 | Glottal Stop:101 Poems
by Paul Celan translated by Nicolai Popov & Heather McHugh
University of New England
192 pages $37.95 cloth
ISBN: 0819564486
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Book Review Celan's 101 PoemsùTranslating the Ineffable
by Diana Fitzgerald Bryden
Translation is a loving art. While all writers confront the fact that they'll never be entirely satisfied with the end result, translators are burdened with the sense of having failed someone other than themselves. Nicolai Popov and Heather McHugh must be dissatisfied with some aspects of their translations of Paul Celan (a near certainty supported by the fact that they jettisoned a third of their work), but for them a sense of pride in Glottal Stop would be fully justified.
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| | Book Review Carr, O'Keeffe and Kahlo.Inspired by Places and Myths
by Nancy Wigston
Unlike most books, this one has an odd, even challenging aura: pale, tall, and narrow, with sideways printing on the front cover. In a way its exterior mirrors the women artists author Sharyn Udall chooses to examine: each one eccentric, tenacious, original. Inside is a treasure of first-rate illustrations, and a wealth of engaging commentary.
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| | Book Review Point du vue
by David Homel
Martine Desjardins, contrary to most French Quebec writers, began her first novel, Le cercle de Clara, in English. The reason was one of inspiration and serendipity. As a girl, she used to spend her summers on Prince Edward Island, this being a rarity in itself, because outside of the "petits QuTbecs" in Old Orchard, Maine or Hollywood, Florida, a vacation outside of Quebec for French-speaking families was (and largely still is) something unusual
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|  | Ice Lake
by John Farrow
HarperCollins
382 pages $32 Cloth
ISBN: 0002255146
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Book Review Moral Inquiry Kept Active by Detective Cinq-Mars
by Keith Nickson
The English just love a literary tempest in a teapot. Starting in thespring and sputtering on through the summer, critics for such decent publications as The Observer, The New Statesmen and Granta harrumphed aboutùwait for itùthe 'death of the English novel.' Yes, it sounds like a case of dTja vu all over again, but the key argument is worth noting.
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| | Book Review A Critique of a Critic. T. F. Rigelhof Takes on Amis in the War Against ClichT
by T. F. Rigelhof
Spending three or so weeks in Britain each year is more time than I ever need to become irritated, exasperated, and finally bored by English newspapers in all their sectionsùexcept for æSports' where the actual standard of play still gets reported. (If a match was rubbish, they do say so.) Otherwise, the broadsheets are much of a muchness and give columns of opinion precedence over reportage in a way that's becoming overly-familiar to Canadian readers, thanks to the National Post
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| | Book Review Acorn, Lemm and Ojibway. A Recollection of Milton Acorn
by Richard Lemm
I first met Milton Acorn in the early sixties when I was a freshman at McGill, just arrived in Montreal from a small town in the Laurentians and beginning to discover that there were poets in the world beside the three Williams and a few others who colonized the high school curriculum. There were even Canadian poets, I learned, apart from John MacRae.
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|  | Cape Breton Road
by D. R. MacDonald
Harcourt, Brace
288 pages $32.95 paper
ISBN: 0151005230
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Book Review Growing Weed in the Ass-End of Nowhere
by Joan Givner
The narrative is classic in its simplicity: a young man in the grip of a criminal compulsion gets a police record and, because his parents have neglected to register him as a U.S. citizen, finds himself deported back to Canada. He returns to rural Cape Breton which he left as a child and where his family has deep ancestral roots. There he lives in the old family home, with a rough, hard-drinking, womanizing, bachelor uncle.
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| | Book Review Gay Fiction Speaks, but Who's Listening
by Stan Persky
In Richard Canning's intelligent and sensitive conversations with a dozen contemporary gay male novelists, Gay Fiction Speaks, as the title proclaims, speaks. But I wonder if anyone is listening. Or, more precisely, I wonder if as many people are listening as a decade ago. I'll come back to that but, first, if gay fiction speaks, let's find out what it's saying.
Canning, who teaches literature at Sheffield University in England, has wisely chosen a broad range of writers to interview.
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| | Book Review A Study of Emily Carr
by Linda Morra
Susan Crean's The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr is another attempt to determine what and how Carr "means" in Canadian postmodern culture, even as it also attempts to contextualize Carr within her own period. As such, Crean's book is a contribution to a growing body of critical work that is proliferating around Carr and that marks a resurgence of interest in her work and person.
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| | Book Review Greed and Lies: The Dark Tale of Thalidomide
by Patrick Taylor
In early 1961, while working in an Irish prenatal clinic I frequently prescribed Distaval for women who were afflicted with morning sickness. I shudder to think what damage my well-meant efforts to alleviate morning sickness may have inflicted. Distaval was the Distillers Company's trade name for a recently introduced sedative and anti-nauseant. Its technical name was Thalidomide
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| | Book Review More Teen Angst but with Style
by Lauren Mechling
Vancouver writer Kelli Deeth has a peculiar way with words. Like a sadistic matchmater, she couples them in odd little combinations that are often so energetic that they set the tamest of passages ablaze. In The Girl Without Anyone, Deeth's assured first book, she assiduously arranges words into compact clusters that brim with vim and honesty. On the book's first page, Deeth showcases her ability to express clunky, difficult moments with economy and wit
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| | Book Review Life and Death in a Bombay Tenament
by Nikki Abraham
Manil Suri packs his 295-page novel with memorable characters, convincing dialogue, dramatic, pathos-inspiring, and humorous situations, and open-ended meaningûûno small achievement. On its most superficial level, The Death of Vishnu follows the inhabitants of a small middle-class apartment building in Bombay (Mumbai) over the course of 24 hours. The building, besides housing those who rent the individual flats within its four storeys, is central to a whole host of people.
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| | Book Review DeLillo's Time is a Hard Body to Fathom
by Julie Chibbaro
Don DeLillo, in an interview with Gerald Howard, 1997: "The novel is a very open form. It will accommodate large themes and whole landscapes of experience. . . The novel expands, contracts, becomes essaylike, floats in pure consciousnessùit gives the writer what he needs to produce a book that duplicates, a book that models the rich, dense, and complex weave of actual experience.
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|  | The Cottage Builder's Letter
by George Murray
McClealland & Stewart
99 pages $16.99 paper
ISBN: 0771066724
|  | Credo
by Carmine Starnino
McGill-Queen's
52 pages $16.95 paper
ISBN: 0773519076
|  | Days into Flatspin
by Ken Babstock
Anansi
81 pages $16.95 paper
ISBN: 0887846580
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Book Review Out with Purdysim! Let the new poets sing!
by Derek Webster
AlPurdy was a mediocre poet, but his influence is seen in so many poets that his importance to our national literature is undeniable: whatever has happened so far, Purdy has been a part of it. I wish I had known Al Purdy, because he was, by every account, an incredible man. Still, part of me is not sad, for meeting him would certainly have made that much harder the task of distinguishing the man from his work.
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| | Book Review Kind and Funny Writing
by Clara Thomson
For an enthusiast of Canadian Literature, it is satisfying to remember the years of the late sixties and seventies, for they were our "golden years". The heady combination of Canada's Centennial in 1967 and the beginning of the Trudeau years released a wave of nationalism that transformed Canadian Studies.
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|  | Completed Field Notes
by Robert Kroetsch
University of Alberta Press
256 pages $19.95 paper
ISBN: 0888643500
|  | This Tremour Love Is
by Daphne Marlatt
Talonbooks
112 pages $15.95 paper
ISBN: 0889224501
|  | Steveston
by Daphne Marlatt
Ronsdale Press
112 pages paper
ISBN: 0921870809
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Book Review Kroetch and Marlatt's Outstanding Field Work
by Rob McLennan
Completed Field Notes, is Robert Kroetsch's continuing poem, started in 1973, with his "Stone Hammer Poems" (Oolichan Books, 1975). Considered, in essays and reviews, to be one of the most important written of so many other times and ways, this is poetry that shows a body how it is done.
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| | Interviews An Interview with Trevor Ferguson
by David Solway
Trevor Ferguson is the author of six novels, including The Timekeeper which won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 1996. Under the pseudonym of John Farrow he has also published two acclaimed crime fiction novels which have become international best sellers. Ferguson has been a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta and an invitTe d'honneur at the Salon des Livres following the translation of several of his works into French. He lives in Hudson, Quebec.
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| | Interviews Nancy Huston Unbound
by Nancy Wigston
Nancy Wigston speaks with the Canadian-born Author about
her latest, work, her past, and her return to writing in English
Born in Calgary in 1953, Nancy Huston moved to New Hampshire when she was fifteen, then to Paris at age twenty, where she has remained. A rarity among anglophones, Huston began her career writing in French. Les Variations Goldberg was published in 1981 and won the Prix Contrepoint. Seven novels and numerous works of nonfiction followed.
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| | Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor,
In "The Trouble with Annie: David Solway Unmakes Anne Carson"(Books in Canada, July 2001), David Solway finds himself thinking that "...Carson doesn't exist but is rather the creation of a couple of heavyweight critics and a swarm of quailing lightweights straggling alone in their wake." I hope to be counted among the former, but fear I may be one of the latter.
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| | Essays George Fetherling
Gloria Emerson wrote one of the most important and affecting studies of the Vietnam War. The moment I opened Winners and Losers in 1978 I was moved by an emotion that I hadn't found in what were then far more famous and influential works on the same subject, such as David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. In the intervening years, Emerson published only two other books, Some American Men and Gaza: A Year in the Intifada, neither of which seemed to me to recapture her early passion.
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|  | Water Wings
by Kristen den Hartog
Knopf Canada
225 pages $29.95 paper
ISBN: 0676972934
|  | What We All Want
by Michelle Berry
Random House Canada
239 pages $32.95 paper
ISBN: 0679310770
|  | As Getting to Normal
by Sandra Campbell
Stoddart
244 pages $29.95 paper
ISBN: 0773732799
| |  | Open Arms
by Marina Endicott
Douglas & McIntyre
248 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 1550548409
|  | Lenny Bruce is Dead
by Jonathan Goldstein
Coach House Books
155 pages $17.95 paper
ISBN: 1552450694
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First Novels First Novels
by W.P Kinsella
It appears this may be the year of the cathartic first novel. In the early pages of the six novels reviewed here we have two mothers and a grandfather dead, a reminiscence of a father's death, an elderly man suffering a massive stroke, and a child taken deathly ill.
On the heels of two highly praised story collections (Object of Your Love, and The Counsel of the Moon) Dorothy Speak gives us The Wife Tree, (Random House Canada, 312 pages, $32.
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|  | Sputnik Diner
by Rick Maddocks
Knopf Canada
283 pages $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0676973787
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Janet French
Fiction
Laced together with vivid images of Southern Ontario's sprawling tobacco fields, Sputnik Diner (Knopf Canada, 283 pages, $29.95 , ISBN: 0676973787) peers into the lives of curious folk in small-town Nanticoke. Composed of five related short stories, Maddocks' debut book tells bizarre anecdotes with unfaltering realism and unforgettable characters.
Born in Wales and raised in Southern Ontario, Maddocks' first short story, "Plane People", is essentially biographical.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Barbara Turner Kinsella
Fiction
Sarah Dearing's Courage my Love (Stoddart Publishing Co Ltd., 196 pages, $22.95, paper, ISBN: 0773762108) is a marvelously entertaining search for identity, sensuality, and ultimate redemption. Phillipa Maria Donahue, shell-shocked after the loss of her unborn child, rethinks the ill considered marriage that brought her from Cincinnati to Toronto.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by John Sinopoli
Fiction
Helen Humphreys likes to give her female protagonists plenty of gender battles to contend with. In her two works to date, characters are placed in settings well before their time; and forced to struggle in male-dominated arenas in which gender-defined difficulties both hold them back and drive them.
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| | Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
He Also Wrote Children's Books
With the exception of a thoughtful passage in John Fraser's remebrance of the late great Mordecai Richler, the magnificent legacy that he left to Canadian children's literature was sloughed off. That's no surprise reallyùthe adult literary world doesn't regard children's literature as its equal.
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| | Children's Books Four Czech Chicks
by Gillian O'Reilly
Appropriate to a nation of immigrants, Canadian children's books in the last two decades have been enriched by the talents of four dynamic illustrators from the Czech Republic (formerly part of Czechoslovakia). Perhaps their birthplace is not so surprising, however, given that the first children's picture book (an illustrated encyclopedia) was written by a Czech educator and bishop in 1658.
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|  | Flying Geese
by Barbara Haworth-Attard
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
192 pages $14.95 paper
ISBN: 0006485731
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Hardley Dyer
Margaret Brown's life is falling to pieces. After her father is injured in an accident, her family is forced to abandon their Saskatchewan farm and move to London, Ontario. To make matters worse, her older brother is off to fight in World War I and there's a new baby on the way.
Moving from "Country life" to "City life" is a difficult adjustment for the entire family, especially as Mr. Brown struggles to find work. Margaret, awkward and outspoken, finds comfort in her memories.
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|  | Raven's End
by Ben Gadd
McClelland and Stewart
347 pages $34.99 cloth
ISBN: 077103251X
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Lena Coakley
Colin has lost his memory. He can't even remember the predators he is supposed to stay away from, not coyotes, not lynx, not even the most dangerous of allùhumans. Luckily, he meets fellow ravens Zack and Molly and eventually joins the Raven's End flock. But dreams and prophetic visions lead Colin away from his new family on a quest for his lost identity.
In Raven's End, Ben Gadd brings his experience as a naturalist and mountain climber to a tale of adventure in the Canadian Rockies.
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