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Roger Sauls

BOOKS

When the Circus Has Left Town

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Circus, by Michael Harris, Signal Editions

by Roger Sauls
21.07.2010

In Federico Fellini’s early Realist film, La Strada, he uses a provincial carnival troupe as a vehicle to explore the performer’s mask, especially what he shows as the contradictions inherent in the lives of those who assume false faces for the amusement of strangers.  The strong man of the troupe, played with great sensitivity by [...]

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BOOKS

The Dignity of Deep Love

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Lookout, by John Steffler, McClelland & Stewart

by Roger Sauls
31.05.2010

John Steffler is the kind of poet who likes to burrow into a landscape’s least beautiful recesses. Once inside, he’s an unusual tenant, his impulses anything but those of a mystic. When he’s in the kind of terrain that inspires his poems—the rock-strewn topography of Newfoundland, say, or the coasts of the Maritime Provinces—he inhabits [...]

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BOOKS

A Worthy Confession

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I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being, Johanna Skibsrud, Gaspereau Press

by Roger Sauls
05.04.2010

According to Chekhov, the listening ear of a horse is receptive to confession, even to the most woebegone among us — especially in cases where humans won’t listen.  In his story “Misery,” a cabby, grief-stricken by the death of his son, can’t find sympathy among his passengers; he finds his waiting mare the only open [...]

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BOOKS

Conferring Grace on the Materials at Hand

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Pause for Breath, by Robyn Sarah, Biblioasis

by Roger Sauls
17.01.2010

The American poet George Oppen liked to cite the carpenter’s art as a useful model for the construction of a poem. He argued that a poem’s parts, when properly connected, constitute a structure of both shapeliness and utility–a ladderback chair, say.  The beauty of Oppen’s simile is that it places the poem in the broad [...]

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BOOKS

An Audacious Exploration of the Psychic Landscape

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Passenger Flight, Brian Campbell, Signature Editions

by Roger Sauls
19.07.2009

The long and short of the prose poem is that it’s a product of deep inner contradictions. Its prose wants the freedom to wander, while its poetry wants the brevity of a few luminous words. It rejects the primacy of either of its parents in favor of a synthesis of both. It delights in frustrating [...]

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BOOKS

A Marbled Psalm of Praise

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This Way Out, Carmine Starnino, Gaspereau Press

by Roger Sauls
28.06.2009

The figure of the traveler, wind-bent and plowing bravely forward, is a useful trope for a poet whose work explores strange terrain, both inner and outer. Travel demands agility in unfamiliar places — improvisation, adaptation to the flux of experience — traits a poet must bring to bear on the blank page. In This Way [...]

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BOOKS

Miraculous Lemons

PAPER ORANGES Carolyn Marie Souaid, Signature Editions

by Roger Sauls
01.12.2008

THE ELEVATION OF THE FRAGMENT, as a writer’s means of portraying his or her world, has become the literary verification of the 20th century’s recognition of the broken nature of perception. It’s a technique not only for bringing the written word in line with the phenomenal, but also for forcing the reader into the same [...]

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