| Book Review As The Artist Sees It
by From Property And Value
WE NEVER SEE our faces or our bodies as the artist sees them, suspended and maintaining themselves in free space. The part in our hair seems on the wrong side, we think, looking at the sketch, forgetting that our own impressions of the form of our skull, its crown, the line of the hair- parting are almost always derived more from reversed mirror images than from appearances in videotapes or films.
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| | Book Review Us And Them
by Geoffrey Stevens
WE ARE SO accustomed to seeing Knowlton Nash read the news on the CBC that we forget he established his reputation as a foreign correspondent. Washington was his beat (from 1951 to 1969) and Canadian-American relations were his oyster.
Nash was friends with an ambitious young U.S. senator, John F. Kennedy, who captured the imaginations of Canadians and Americans alike as he won the presidency.
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|  | The Sleepwalker
by June Callwood
Lester & Orpen Dennys
384 pages $26.95
ISBN: 0886193540
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Book Review Justice Is Done
by Jack Batten
ONE OF THE APPEALS of June Callwood as an author is that she writes books about Canadian people and subjects that other authors wouldn`t touch with a 10-foot pencil. She has written about an obscure, troubled woman who got a jail term for spying as a result of Igor Gouzenko`s revelations, She did a book about the friends of a woman who was dying of cancer and another about a man -- a gay Jehovahs Witness -- who survived longer than anyone with AIDS.
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|  | Hanging Fire
by Phyllis Webb
Coach House
80 pages $12.95
ISBN: 0884103917
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Book Review Given Words
by Maggie Helwig
PHYLLIS WEBB IS a poet of conceits, one who prefers to work within the self imposed limitations of a concept. In Hanging Fire, she bases each poem on a "given" word, "words, phrases, or sentences that arrive unbidden in my head," and attempts to explore the hidden connections, the "subrational rationale" behind these drifting verbal pieces (which we all know, all have our own).
The results are somewhat mixed.
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| | Book Review Onward To The New Age
by Keith Garebian
HUGH HOOD`S THE NEW AGE series of novels is, as J. M. Cocking said of Prousts Remembrance of Things Past, the Divine Comedy of a religion of art
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| | Book Review Other People`S Wars
by F.J. Mcevoy
GWYNNE DYER Is well known in Canada as a syndicated columnist on international affairs and for his CBC-NFB documentary series "War" and "The Defence of Canada." Now he has produced a book based on the latter in collaboration with Tina Viljoen, who directed and co-wrote the series.
Both the documentary and the book make the case that neutrality is not an unrealistic goal for a country in Canada`s position.
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|  | The Miracle Game
by Josef Skvorecky
Lester & Orpen Dennys
448 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0886193427
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Book Review History`S Handmaiden
by Douglas Glover
JOSEF SKVORECKY GREW UP under the sign of epistemological relativism in the pseudo- Marxist state of post-war Czechoslovakia, and knows that truth -- 11 that elusive perpetrator of the mystery of our lives" -- is history`s handmaiden, that this month`s truth is next month`s treason
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| | Book Review Morley Callaghan 1903-1990
by Joyce Marshall
MORLEY CALLAGHAN, who died on August 25 at the age of 87, was so much a person, so firmly, even stubbornly his own self, that I find that I can only write personally about him. We had a curious friendship, going back for more than 40 years longer if I twist the word to mean friendship on my side even though not yet on his.
I first saw him during the fall of 1938. He was walking in the twilight on Yonge Street near Bloor, round the corner from where I was living.
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| | Book Review Tonal Shifts
by Maurice Mierau
WITH Earthworks Thistledown Press launches New Leaf Editions, a series of poetry books by new writers. Chris Collins`s back-cover photograph, black and white and in profile, makes him look remarkably like Dylan Thomas; whether or not this was intentional, quite a few of the poems have Thomas-like qualities. In a poem called "Herthspring," Collins sounds like he`s overdoing his version of Thomas. In "Newscenes Less Soundspeak" there is the same fascination with sound play, and heavy shades of e.
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| | Book Review Life On The Run
by George Kaufman
THE DOWNFALL OF Ben Johnson was a sad, almost tragic, event, but it did have a saving grace: it opened many people`s eyes to the gritty reality of the international track and field world. Without the shocking drama at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, we wouldn`t have had an important book like Running Risks, an unflinching took into a fascinating world.
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| | Book Review Not Wild About Harry
by Douglas Marshall
THERE`S NO GREAT MYSTERY to the craft of writing successful thrillers. We have it on Ian Fleming`s authority (and who would know better?) that all one has to do is keep the reader turning the pages. By that criterion, strictly interpreted, both these books are moderately successful.
I wish in the case of Harry`s Fragments I could leave it at that, such is my admiration for George Bowering.
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| | Book Review Family News
by H. R. Percy
THAT W. O. MITCHELL`S story of smalltown life at the western extremity of the prairies won me over in the end -- as I hope it will win others -- is as much a tribute to my staying power as to the power of the book itself It is a painfully slow starter. The first part of the book lacks the dramatic tension that keeps a reader turning the pages while characters are introduced, narrative lines developed, landscapes painted.
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| | Book Review Perimeters Of Power
by Desmond Morton
ANYONE WHO INSISTS that Canadians are dull characters Without much to say for themselves or even the words to say it has not met Eugene Forsey nor, to judge from his book, a great many of the people he has encountered in a long, varied, and very useful life.
Some years ago, I had the occasional privilege of inviting Forsey to share his knowledge of labour history with my students. It was an exhausting but thoroughly selfish pleasure.
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| | Innocent Cities
by Jack Hodgins
Mcclelland & Stewart
392 pages $27.95
ISBN: 0771041861
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Book Review Really Not Magic
by Fraser Sutherland
ALTHOUGH MUCH HAS been made of Jack Hodgins`s "magic realism," there is nothing here that would outrage the conventions of the mainstream historical novel. The times and places (the 1880s, Victoria -- with detours to California and Australia) are carefully researched and vividly evoked. A throng of characters jostles eventfully. The plot twists and turns nicely.
The story begins with the encounter of a widower and a widow in a graveyard.
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| | Book Review High Risk
by Chris Whynoti
AT FIRST GLANCE Criminal Neglect looks like the kind of sensationalist book that I tend to avoid. The black cover has the title stamped urgently across the top half in large, blood-red lettering. Underneath there are two authors listed, one a "Dr.," the other an "award-winning journalist," reminiscent of those books where an expert with an axe to grind gets together with someone who can write prose speedy enough to evade our critical filters. Books about conspiracies and scandals.
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| | Book Review A Safe Place
by Merna Summers
A FLOCK OF PIGEONS flutters down toward the balcony of a Toronto apartment. An aging man, whose family duty it is to shoo them away, lets them settle, even though he knows they will foul the balcony.
Mr. Ramgoolam figured that everybody -- even birds -- needed a safe place to land. Surely their wings would tire, he thought. Surely even pigeons, with their innate sense of direction, occasionally needed a point of reference from which they could reassure themselves of their place in the world.
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| | Book Review Aversion To Verse
by Cary Fagan
... could a poem pick you up in Chicago and land you in New York two hours later? Or could it compute a space shot? It had no such powers. And interest was where power was. In ancient times poetry was a force, the poet had real strength in the material world...
Saul Bellow
Humboldt`s Gift
In my country, where poems are seldom found in bookstores or on the lips of small children...
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| | Visions De Jude
by Daniel Poliquin
Editions Quebec/Amerique
301 pages
ISBN: 2890374902
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Book Review Sacred Monsters
by Joyce Marshall
DANIEL POLIQUIN is no newcomer to the literary scene. A Franco Ontarian, born and still resident in Ottawa, he is the author of two earlier novels, the second of which, L`Obomsawin, was short-listed and a close contender for the Trillium Prize in 1987, as well as Nouvelles de la capitale, a book of linked short stories. He has translated two books by Jack Kerouac into French and is Currently translating W. O. Mitchell.
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| | Book Review Canada On Stage
by I. M. Owen
THE INDUSTRIOUS HISTORIAN Robert Bothwell and the extraordinarily industrious historian J. L. Granatstein have produced in Pirouette what is billed, regrettably, as the concluding volume in the Canada in World Affairs series of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. It covers the Trudeau years (including the Clark interlude), 1968 to 1984.
The book is comprehensive and amazingly thorough in its detail.
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| | Interviews The Language Of Resistance
by Beverley Daurio
In her poetry Dionne Brand is rewriting history
`in a way that saves our humanity`
DIONNE BRAND is the author of six books of poetry -- `Fore Day Morning (Khoisan), Earth Magic (Kids Can), Primitive Offensive (Williams-Wallace), Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defence of Claudia (Williams-Wallace), and Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (Williams-Wallace) -- and a collection of short fiction, Sans Souci and Other Stories (WilliamsWallace).
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| | First Novels High Ambitions
by Gary Draper
GENNI GUNN`s Thrice Upon a Time (Quarry, 229 pages, $12.9 5 paper) is a kaleidoscope of a book with three main narrative lines, told from several points of view, and employing a variety of forms. At the novel`s centre is Elise Slayte, who is both literally and figuratively an elusive character. Literally, she is being sought by the police in connection with a baby found abandoned in a canoe
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| | Field Notes True Paytrick Love
by George Bowering
ALL MY LIFE I have had trouble with the national anthem. When I was in grade one I had trouble understanding the words to the Lords Prayer and the words to the national anthem. For instance, "true paytrick love." All around me people were intoning "true paytrick love." I figured "paytrick" must be the way they said Patrick back East.
Christmas carols often bothered me too, of course. "Round yon virgin" had me wondering, until I figured out that a virgin was a sort of stall in a barn.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Ofdesire
by L.B.
ARNOLD RIGGS "stare[s] at the figure of Buddha who said that all suffering was caused by desire." Sexual longing for unreachable partners, carried to a metaphysical extreme, drives David Helwig`s new novel, Of Desire (Viking/Penguin, 231 pages, $24-95 cloth). The plot is thin: Ross Riggs has apparently drowned himself. His second wife, Sandra, along with Arnold and Donald, his two sons by his first wife, recall the past and live through the days until Ross`s body is found and buried.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Scrollofsaqqara
by P. B.
THE PROTAGONIST of Pauline Gedge`s Scroll of Saqqara (Viking/Penguin, 460 pages, $24.95 cloth) is Prince Khaemwaset, fourth son of Pharaoh Ramses 11 (1292-1225 B.C.) and "the greatest magician and physician in Egypt." Apparently, Khaemwaset leads an ideal life: he has a voluptuous wife, two loving teenagers, devoted servants, a magnificent home, and plenty of interesting work
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Songsforthepeople
by D.D.A
A SELECTION OF PIECES -- essays, speeches, poems, letters, and songs -- comprises Songs for the People: Teachings on the Native Way (NC Press, 192 pages, $14.95 paper) by Arthur Solomon, a Nishnawbe (Ojibwa) elder. The book documents a life full of economic, political, and spiritual activism on behalf of Native people
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| | Brief Reviews F.Spincycleandotherstories
by R.R.
EACH TALE IN Judy McCrosky`s Spin Cycle and Other Stories (Thistledown, 63 pages, $6.95 paper) is constructed so that we expect an ethical point to be made. However, most of these short -- very short -- stories are thin, unresolved narratives, as McCrosky reduces her characters to little more than quaint, stylish caricatures. As a result the stories have no substance.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Gallantcanadians
by D.M.
DANIEL O. DANCOCK`S Gallant Canadians: The Story of the Tenth Canadian Infantry Battalion, 1914-1919 (The Calgary Highlanders Foundation/Penguin, 251 pages, $35.00 cloth) focuses on one of the units on which the reputation of the "ever victorious" Canadian Corps was built. Formed in 1914, largely from Calgary and Winnipeg contingents, the Tenth survived a disastrous night attack at 2nd Ypres that later struck the Allied supreme commander, Marshall Ferdinand Foch, as "the finest act in the War
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| | Brief Reviews F.Becomingtania
by P.B.
FORGET REINCARNATION. What if, instead of merely being born again in a brandnew body, the eternal human soul could pass from one body to another while the bodies` owners were still alive? If such a thing were possible, then during the lifetime of one body, several different souls might take turns inhabiting it. Enter Ian Adams, who has based the plot of his latest novel, Becoming Tania (McClelland & Stewart, 304 pages, $26.95 cloth), on the implications of this idea.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Rivierablues
by P.B.
THE BURNING QUESTION in Riviera Blues (Macmillan, 271 pages, $19.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Alottomakeupfor
by N.S.
MONTREAL`S JOHN BUELL, the author of four novels since his debut in 1959 with The Pyx (later made into a movie), is neither prolific nor widely known, but on the evidence of A Lot to Make Up For (HarperCollins, 202 pages, $19.95 cloth), he deserves a wide readership. This is a subtle and well-paced suspense tale, with carefully observed and skilful manipulation of emotions.
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| | Brief Reviews P.Comingfromafar
by M.T.L.
R. A. D. FORD`S Coming from Afar: Selected Poems 1940-89 (McClelland & Stewart, 265 pages, $14.95 paper) is ruminative, wistful, and plain; at its best, as in the Audenesque "Luis Medias Pontual in Red Square," Ford achieves both profundity and technical distinction. A selection of his translations of poets writing in French, Spanish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and German, also included here, is equally impressive.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Playinginthedark
by N.S.
KENT THOMPSON`S fifth novel, Playing in the Dark (Quarry, 139 pages, $12.95 paper), is an intentionally brutal, ugly, and shocking story about a pair of brutal, ugly and shocking misfits: Stringy, an aptly named drifter and petty criminal, and Sharon, a young bank teller who knew Stringy when he was a child and now becomes his girlfriend.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Nightcries
by R.R.
LINKED BY THEIR common air of depressed solitude and the languorous rhythms of Irena Friedman Karafilly`s prose, the six vignettes in Night Cries (Oberon, 131 pages, $12.95 paper) evoke a small Aegean village where life is arduous, culture ancient, and foreigners forever unwelcome.
These are tales of alienated, unaffiliated people who gladly pay the formidable price for the freedom they find in their status as perpetual foreigners.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Properdeafinitions
by C.D.J.
IN Proper Deafinitions: Collected Theorograms (Press Gang, 144 pages, $11.95 paper), Betsy Warland investigates such contemporary feminist issues as the female/feminine body and language, lesbian sexuality, the relationship with mother(s), and incest. Such a book could he stimulating, challenging, important. This one isn`t.
Warland styles herself a language-centred writer. Her frequent forays into word histories aim to release dormant potentialities: "intact, in-, not + tactus, to touch.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Jimmygardiner
by I. M. Owen
IT WAS BAD NEWS last February that Norman Ward, the clear-headed political scientist and engaging humourist, had died. Hence it was cheering when one last book by him appeared, written in collaboration with a younger colleague at the University of Saskatchewan, David E. Smith. It`s Jimmy Gardiner: Relentless Liberal (University of Toronto Press, 415 pages, $45.00 cloth).
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| | Brief Reviews F.Deadandburied
by N.S.
IT WAS BOUND to happen sooner or later: with everyone from junk-food outlets to supermarkets discovering environmentalism, it was only a matter of time before escapist fiction got on the bandwagon. With Dead and Buried (Penguin, 224 pages, $24.95 cloth), his seventh Benny Cooperman novel, Howard Engel serves notice that even mysteries have gone green.
Cooperman is hired by the widow of a truck driver who was killed in an industrial accident.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Littlebitknowsomething
by J.A.
IN THESE CRYSTAL-GAZING DAYS, it`s virtual dogma that truth is most pure when it rises out of the heavily spiced pot of aboriginal mythmaking. While this presumption fed the Castaneda fad and now the New Age movement, it rather begs the question of what it all means to a professional anthropologist. In Little Bit Know Something (Douglas & McIntyre, 281 pages, $16
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| | Brief Reviews F.Thelovesongofromeopaquette
by L.B.
AN EDMONTON ROOMING-HOUSE serves as Cecelia Frey`s "ship of fools" in The Love Song of Romeo Paquette (Thistledown, 160 pages, $14.95 paper), 15 linked stories introduced by a prologue and ending with a reprise. Most of the stories are told through the consciousness of the title character, the caretaker of the roominghouse.
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| | Children's Books Reading For A Difficult Age
by Dave Jenkinson
Developmental psychologists tell us that between childhood and adulthood there exists a stage called "adolescence." Those who are in this stage are tagged "adolescents" or "young adults," and are often thought too old for "children`s" books but not ready for the length or complexity of "adult" novels. As a result, adolescents, since the 1960s, have had fiction titles especially written for and marketed to them. The best of this YA lit. (sometimes also called Ad. lit.
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| | Great Authors Fellow Travellers
by Phil Hall
A. WHY ARE we two?
B. I have created you because I find that my opinions of Gary Geddes`s poetry and prose are widely divergent, that I am an avid fan while also wanting to be a sort of "constructive heckler."
A. Which am I to be?
B. Your choice. I am borrowing this format from James Dickey who discussed Randall Jarrell this way.
A.
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| | Great Authors The Schooling Of Women
by Cynthia Flood
WE HEARD THAT Nora Darragh, a senior on our thirdfloor hall in the residence, was going to be a model after she got her general arts B.A. the next year, 1957. Already there were pictures of her in magazines, even in American ones; for modelling, her name was Norah Darcy. We were in Honours. In the residence dining room, Nora`s cheekbones angled up as she looked down at the tapioca, whipped potatoes, macaroni, canned pears. We cleaned our plates.
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