Susan Briscoe’s poetry is one of telling details, subtle hints and indications.  The Crow’s Vow, her first collection, follows the slow breakup of a marriage as it is reflected in the passage of the seasons around the couple’s cabin in the woods.  What most readers in our story-based culture would expect to make up the central plot – the scenes from the marriage – is reduced to a hazy, thinly evoked background, while what normally would comprise the background becomes the poet’s chief focus:  the trees, the garden, the foxes and mice, and hints of happiness, resentment and tensions as projected by her states of mind.

Here Briscoe follows minimalist traditions inherited from such diverse sources as Sappho, Dickinson, H.D., and the Japanese, and is poetically on solid ground.  Perhaps too much of the main story, however, is left untold.

The first two poems set the pattern:  six to eight brief lines describing the natural surroundings, followed by two to four lines of question, commentary, or ironic twist.  The tradition of ten-line poetry – called decastitch in some rulebooks – has had a number of notable practitioners, but most often in the West has taken the form of a shortened sonnet (or “sonnetina”). Briscoe’s form – five brief, unrhymed couplets – is airy, delicate, unique to her, and she handles it well.  In the first poem, she deftly evokes the beauty and impersonality of nature:

An icy mist,
no mountains this morning.

followed by a suggestion of constraint

The world is a smaller circle.

A call to observation

look closer

and a return to the immediate surroundings

ribbons of deer tracks
strung across the snow
and three brown apples
that never fell.

is concluded by a disturbing innuendo regarding the man she is with:

Your traps
all along the edges.

The following poem, which begins as an ode, of sorts, to spring, ends in pure vinegar:

We wake to a field mouse,
soft brown fur and clean white belly.
I could skin the whole family,
stitch pretty mittens.

Clearly, not all is as well as might appear.  What emerges is that the narrator is sharing this idyllic surrounding with a man utterly unsuitable to her.  He is obtuse, self-centred, incompetent – a complainer, insisting on his way.  She has to teach him “to buttress the rows,” while “You/resist, want this to be easier.”    He is compared to the crows: what he brings to the relationship are “shiny bits and baubles/a crow’s cache/of electronics and appliances”  — but “not once have you danced,/and I have yet to hear you sing.”

In this he is redolent of certain stock male characters of Atwood, Laurence or Shields – oafish dullards who go by monosyllabic “grunt” names like Bruce or Jeff.  Here, though, the crow goes unnamed – and he never speaks for himself; we hear her slights and commentary, but we never really hear his vow.  If he spoke, if he entered these poems a little more, it might rattle the controlled cages of these verses, but render something emotionally richer. Instead, he disappears into abstraction, “hard to see … across the hectares of corn.”  To give the poet her due, this leads to self-criticism: “Were I honest, I’d admit to being deaf/as well as blind.”

Despite these astringencies, however, there is a warm rhythm to the collection as it progresses through the seasons of nature and of this failed relationship.  Amid its keen observation, exquisite detail and masterful rendering of the passage of time, the poet’s misgivings – like this critic’s quibble – become like the cawing of crows, disappearing into the distance.

Brian Campbell’s second collection is Passenger Flight.  It is reviewed here in the Rover.

Angela Hibbs’ poetry is one of leaping semblances, wry cleverness, and urgent, dark confessions. Wanton, her second book, is actually two lengthy chapbooks sewn together: the first, a pastiche of dark, edgy poems mostly concerning an ill-fated love or oppressive father, the second, a long series of linked verses concerning unseemly goings-on in an imaginary Newfoundland town called, evocatively enough, Wanton.

Hibbs does very different things in these two parts, so they deserve to be considered separately; but her voice is consistent throughout.

Violence flashes like switchblades through slats of clipped phrases:

Again I hear betrayal in your clarinet’s song.

I shift from left to right; satin skirt damns me.

(“A Few Miles Above Twin Peaks”)

I composed thank yous slowly and typed them quickly

my stiff little fingers

complied, complied.

Their pain was like applause.

(“Quick and Slow Lists”)

At times the writing is so tight one can hear the delete key. What remains is pithy, and frequently, rich in wit and implication:

I look like a pictogram warning against

Forgetting to listen to my own bad press.

(“Candy-Assed in Pointe Saint-Charles”)

Bad press: yes, publicity; image-consciousness heightened by social networking sites; but also bad impression, pressure, type, publisher perhaps? (Concision makes for some unlikely spinoffs…)

The influences of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are plainly audible. Sexton is apostrophized in a couple of poems. While “A Standard,” which addresses Hibbs’ own Daddy, does not reach the heights of Plath’s famous poem, it does achieve dramatic intensity.

Three pieces written from the point of view of an inmate of a mental institution include perhaps the strongest poem in the entire collection, “There Is a Room Reserved for the Hopeless.” Whether Ms. Hibbs is a psychiatric survivor or not, these have the ring of hard-won authenticity.

The second part, Wanton, concerns orphans in a small town who have been put to work to earn their keep. There is plenty happening here, none too savoury: exploitation, alcoholism, sexual abuse. The language is smart and fairly crackles: Hibbs captures colourful Corner Brook turns of phrase with an unerring ear. Her urge for terseness, however, does not always serve us well. A host of some twenty-five-odd characters, none really described and many referred to by shortened or nick-names, leads at too many junctures to confusion rather than clarity. At times the reader is left wondering, who is speaking? Who does that pronoun refer to? And does it, in the end, matter? Effects of ghostly presences and cryptic implication are achieved, but only in glimpses do we see beneath a sardonic surface. Context could be better nailed down with a poetic dramatis personae, as, say, George Elliott Clarke employs to introduce Whylah Falls. Perhaps someday this narrative will be expanded into a novel. Hibbs’ priority, though, is compressed musicality of expression, and this does lead to unforgettable moments:
The lock clicked, automatic.

Control was on his side

and on the wheel and on the console,

which he hadn’t removed,

highway handjobs a wrist twist and a half

for the same lousy three bucks, Three-buck-Nancy’d say

through buck teeth…

Rolled eyes and hips,

she adjusted in the bucket,

hoped he’d kick it.

Brian Campbell’s second collection is Passenger Flight.  It is reviewed here in the Rover.

In January, 1974, Tomas Edward Bojeski, aka Thomas James, put an end to his life by shooting himself in the head with a handgun.  He was only twenty-seven, and had just published his first book, Letters to a Stranger, which would receive one disdainful review describing him as a “pale Plath.”  But Letters would acquire a life of its own, rescued from obscure stacks and photocopied by poets and poetry admirers all over the US. 

One of these became an editor with Graywolf Press, and so the book has recently been reissued, to considerable fanfare – a strong review by Edward Hirsch in the Washington Post, and a major feature – Lucy Brock-Broido’s ringing introduction to the book, along with several poems – on the website of Poetry.

Reading through Letters, it’s easy to see why a negligent reviewer might have unfavourably compared James’ work with that of Plath.  The least remarkable poems in the collection are in its first twenty pages.  These include the opening poem, “Waking Up,” a call-and-response to the first poem in Ariel, “Morning Song”; and “Carnations,” a mannered and indeed pallid derivation from “Tulips,” one of Plath’s most powerful poems.  At least five poems in Letters, as Brock-Broido points out, are in direct dialogue Plath’s Ariel.  Still others bear the unmistakable stamp of her influence. But while Plath’s is an abrasive, searing voice, James’ is understated, lapidary, resigned; while she was manic-depressive, he was undeniably depressive.  Frozen in an otherworldly calm, his haunting, tuneful, often decorative meditations arise out of a state of near-deathly paralysis:

The dead have such sweet breath.

They are entirely indifferent to their surroundings,

Too wrapped up in themselves to notice anything –

A fly investigates the pearly knuckle.

Daylight withers, effacing its muscularity.

It takes time to warm up to this voice.  But reading on bears rich rewards. Winning qualities are a gorgeous musicality of language, and frequent rapid-fire associations Bly would call “leaping poetry.” An echo chamber of intricately connected motifs – including winter ice, turning to stone, ringing tongues of bells, speaking from under water or under earth, pouring out of gold, leaves and flowers — culminates in some superbly crafted, intense and mysterious poems.  Highlights include “Jason,” “Wooden Horse,” “Frog,” “Going Back,” “The Bell Ringer,” and “Dragging the Lake.”  “Letter to a Mute” is an utterly new and beautiful restatement of the aphorism “Silence is golden.”  “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh,” meanwhile, would belong in any major anthology, and it is not a stretch to say it may well go down as one of the great poems of the century.

Death is of course a major theme and preoccupation of poetry.  Each time a suicidal writer presages his death, it gains that much more impact by his final act.  There are plenty such premonitions in Letters, including lines like

The woods are full of a silence.

I breathe a scrawl of ice in my own darkness

As my gun barks, putting a whole landscape to death.

Ultimately, the stranger James addresses in his poems is not only the writer’s ghostly twin, but death itself.

Doubtless Thomas James was a poet of extravagant gifts.  Unlike certain experimental writers who under guises of supposed radicalism live comfortable lives, James’ poetry, life, and death were of a piece.  One could say that in all senses his was the riskiest experiment, in that he put his very life on the line.

Brian Campbell’s second collection is Passenger Flight.  It is reviewed here in the Rover.

First kiss the arms and under the arms
Then slowly kiss the belly.
Becoming more intoxicated, kiss the thighs and vulva;
Draw the streams of the channels under the sea.

It’s hard to believe this was written by a Tibetan Buddhist monk and scholar; but clearly Gendun Chopel was not just any monk or scholar.  This is one of 104 poems – the first comprehensive collection of his oeuvre in any language — translated in a sumptuous bilingual edition.  A must-read for anyone interested in Tibetan and Buddhist culture, In the Forest of Faded Wisdom serves as a fitting introduction to a formidable writer and poet, and a most complex and fascinating man.

Born in 1903 as British troops were preparing to invade his homeland, Gendun Chopel was identified at an early age as the incarnation of a famous lama and became a Buddhist monk, excelling in the debating courtyards of the great monasteries of Tibet.  At the age of 31, he gave up his monk’s vows and set off for India where he would wander, often alone and impoverished, for over a decade.  Returning to Tibet, he was arrested by the government of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason, emerging from prison three years later a broken man.  He died in 1951 as troops of the People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa.*

And yet through all this Chopel was prodigiously prolific, translating plays, epic poetry, and sutras from Pali and Sanskrit into Tibetan, as well as producing a number of lengthy tomes of his own.  His early poetry expresses a pious and conventional Buddhism:

Compassionate power of the three jewels,
Reliable refuge that never deceives,
Calming all illusions of meaningless samsara
Bless our minds to turn to the dharma.

His later work turns world-weary and caustic.  A harsh critic of hidebound convention, Chopel was nevertheless a master of the traditional forms of Tibetan poetry; although felicitously translated, we can assume that much of the music is lost. At times the reading gets rather dry, as the poet draws heavily upon the numberless typologies of the tradition, e.g. the “nine vehicles,” the “treasure of one hundred and seven indestructible precepts.” One can take out a Buddhist dictionary and parse the subtleties, or simply repose in the mastery of such crystalline intricacy. What raises his writing to sparse and even lovely lyricism is the effective use of sensual but generic imagery:  mountains, temples, flowers, trees, sands, sky, moon, sun.  And the occasional candid and touching confession:

In my youth, I did not take a delightful bride;
In old age, I did not amass the needed wealth.
That the life of this beggar ends with his pen,
This is what makes me so sad.

In the end, Chopel descended into lasciviousness and alcoholism – but did produce the extraordinary verses of Precepts on Passion.  There is some debate as to whether he had become a “crazy saint” or had simply lost his way. Nearly all poets of the Buddhist way write of quietude and restraint. Chopel’s difficult path took a profound personal toll, but his work suggests a distinct possibility for a dynamic, intense, and varied Buddhist poetic.

* That Chopel was imprisoned, beaten and most of his work confiscated – and lost – under the regime of the young Dalai Lama is curious indeed. Online searches revealed scant information.  According to his website, the Dalai Lama assumed political power over Tibet in 1950, around the time of Chopel’s release, while this website claims that the Lama is “one among many admirers who name Gendun Chopel as their intellectual predecessor.”

Brian Campbell’s second collection is Passenger Flight.  It is reviewed here in the Rover.

Drive down a freeway through typical North American urban sprawl – whether it be Toronto, New Jersey, Houston or L.A. – and you will encounter a cluttered yet relentlessly vacuous landscape.  In her latest collection, Expressway, Sina Queyras takes that landscape as an extended metaphor for our contemporary world:  a world of blurring speeds, heavy freight, fast food, exhaust, collision, gridlock, a dream of freedom gone totally awry.

More than two centuries after the English Romantic poets celebrated the harmony of nature and the human imagination, nature has been almost wholly subverted, yet animated in new and surprising ways:  a “land bunching, ruffling” with “the joy of onward, the joy of forward, the endless fuel.”  Enlivened by references to cellphones, DVDs and text messages, Queyras’ work becomes a critique of a peculiarly modern paradox:  as transport and communications reduce distances and draw us together, so they also isolate us and compound an ever more profound loneliness.

The poem that most masterfully encapsulates these themes is the opening one, fittingly called “Solitary.” Here a female persona wanders near an expressway, past its various flotsam and detritus, questioning “what sympathy of sounds” is to be found there – all the while considering the “multiple pathways” of history and an uncertain future as she tries desperately to call home to resolve an unspecified personal grief.  Her crimson cellphone ends the inquiry with the force of a slamming door.

She snaps her cellphone closed: no one.  Alone.

The century is elsewhere.  She turns her back,

Swallows her words.  She will do anything for home.

Thenceforth Queyras’ project is to thoroughly explore the manifold dimensions of her central metaphor. The reference to the Romantics is not an idle one:  not only is imagery from Shelley and Wordsworth reframed; the entire collection is modeled on Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  Lyrical and manifesto-like poems alternate with surreal and ironical prose poems that she, like Blake before her, calls “Memorable Fancies.” After “Crash,” a ferocious pastiche of expressway deaths collaged together from Google searches, Queyras inserts a quaint and peaceful interlude crafted from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals, highlighting the very serenity we have lost.  The collection concludes with a take-off on Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, which while more subdued than the fiery visionary, frequently crackles with insight and deadpan humour:  “The body sublime, the heart SUV.” “Drive your car on the bones of the dead.” “Once thought filled immensity: now it purchases goods.”

Queyras’ predominant tone in relation to the expressway is one of restrained anger, punctuated by moments of ambivalence, where the irresistible “slide of modernity” is also “beautiful.” There are delightfully coy and sensual moments like this one: “She lifts the expressway’s veil. Hardly modest but, still, a crevice here and there to slip into.”

At times, however, Queyras’ project becomes laboured. Except for the odd arresting  verse or phrase, a six-section poem in the middle entitled “Endless Interstates” seems a needlessly obscure slog. Nevertheless, Queyras succeeds in creating a powerful gestalt, where dull, violent and intensely lyrical notes blend together into the expressway’s unending hum.

Expressway is nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award in the poetry category. Winners will be named on Nov. 17.

Brian Campbell’s second poetry collection, Passenger Flight, was recently released by Signature Editions.

Robert Creeley died in Odessa, Texas, at sunrise one day in March, 2005. On his writing table was a black folder containing thirty-odd carefully typed poems; these, along with an essay he had written the previous year, were put together by his wife and other editors into a final collection, On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay.

Famous for pared-down poems wherein every syllable and line break unfolds riches of meaning, Robert Creeley is nevertheless an easy and engaging read. His singular, mostly first-person musings are by turns intimate, conversational, cerebral, ironic, anguished and direct. His is the angst-ridden, nerve-wracked voice of renowned shorter poems like “I Am a Man”, or the serene, magisterial voice of “Echoes”. The best way this reviewer found to read through his weighty Selected was to carry it around and take in the poems during waits for buses, short subway rides, coffee breaks, TV commercials. Considering how fragmented our attention spans have become, poets like Creeley make one wonder why more don’t read poetry these days. Robert Creeley, however, holds a dubious distinction: for a writer of such influence, he occupies an oddly marginal place in anthologies and in critical regard. This may be because he wrote not a single great poem, but a great quantity of excellent small ones, spanning some 60 collections that together make for a sort of odyssey.

Hence, perhaps, the value of On Earth. Many of the poems are as artful and polished as any he published during his lifetime. Published pretty much in the order in which they were found, it makes for a natural, if incomplete, trajectory. Here, in that same, unmistakable voice, are common motifs of earlier works: the sea, echoes, the mirror, the hole in the wall, the scary surrounding void, the delight of talking. With age has come a certain relaxed amiability, but death, while no longer the harrowing presence found in earlier poems, carries an even greater weight of finality. “Sad Walk”, with its unintrusive echo of Macbeth, shows Creeley at the top of his game.

The essay, a rambling meditation on the later poetry of Walt Whitman, expresses the same concerns as a number of the poems, and employs a number of like images. His observations on Whitman could be said of himself. “The common sense is that Whitman’s poems faded as he grew older, that their art grew more mechanical … the life, however, is finally the poetry, the issue and manifest of its existence.” While nostalgic melancholy is felt as the sun sets on a great literary career, here also is the acuity of extraordinary discipline, the youthful pleasure of a literary gabfest. Of his friend, the poet Paul Blackburn, he writes:

I wish he were here now, we could go on talking,
I’d have company of my own age in this
drab burned out trash dump we call the
phenomenal world where he once walked
the wondrous earth and all its pleasures.

Brian Campbell’s second collection, Passenger Flight, was published by Signature Editions in April, 2009.

Tariq Ali is an Oxford-educated East Asian expatriate who has nevertheless maintained deep ties with his nation of origin. Famed for his silver-tongued oratorical skills, he kept a packed, multi-ethnic audience captivated with his account of American interventions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought out ripples of laughter and applause with caustic assessments of the Bhuttos, the Bush legacy, Barack Obama, and Michael Ignatieff.

In his most recent book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Ali describes how Americans called the shots in Pakistan, pouring billions of dollars into the military while the country’s poverty deepened, always finding the kind of general they wanted–profoundly fundamentalist or profoundly secular – to satisfy short-term, disastrously short-sighted policy aims. If they had wanted a hermaphrodite general, he joked, they would have found one. He didn’t mince words about the Bhuttos.

Although Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came in with an idealistic platform of land reform, etc. a la India, he didn’t put it into effect because fundamentally, he didn’t consider it necessary, coming from the landed gentry himself. The problem with his daughter Benazir was that she had married “a rogue” – one of the most corrupt landlords and administrators in Pakistan. She and Ali had been quite close. He helped write her inauguration speech and advised that if elected, she leave a positive legacy, including state schools for girls and a health centre in at least every two villages, so the poor wouldn’t have to go to the big cities for medical attention.

Like her father, she doubted she could enact such reforms without support of the power elites – an impossible condition to hope for from the start. Ali was as upset as any when she was assassinated – but found it absurd that the Western press should paint her as a sort of “goddess of democracy,” when in her political will she had left the leadership of her party to her husband.

Ali had written during the Bush years. Obama, Ali remarked, is almost certainly the most intelligent President in recent memory, one who can not only read books, but actually write them. “Unfortunately, if you wear Caesar’s robes and put on Caesar’s crown, you have to act like Caesar. The previous one was like Caligula. This one is more like Claudius.” He mused as to whether Michele would make a more decisive President.

Asked whether his own political convictions had changed over the years, Ali replied that of course times and he himself had changed dramatically, but that fundamentally, he had always remained on the left, in support of human rights and a better lot for the poor – “unlike certain liberals who have gone on to advocate the Iraq war and apologize for torture, like your future Prime Minister.”

—

CBC host Paul Kennedy wrote his interview notes on a coffee coaster. Jian Ghomeshi, the interviewer of Jonathan Goldstein a few hours later, wrote his on a couple of barf bags from two different airlines, which brought him to compare the merits of the two airlines, as well as other uses for those bags should the interview go like the notorious one that had recently taken place on Q. What’s with these CBC hosts? I thought. Well, both were very smooth and professional, which made these little foibles all the more endearing.

—

Jonathan Goldstein said he felt like a truck backing up. A.S. Byatt said she could hear ghostly fairy pipes in a forest. The source of their metaphorical inspiration? Feedback from hearing aids and cell phones in response to the elevated speakers by the stage – a new technological interaction designed to vex hosts and bring on flights of whimsy from featured guests.

Imagine you come home, turn on the TV, make popcorn, settle into the couch and really try to get into a show.  Meanwhile, your house is burning down. That’s how Carol Zardetto, a Guatemalan writer who spoke on Friday’s Politics and the Pen panel, described a Gen-X of younger, apolitical writers in her country.  While turning away from politics is entirely understandable in the context of Guatemala’s unending political foment, in the end, she said, private life cannot be separated from public life, particularly in a country like Guatemala.

Both Zardetto and Sergio Ramirez, the other writer on the panel, have been seriously involved in politics.  Ramirez served as Nicaragua’s Vice President from 1995-2000; Zardetto, a lawyer, served as a Deputy Minister of Education for a year in 1996 before being posted as Consul General in Vancouver.  Both spoke of the difficulty of balancing the writing life and the political life, and of the inherent incompatibility of holding to an official line while trying to maintain the independence required of a writer.

Ramirez said he didn’t write a line for ten years when his Sandinista commitments most monopolized his time; at a certain point a panic set in and he literally “stole time” from his Vice Presidential duties, getting up at five in the morning to put in three hours of writing before starting his working day.  While both writers have withdrawn from active involvement in politics, both concurred that it was important to maintain a sense of political commitment, and expressed appreciation for how their own political lives ultimately enriched their writing lives.

In the relatively benign political climate of Canada, of course, it is quite possible to live out an entirely “private” life – to tune out the disturbing news, to narrow-cast, to ego-cast.  All one has to do, though, is look at a typical kitchen and all the products in it that come from foreign lands, to sense the pervasive influence of realpolitik on our lives.

As Carol Zardetto put it, no matter how much one may push politics to the margins of one’s life, it will always remain a lurking presence there – so one may as well try to understand and deal with it, to make oneself into a subject of history rather than its unwitting object, pushed around by forces one can neither control nor comprehend.
Sergio Ramirez: http://bluemetropolis.org/Festival/Participants/1138
Carol Zardetto: http://bluemetropolis.org/Festival/Participants/1184

With the momentous recent political and economic news, it may be all too easy to overlook what Ezra Pound called the “news that stays news.” Poetry has never pretended to be breaking news, but well executed, it can revive old verities with an immediacy that surpasses any reportage à la CNN.

Consider Vancouver poet Shannon Stewart’s second collection, Penny Dreadful. “Penny Dreadfuls” were popular, cheaply-produced 19th century tabloids filled with brutal, sensationalist tales, featuring largely mythologized figures like Spring-Heeled Jack and Sweeney Todd. Flash forward to 21st century Vancouver, where notorious serial killer Robert Pickton provides our contemporary shudder material. This time, however, the grisly evidence is all too real:

He had dirty hands, sat
for hours, saying nothing.
Patrolled his yard with
a boar trained to attack.
Trailers filled with purses,
i.d.’s, girlie bric-a-brac.

Featuring skillful short lines and perspicacious rhyme, many of these poems have a mordant, singsong quality; though penny-sized, they pack a powerful punch. The titles run like a series of legal exhibits, labelled with name and address, or constitute bizarre headlines in themselves: “Roofers Find Bucket Full of Teeth,” “Woman Gives Birth to a Frog,” “Man Jailed after Sucking the Toes of Three Unsuspecting Women.” Sly humour aside, a number of disturbing dream-like poems – “63 Missing from the Low Track” is a standout – express how the tragedy in her neighbourhood has invaded the author’s psyche in a most poignant, heartbreaking way. Particularly brilliant is “A Rose by Any Other Name,” a series of brief riffs on common terms of abuse for women – cow, slut, cunt, bitch, whore. Stewart’s relentless questioning of the hazy line between sensation-seeking and responsible reportage makes for most revelatory news.

Phil Hall’s White Porcupine opens with the inscription,

“Incomprehensibility is confession – Theodor Adorno”.

Phil Hall’s elliptical work represents an ambitious project of exploring language as a way of experiencing the world. Between slats of musical, purely evocative phrases, the reader can perceive the clear daylight of an implied narrative and definite setting: the austere quietude and suppressed anger of living in the “back townships,” presumably somewhere near Ottawa. The white porcupine is a snowstorm into which the narrator and his father, who apparently had an abusive relationship, drive in the family car. The pelting snow is transformed by speed into “quills that are broken passing lines in sharp bouquet,” a shared experience that brings them together even though, “our silences clenched in full bristle” they “hate each other.” Taken in a larger sense, the white porcupine could be seen as the wiry bristle of language itself, with which Phil Hall plays with astute humour:

I begged for this fresh day
to run as I have others — a day that is already a day
to bend out of its spelling into yada yada

the landscape is lined up around the block
to get in to see The Landscape: A Wire Circus

It is a common meme in language poetry to stand back and comment on the writing itself:

out of all this legendary salvaged junk
help me construct some show to warn us awake

which, of course, brings us back to what this “news that stays news” is about: a dredging up of near-forgotten memories, a reportage on consciousness.

Brian Campbell’s second collection, Passenger Flight (Signature Editions), will be launched in Montreal this spring.

AS EARLY AS 1807, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH LAMENTED, “The world is too much with us.” Now it is always with us, in its richness and calamity; we can’t get away from it; frequently overwhelmed by sheer superabundance, we can feel paradoxically diminished, cut loose, cut off.  

Katia Grubisic, in her debut collection, What if red ran out, delights in the paradox, flotsam and jetsam of the world.

It began with an elegy for a goldfish and the list went on
to include the practice
of entomological Buddhism; also
do a bit of laundry.

Her writing is a dense, eloquent, musical mishmash; sensual, lively, steel-trap intelligent and cold. The risk, at times, is incomprehensibility, but brilliant metaphors leap out of the ruck.

… there, and there

are the thunderstorms you seek,
one after another, all close calls with lightning bolts
and crashing, tequila-drunk skies.

While her writing is well grounded in fresh imagery and evocations of place, the effect can be oddly cerebral. The emotional disconnect is indirectly confessed in poems employing an indeterminate “we”:

We say the words instead of love, keep ourselves revocable,
when we are standing stone-still, blithely confessing our dreams
to the sleeping beasts around us in the night zoo.

The most successful poems have crystal-clear narrative focus:  On the Eve of Return To Hamelin, a gorgeous evocation of the Pied Piper legend; Basin No. 3, a profound penetration into our grisly industrial heartland; two fun poems, Song for my Old Lead Pipes and Ladder to the Middle, and the ferocious Love Song for the End of the World.  Needless to say, a very strong debut.

In Noble Gas, Penny Black, his third collection, David O’Meara cuts through the clutter in a series of concise, gravely singular poems. Many of these pack undeniable emotional punch. The opening poem is a brief meditation on the anxieties and inadequacies of mid-life. In full:

The Next Day

You turned forty all afternoon,
and with every hour’s drink you poured,
you aged. The thought was fuel; your mind roared
like a fire, like a starved sun

eating its core, making a feast of
the fears that remained. But the next day arrived,
and you were safe, and sane; not in the least
surprised you’d lived.

This poem contains hallmarks of O’Meara’s verse: irregular lengths and anticipatory line breaks associated with free verse, coupled with an easy mastery of form — the slant rhymed abba cdcd, with the justly placed internal rhymes, “remained” and “sane”.

Containing not a word of filler, most of this slender collection concerns an ill-fated relationship. The fractured narrative of this unhappy romance takes us on a tour through the faraway climes of a wasted world – the Caribbean, Europe, Central and East Asia – yet always within the limits of poverty, poor jobs, inadequate means:

How fast a month goes when you can’t make rent,
how mean the restaurants look, how hard
everything seems, remembering fun
but too stretched to share it.
I’ll wait, and wait, and walk with you endlessly.
Let’s ditch this city, these jobs, all the bother
of having things, and keep only each other.

Brian Campbell’s second collection, Field of Gems (prose poems) will be coming out with Signature Editions in the spring.

ANYONE LOOKING AT POETRY published in Canada over the last 40 years or so might conclude that free verse is the default mode. As the anthology Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets shows, a great many Canadian poets have also been busy writing in that most traditional form, the sonnet – or at least using the form as an organizing template.

The attractions of the sonnet are many. As editor Zachariah Wells writes in his introduction, “…its deceptively ample cargo space can accommodate…pithy wit and irony, intellectual investigations and sincere feeling.” Limitations can bring freedoms; the sonnet structure enforces both emotional concentration and an intricate musicality.

Jailbreaks offers an array of excellent sonnets ranging from Confederation poet Archibald Lampman to young contemporary writers. The selection tilts heavily towards living writers, reflecting in part a renewed interest in fixed form. (The 2005 anthology, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry edited by Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, is another manifestation of that interest.) A number of poets show extraordinary mastery of strict (or fairly strict) sonnet forms, among them Barbara Nickel, Robyn Sarah, and Eric Ormsby.

Others, including Don Coles, Milton Acorn, and Elizabeth Bachinsky, play fast and loose with the rules, varying line lengths and rhyme schemes, or doing away with rhyme altogether, to meld the conversational play of free verse with the formal limits of the sonnet. Still others – notably Peter Van Toorn and P.K. Page – evolve their own idiosyncratic variations on strict form and succeed in creating fresh and surprising expressions within constraints. Not a single line of this collection shows the hallmarks of bad formal verse: the stilted word choice or quaint gentility that prompted famed free-verser Charles Bukowski to write, “As the spirit wanes, the form appears.” Interestingly, instead of providing biographies of the poets, Wells wrote notes about the poems, what he appreciated about them and their salient features.

Wells’ notes are for the most part pleasantly informal and astute; some are downright educational. A number of the poems – those broken into two line stanzas or lines of varying lengths – could scarcely be recognized as sonnets. In all but one or two cases, his commentary convinces. Wells’ selections were made not just from the most prominent poets, including Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Margaret Avison, and Don McKay. He also chose fine poems from literary magazines and out-of-print books by poets long consigned to obscurity. These he wove together into a thematically blended sequence, itself an intriguing series of juxtapositions. Many of the poems are so good, they aroused my curiosity about their authors; indeed, the only thing I missed were brief bios providing information on when and where those writers live or lived, etc. Judging, however, by the bibliography and Wells’ notes, Canadian poets have been writing sonnets throughout this so-called free verse era, weaving intricate webs like spiders in the dark.

Brian Campbell’s second collection, Field of Gems (prose poems) will be coming out with Signature Editions in the spring. He has never attempted a sonnet, although some of his poems could be tweaked to resemble one.