact that hysteria’s etymological root is hystera, the Greek word for womb, isn’t necessarily a laughing matter for those who have one, and to not even hint at the more grave implications of such an etymology is a missed opportunity at best. Thankfully, lynch, further on, is given more sober treatment.

While Bedfellows is entertaining, its limited scope and irreverent tone make it more of a good-natured introduction to the idea of etymology than required reading for the seasoned lover of words. Still, since the full twenty-volume collection of the OED runs about $1,200 and weighs enough to compromise your car’s axles on the way home from the bookstore, having someone to do the research for the rest of us is nice — which is to say, pleasant, and not, more archaically speaking, ignorant, foolish, or lascivious.

Abby Paige is a writer and performer based in Montreal. She used to think she was a nice person, but thanks to Mr. Richler, now she’s not sure.

While distinctly innovative and post-modern in its approach, Cara Benson’s first full-length collection of poems, (made), harkens back to an artistic impulse a century old. In 1915, Marcel Duchamp painted his name and the title “En prévision du bras cassé” on an ordinary snow shovel, giving birth to the ready-made. In the years that followed, he created a number of similar works, most now lost, a repurposed porcelain urinal entitled “Fountain” perhaps being the best known. In addition to challenging conventional notions about what constituted art, a ready-made forced viewers to question their ambivalence toward the familiar.

While Duchamp’s ready-mades came to life in an era when mass-produced, manufactured goods had just begun to supplant their handmade analogs, Cara Benson writes at a historical moment when communication is often automated, “reality” is often scripted, and conversation can feel as canned as an enthusiastic i’m lovin’ it! Most of us are so accustomed to consuming the world one sound bite at a time, when a beer declares itself “Rocky Mountain Cold” or the PM throws around a word like “patriotic,” we rarely pause to consider what, if anything, is actually being said. The words have become furniture.

All poetry intends for its readers to hear words differently, but with (made) Benson is particularly interested in putting words into unfamiliar combinations and contexts to give them new life and unexpected meaning. For one thing, this slim volume is printed in landscape format, which feels surprisingly weird in the reader’s hands, and which makes the shape of the poems — wide, short blocks — look surprisingly unlike either paragraphs or stanzas. Many poets seem to be reaching for innovative forms these days, but Benson’s simple solution doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. We can’t be sure whether these are prose poems (although the blurb on the back seems to suggest so) or just poems with unusually long lines. Most of the poems are accompanied by a single word in larger font, but it’s hard to say whether these are titles. On most pages they are printed below the poem itself, and only a few are obviously related to the poems that precede them. On some pages just a single word is printed: “and,” “will,” “was.” Isolating a single word this way is like Duchamp’s placing a urinal on a pedestal: the everyday, as the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme put it, is “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”

The poems themselves attempt something similar by juxtaposing diverse words, images, and thought fragments. The resulting non-linear semi-narratives take on a dream logic that forces the reader to redefine familiar words, as in this poem that may or may not be titled “Slumberland”:

Rocks come in sheets: gypsum plaster between paper. There is a softness to the touch, surface scratchable by fingernail. Hung. Taped. Sealed. Papered. Ornamented. Pink fiber concealed. Protection. Separator of wind. View. distribution, all…

What appears like candy to keep us warm, can injure upon a brush. And White can bruise a forehead.

The diction is intentionally awkward. It makes the words seem foreign and opens the reader to unexpected associations.

Part of the tension of the ready-made is the question of whether a familiar object can truly hold our attention. In some ways, the idea of appropriating the original object is more compelling than the appropriated object itself. Benson’s poems hold a similar tension. While the poems accomplish the aim of de-familiarizing language, they sometimes feel too random and uncomposed to be completely satisfying as poems. Then again, something similar was said about “Fountain” when Duchamp first tried to show it in Paris in 1917, and look how that turned out.

Abby Paige is Montreal-based writer and performer. Her website is at http://www.abbypaige.com.

These days, a little cleansing rage seems not only justified, but downright de rigueur. Between dead soldiers, greased pelicans, and one’s own everyday grievances, who doesn’t have a few choice words for the powers that be — be they oil barons, politicians, landlords, or ex-lovers? Yet outrage seems strangely rare in most contemporary poetry, perhaps as a consequence of creative caution. “Speak when you are angry,” Ambrose Bierce tartly advised, “and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.”

Like alcohol and over-inflated self-regard, rage has a delightful loosening effect on the tongue, but, as with booze and ego, the hangover it can leave behind is characterized by the chastening realization that your few choice words could have been chosen more carefully.

Those of us apt to hold our tongues can take vicarious pleasure in For and Against, Sharon McCartney’s new and seventh collection. McCartney’s voice is dark, sharp, and refreshingly fierce. Arguing against everything from skunks to therapy to “my father’s third wife,” she exploits anger for all its energy and bravado, her imagery vivid and her vocabulary expansive, as tends to happen when one is pissed off and on a roll. These poems for the most part trace the dissolution of a marriage, but their outrage is broader, more existential, and endearingly self-aware. Every once in a while a metaphor borders on melodrama — but then, every once in a while, real life does, too, as in “After Little Italy”:

Actually shouting at each other on Bloor — like couples we’ve
always laughed at, trailer park romance. So caught up in it, divorce
the only thing we can agree on, we lose track, forget where we are,
which way to the hotel. We’re on Yonge Street — you stop as if
at a precipice — I hate Yonge Street! And I, out of habit or love,
I don’t know which, pity you. That part of you I know too well, […]

This is deep anger combined with great vulnerability. McCartney’s speakers are not altogether likable, but the reader can identify with their rage because of the poems’ searing honesty. The poet doesn’t play any tricks to make things — or herself — appear prettier than they are or provide the comfy assurance that it all works out in the end.

This is especially true in the poems that refer, often obliquely, to breast cancer, such as “For (Against) Judith,” a diatribe directed at an ungrateful houseguest, which concludes:

… I recycle your malicious missive, left perched on the guest
room pillow like pissed-off cat shit, so calculated to wound, trash
your subsequent self-serving e-mail gasconades, the albino bone
of forgiveness that was in me once gone AWOL, fed up, ducked out
for a pack of smokes while I lay unconscious in the sequestral OR.

It would be easy for the theme of illness to take over, but McCartney astutely channels its force into a quiet fury, a darkness that lies at the centre of the poem almost as a tumour sits hidden within tissue, a dense node of gravity. McCartney is tough. She doesn’t feel the obligation to rise above a heart-wrenching experience, to find a bright side, or to soften her bitterness, and so we believe her when she concedes in one of the book’s final poems, “it’s an adequate life, no snipers, after all.”

A few poems take creative departures from the confessional tone: a romance between Dorothy and the Tin Man; the last thoughts to cross Marie-Antoinette’s mind; an ATM’s late-night soliloquy. And the book does finish off with a few poems that are for rather than against, but you wouldn’t mistake them for feel-good poems. These are poems for feeling bad and liking it; not for regretting the vile things you’ve said and done, but for regretting that you now, alas, know better than to say or do them.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and actor.

Ever since we were kicked out of Eden, we’ve been trying to get back in, and sometimes the zoo seems like the next best thing. There, we can wander amid the animal kingdom from which we’ve been exiled, looking at animals and being looked at by them, seeing between cage bars the frighteningly familiar and the deeply, wildly other. The thought would never have occurred to me before picking up Penned, an anthology of poems about the zoo, that poetry is the perfect form to explore what we see when we look at animals, precisely because language so fundamentally separates us from our animal brethren.

Their lazy armpit scratching, their blank-faced cud-chewing, their clumsy couplings, their cages all remind us of ourselves, but we know that animals belong to a society deeply separate from our own. They don’t put each other into cages as we do, or build and demolish complex civilizations; they don’t wax their eyebrows or wear pajamas; and they certainly don’t struggle to put any of those experiences into words. Lucky them.

One might expect a book of zoo poems to be of the cutesy coffee table variety, complete with glossy photos of basking hippos and adorable, preening chimps. But while this pretty volume would indeed make a good gift for the zoo lover — or hater — in your life, Penned is about poetry as much as it is about the zoo. Juxtaposed against each other in a single volume, these poems become a reminder of how deeply metaphor is embedded within language and how often poetry expresses the longing for a time and place before words. A wide variety of poets and poems are brought together here, and as would any of us on a sunny, Sunday afternoon, each has their own experience of the zoo. To some, the zoo is the Id, moated neatly off within the order of the city; to others it is an oasis of sanity within the insane metropolis. Countee Cullen sees “they in their cruel traps, and we in ours.” For Lisa Jarnot, it is a place of innocence; for Robert Kroetsch, the site of transgression; for Peter Meinke, a little of both. While the editors have chosen to omit children’s verse for the most part, A.A. Milne’s “At the Zoo” is among the few to strike a childlike tone of celebration, rhyming, “There’s sort of a tiny potamus, and a tiny nosserus too— / But I gave buns to the elephant when I went down to the Zoo!”

Some pieces, such as Ted Hughes’ “Jaguar” or Emily Dickinson’s “#1206,” will be familiar, but there are a number of unfamiliar gems. Gertrude Halstead’s brilliant “panther” imagines the capture of a great cat from its own point of view, the words gradually becoming literal bars on the page. Judith Beveridge’s “The Domesticity of Giraffes,” while a work of pure and delicate observation, is easily read a portrait of a couple, suggesting that language itself has something to do with why we so easily anthropomorphize.

More than any other literary form poetry captures our ambivalence toward the very human tool of language. Words set limits even as they open expressive possibilities; they build and unlock cages with equal facility. In a collection that spans different eras and locations, biographical notes or dates for the authors — a kind of taxonomy, perhaps — would have made a nice addition here, but that’s a small complaint about a menagerie that ingeniously reveals as much about us as it does about animals. Penned shines a poignant, unexpected light on what it means to be human.

Abby Paige was a frequent childhood visitor to Quebec’s Granby Zoo where, sometime in the late 1970s, an elephant threw a rock at her mother. Years of therapy followed.

Lisa Robertson’s latest collection, R’s Boat, may be read as a formal experiment, an autobiographical game, an argument about language and gender, or an attempt to put the unsayable on the page — but not, if you please, as a poem. Its author has described the work as neither a book of poems nor a series of poems nor a single long poem of many sections, but as a “unit of composition.” The distinction is worth exploring, because the reader may find that its not-a-poem-ness is a fundamental aspect of the book.

Robertson created R’s Boat in dialogue with her own archives, now housed at Simon Fraser University. From old notebooks, she culled sentences and phrases that were related thematically or, more likely, grammatically: first-person statements, negative statements, statements in the present tense. The resulting compositions are fragmentary, but not without their own logic or music. There is a time-released quality to Robertson’s language, as flat, declarative lines of text are juxtaposed with densely evocative ones, and repetitions sound more like echoes than drumbeats, as she seems to acknowledge when she writes, “I heard two centuries of assonance, and then rhyme.” If most poems are written on the page, this work is composed across a broader span of time and space.

Robertson goes to lengths to resist conventional poetic form. Most of the book is double-spaced, spreading lines across the page so stanzas don’t appear as blocks of text and stanza breaks become almost incidental. The spacing doesn’t merely allow the text to breathe, but breaks down the relationship between utterances, preventing a coherence pointed enough to coalesce into something decidedly poem-ish. Odd enjambments often further aid in the fragmentation:

Between stability and volition
Full-blown in the first moments of waking
The action of the sounds comes clear
It’s like this—the non-identity of servitude
(The part that makes its own use of effacement)
Won’t ever be revealed

After struggling to string these words onto a ribbon of meaning, one might nod a few lines later when the poet writes, “It is both in ruins and still under construction.” Is this language being put together or taken apart?

While some of Robertson’s individual lines are beautifully written, it is the space between them where the poetic work happens. This is not to suggest that Robertson’s work is not poetic — at least not in any pejorative sense — but to emphasize how fundamentally she questions the conventions of both the narrative and the lyric. She looks for a form unfamiliar enough not just to defy expectations, but to sidestep them altogether. If what she’s writing doesn’t look like a poem (or an essay or anything else we’ve ever seen), the reader can approach it without the baggage associated with those forms. While fans of Robertson’s work will likely delight in how this “unit of composition” searches for a way to liberate language from its own limitations, those more ambivalent about innovative poetics may protest that some baggage contains helpful tools.  Interestingly, Robertson seems to acknowledge as much in the final section of the book, which contains couplets separated by stanza breaks, work that looks more poem-ish, suggesting a sort of counter-argument, or a conciliatory suggestion that, on the other hand, poetry might have an answer to language’s problems.

Abby Paige lives, reads, and writes in Montreal and at http://www.abbypaige.com/

Multilingualism begets a mental dexterity and a comfort with ambiguity that is difficult to acquire through other means. In learning a new language, we discover how words shape our thoughts and how flexible our conception of the world can be when transferred to a new grammar. Consider where different languages place direct and indirect objects within a sentence; the strangeness of reflexive verbs; how time is ordered by various verb tenses — perhaps not the sexiest considerations, but polyglots and translators understand that language is sly, flexible, and ambidextrous. Poets understand this, too, and perhaps no one has explored the relationship between poetry and multilingualism to greater effect than Montreal poet Erín Moure.

Her new book, O Resplandor, follows a series of collections that have questioned notions of authorship and definitions of translation, and smudged the boundaries between languages. One of the pleasures of reading Moure is that, although her work is often challenging, she almost always creates a foothold for the reader, finding creative and often humorous ways to open what can be opaque and deeply strange poems. The current volume employs a loose narrative frame (even calling it “narrative” is taking a bit of a liberty) to gird the poems’ leaps and dives. The result is lyrical and engaging, and captures the intimacy, romance, and loneliness of the collaborative acts of writing, translating, and reading.

The first section of the book consists of English translations of the Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu by Elisa Sampedrín, who by her own admission cannot read Romanian and, more complicated still, may not actually exist. (Readers may recognize Moure’s literary heteronym from previous works.) The second section consists of translations by Moure, who doesn’t read Romanian either, of a group of poems in Romanian by Paul Celan. In creating their translations, both Sampedrín and Moure refer to earlier English translations of Stănescu and Celan by Oana Avasilichioaei. Writes Sampedrín, “When I first picked up O.A.’s book of Stănescu’s poetry, I realized that not only did it give me access to the poems in my second language, English, it gave me access to the original, Romanian. At this point I ceased to understand any language. I had to translate it, in order to read again.” The relationships between the three women are left unclear, but they write to and about each other in prose sections that are interspersed among the poems. Letters, diary entries, and notebook jottings link their work. What results reads like a mystery that takes place across two continents and in flagrant violation of linear time, fitting for poetry that doesn’t give itself up too easily to the reader. Freed from the danger of being too literal by the fact that neither translator speaks the source language, these translations clatter with a syntactical complexity and musicality that seem at once post-modern and timeless. The prose sections invite the reader to wonder, Who wrote this? Does this writer even exist? What language am I reading? What are these words trying to do? — questions we should perhaps ask of poems more often.

The book’s slim, final section contains “documents for further inquiry…from possibly unreliable sources.” Here Moure provides the most obvious foothold for her reader, coming close to defining her poetics, which is deeply tied to the experience of speaking, reading, and wrestling with more than one language. “Casi nadie sabe leer,” reads the epigram at the opening of O Resplandor, “Almost no one knows how to read.” But the more languages you have under your belt, Moure argues, the better prepared you will be for the task.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and performer. She speaks three languages, none fluently.

In a writing workshop, the American poet Ed Ochester once bellowed over one of my poems, “There is no philosophy in poetry.” Generally, I find such grand pronouncements about poetry perplexing and not very helpful, but I made a note of this one. Then I mostly forgot about it until, reading Kate Hall’s debut collection, The Certainty Dream, I wondered whether poems are written for the mind alone.

Like Wallace Stevens, Hall often blends rigorous philosophical thought with playful, creative nonsense. The book’s longest poem, “Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis,” for example, uses the structure of an academic thesis (abstract, introduction, literature review, and so on) to explore the lengths to which we go to “assuage epistemic hunger,” but the poem is also packed with wacky imagery, including echo-locating bats, celebrity suicide notes, and the Mars rovers poetically named Spirit and Opportunity. Hall invokes great thinkers (Hume, Descartes, and Pascal, for example) to address some grand philosophical questions: What is real? Where does the past go? Does God exist? How can I know for sure? Many of the poems enact a desire to build a structure of logic around a world that refuses to adhere to logic’s laws, a project that sometimes seems philosophical first and poetic second.

Much of the book captures that vague state of consciousness between sleep and waking when dreams still seem real and the laws of language, narrative, and logic are still loose. Hall’s subconscious is busy with wild animals, odd machines, and lots and lots of birds, and her penchant for startling imagery helps to transport us to a dreamlike state: God hides inside a pepper grinder, a herd of antelope eat the siding off of a house, dump trucks file out of a suitcase, and someone (George Herbert?) has left an orange tree at Lost and Found.

These deeply weird visions are balanced by straightforward, declarative diction; there is no airy dream-talk here. Hall’s speakers sound knowing, but their knowing is a kind of order futilely imposed onto the chaos of the mind. “There is art, / unless there is so much missing, / we cannot build a structure around it,” she writes in “Water Tower, 1998-2000,” an hommage to sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s translucent Soho water towers. Whiteread’s sculptures, which played on ideas of fullness and emptiness, are a fitting parallel for Hall’s poems, which push the limits of lack. There is so much stream-of-consciousness here, so many imaginative leaps taken by the writer and required of the reader, it is often difficult to discern what, if anything, holds a poem together.

It’s only appropriate that a collection so fundamentally concerned with the workings of the mind would inspire a hunger for logic and certainty, but I sometimes hungered, too, for a more sensual approach. These poems sometimes veer too far into academic territory — self-consciously and playfully, but frequently enough that they work mostly from the neck up. I’m not sure I agree with Ochester’s dictum, but this might be among the perils that arise when philosophy and poetry overlap.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and performer. You can visit her on-line at http://www.abbypaige.com/.

Susan Holbrook is funny, sometimes enough to make one laugh out loud. In Joy Is So Exhausting, her second collection, she employs a variety of poetic constraints to create poems that surprise and delight without being too cute or comfortable. Constraint-based poems often read as though they must have been much more fun for the writer than they are for the reader, but Holbrook’s sense of humour and preoccupation with the element of surprise help to make her procedural poems seductive.

Although some poems get lost in their own improvisation, the poet’s willingness to borrow from unexpected places (the insert in a box of tampons, the inspector’s report on her house) and to acknowledge the difficulty of her own poetic project (“Is it worth the portage?” she asks in “Q&A”) make these experimental poems unusually approachable.

In “POETSMART Training for Your Poet,” she perverts text from PetSmart’s website by substituting “poets” for “pets,” and promises, “Using positive reinforcement methods, you’ll learn how to prevent unwanted behaviour and establish a bond with your poet.” In “Memoirs of a Canada Council Visiting Writers Hostess,” the fatigued speaker remembers a long line of high-maintenance guests, including “the one who kept calling me Sharon” and “the one who always read final lines as if our lives / depended / on / them.” In “Good Egg Bad Seed,” she plays with the adage that there are two kinds of people by devising a litany of often hilarious dichotomies: “You have a way with animals or squirrels smell your fear and attack”; “You think Modigliani painted nipples too small or you think Emily Carr painted trees too big”; “No pulp or extra pulp.” “Nursing,” the long poem that ends the book, is most notable for the luminous simplicity with which it captures a new mother’s most intimate routine, but it has moments of humour, too, including its closing line, from which the collection takes its title.

The purpose of a joke can sometimes be to create social affinity — to put a stranger at ease or invite an outsider in. This is often the function of Holbrook’s humour: to establish rapport with the reader and make fragmented language less opaque. In poems created from a Sudoku puzzle or a creative transliteration of Garcia Lorca, the lyric epiphany favoured in more mainstream poetry is supplanted by formal and syntactical shocks. Although the poet asserts that either “you like an epiphany or you like a surprise,” her surprises are in a sense epiphanic. A good joke contains a flash of insight so sudden and unpredictable, we can’t help but respond, usually with laughter. While this species of epiphany may not be as cloying as its lyric counterpart, it is familiar enough to make Holbrook’s experimental jolts more palatable. Humour invites us into these poems and makes us want to stay even when we’re startled, a poetic strategy that makes Holbrook’s work especially innovative.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based poet, playwright, and actor. Her one-person show “Piecework: When We Were French” will tour in New England in 2010. (No pulp.)