| Book Review An Argument With Darkness
by Mary Di Michele
IN "IF A POEM Could Walk," Loma Crozier proposes that the poem is both "tame" and "wild," that it is not human, walking as it does on "paws, not feet." Wittgenstein has written that at the centre of every great work of art there is the sense of "a
wild animal - tamed." The inverse is also true, true of Crozier`s poetry, that at the centre of every domectic scene, every ,creature that is caged is released.
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| | Book Review Going For Baroque
by Norman Snider
HE STEALS into my office," Peter Newman begins his mini?profile of Joe Clark, "like a wild fawn caught eating broccoli." For connoisseurs of the genre, this is a veritable golden oldie of Newman metaphor, melding the unlikely comparison with the unintentionally surreal
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| | Book Review The Continent Of Silence
by Phil Hall
MARLENE NOURBESE PHILIP is the 1988 winner in poetry in English of the prestigious Casa de Ias Americas Prize. She won the $4,000 award for a manuscript called She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, to be published in Havana later this year. Nourbese Philip is the first anglophone woman to win the award, and the second Canadian. (Austin Clarke won it in 1980.)
Likely, though, you've never heard of her. I hadn't either.
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| | Book Review A State Of Strangeness
by Douglas Glover
In Moscow and Leningrad, editors are stampeding to publish the lost, banned, repressed, and expatriated literature of the past 70 years. In the process, the new generation of writers is being crowded off the pages of the official magazines
AT 2 A.M. on my second night at the Russiya Hotel in Moscow, I was awakened by a knock at the door. Half asleep, I stumbled into my Calvin Mein boxer shorts ? if it was the KGB, I wanted to show them the best the free world had to offer.
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| | Book Review The Voice Of Reasonableness
by Desmond Morton
IT OFTEN SEEMS that civil liberties are more honoured in the long-ago and far-away than in the here and now. in Britain, cradle of our free institutions, the bar to self-incrimination has been sacrificed to the war with the I.R.A. In the United States, George Bush campaigners found a weapon in Michael Dukakis`s membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. Canada finally offered compensation to JapaneseCanadian internees, but only 45 years later, when half of them were dead.
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| | Book Review Wish You Were Here
by Thomas Carpenter
Back again under these cliffs. The sea stretches tight and grey as canvas out to a cold curved horizon. My children wade the pools searching for crabs. My mind lets go and for a moment I am back thirty years a child in these same pools free and running with the long tides in the bright weather Triumphant, my son holds up a crab, his face alight, wanting my Praise.
CHRISTOPHER WISEMAN`S poem "Filey Brig" consists of the above four sentences introduced by one other incomplete sentence.
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| | Book Review Action And Reaction
by Barbara Carey
A FEW YEARS ago, in an article in This Magazine, Paulette Jiles lamented that most of women`s writing was about relationships (with men); she urged women writers to explore new forms of fiction that would allow for female protagonists who were active, rather than just reactive, and whose sense of self and purpose did not hinge on the male species.
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| | Book Review Fair Weather Warning
by Erin Moure
ACCORDING TO the press release, Poets 88 "showcases what is innovative and challenging in Canadian poetry right now." In the introduction, the editors` claim is more modest: " . .27 distinctive voices, each telling you something new about the times in which we are living." The book finished, it is the more modest claim that wins out: the times, I report, are conservative, technically capable, and safe
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| | Book Review One For Solitude
by Brian Fawcett
EASTERN EUROPEAN writers, particularly those living in exile, seem irritatingly prone to fiddling with their cultural underwear in public. They do it constantly, obsessively and at times skilfully enough that North Americans - who generally don`t even own cultural underwear -have taken to it as a minor spectator sport
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|  | Coming Attractions
by David Helwig And Maggie Helwig
Oberon
128 pages $12.95
ISBN: 0887507239
|
Book Review Surprising Voices
by Marni Jackson
IN A NOVEL, irony can become tedious ? alL that knowingness. But in the short story, irony is perfect: astringent, mischievous, and double?edged, it can infuse a simple story or a string of images with sidelong meaning. And since Canadians are for some reason deeply afflicted by, or gifted with, irony, it follows that they can be accomplished, even dazzling, short story writers
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| | Book Review The Proof Of The Pudding
by T. F. Rigelhof
THIS IS a gem of a book: polished and multi-faceted, hard, cutting and brilliant, it reflects more light than is easily assessed on first viewing, But the metaphor shouldn`t be pressed too far because unlike an actual jewel, this book is neither costly nor precious nor lacking in reality
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| | Book Review After The Fire
by Jane Rule
THE FIRE had bloomed into the winter night before the fire truck could get there, skidding through the slush, spewing out mud from the deep pot holes of the dirt road. Behind it came the old water truck, even more slowly, and behind that a line of vehicles that might have been resurrected from the wrecking yard for the occasion.
"Christ! Do you think Dickie's still in there?" Homer, the driver of the fire truck, shouted to the young woman sitting next to him.
Karen Tasuki didn't reply.
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| | Book Review Bidder And Better
by I. M. Owen
THE ORIGINAL SCHEME for a Hurtig encyclopedia, which was first invited and then turned down by the Canada Council, was drawn up by Morris Wolfe and me, and we were going to be its editors. I mention this at the outset in case any reader who remembers the fact suspects that it colours my response to the actual book. It doesn't, because this work is very different from what we envisaged, and much more ambitious.
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| | Book Review A Dream Like His
by John Flood, M. T. Kelly
WITH REGARD to what is otherwise an insightful profile of M. T. Kelly in the November issue of Books in Canada, I would like to comment on what I believe to be a false impression about the publishing history of his award?winning novel, A Dream Like Mine.
It is quite inaccurate to say that he "was unable at first to find anyone who'd publish his most masterly achievement, 11 and that "once the book was certified as popular, it was accepted for publication (by Stoddart)
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| | Book Review The Past
by Jack Mcleod
TWO OF CANADA`S best hisFo-ri ans have laboured over this book, and the question is: why? It is too short to be interesting or very useful. With 1,600 en tries and many tables and chronologies, Bercuson and Granatstein have produced a compressed desk-top book that in many ways reflects their skill and good sense, and they have a lot of both. The entries are terse, the information reliable, the illustrations numerous.
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| | Book Review No Redeeming Social Value
by Douglas Hill
ROGER CARON knows his stuff, his prison experiences informed an admirable autobiography, Go?Boy!, and a fine book of reportage, Bingo!. The fictional flatness of JoJo (Stoddart, 180 pages, $19.95 cloth) thus makes for a considerable disappointment. Caron tells the story of a young half?Sioux, raised on a reserve in Manitoba, who as a teenager is placed for adoption in Kansas and eventually jailed there.
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| | Book Review Canon Fodder
by Kenneth Mcgoogan
NOT SO LONG ago, writing in the The New York Times Book Review, Bharati Mukherjee, an ex-Canadian, argued convincingly that immigration is the opposite of expatriation. By refusing to play the game of immigration, she suggested, psychological expatriates "certify to the world, and especially to their hosts, the purity of their pain and their moral superiority to the world around them.
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| | Book Review Sweetness And Light With Black Edges
by Patricia Morley
THE AIR IN CANADA must be good for writers. Clearly, it`s keeping them young. The season includes a new novel from Morley Callaghan at 85 (A Wild Old Man on the Road); Pierre Berton, at 68, is just hitting his stride (The Arctic Grail); and now W. 0. Mitchell, at 75, offers us his best work since the 1947 classic, Who Has Seen the Wind.
Ladybug, Ladybug . . . is a wonderful mixture of life, laughter, and reflection.
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| | Book Review Another Night Visit
by Chris Whynoti
'Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their
own humanity ... it's only made them uncomfortable'
IT'S LATE, past 11:30, and the crowd is dwindling. The last of those who paid extra for the privilege are lined up to get autographs, to make small talk, to take away with them some memento, some remembered connection with the presence in that room. Margaret Atwood has been "on" now, for more than three hours. At last she sits to sign a final few books, a gracious, exhausted, purple presence
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| | Book Review The Deep South
by D.G.
SOVIET Georgia is a curious mix of California, Texas, and Greece. When I arrived in Tbil isi after a damp, chilly three days in Moscow, it was evening
and a dry, warm wind was blowing from the mountains, A fleet of gleaming white Volgas full of Georgian writers and writers' union officials raced out onto
the runway, to greet me
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| | Book Review More Morley
by Joel Yanofsky
IT MAY NOT be enough to ensure a writer's reputation, but there is something to be said for longevity. Morley Callaghan's long career. is proof that a writer can Outlast both his detractors and his fans. 'At 86, he is a model of stamina and consistency. Whether he was being praised by Hemingway, a fellow expatriate in the Paris of the 1920s, or ignored by CanLit critics in the period following the Second World War, Callaghan has never changed his motives or methods
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| | Interviews Treasure Islands, Sean Virgo
by Nancy Wigston
I spent three months in Makira, where Kareimanua, the shark?man,
originated. Canoeing around coastal villages, collecting
stories, gawping at Paradise like an eight?year?old
SEAN VIRGO, a poet and short story writer, (White Lies and other Fictions, Through the Eyes of a Cat) published his first novel, Selakhi, in 1987.
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| | Letters to Editor His Life In Part
by Paul Stuewe
I WOULD LIKE to express my admiration for the mastery of the book?reviewer's art exhibited by George Woodcock in his notice of my The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner in your November issue. One of my pet peeves is the reviewer who tells you all about a book before you've had a chance to read it, and Woodcock certainly can't be faulted on that score.
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| | Letters to Editor Mistaken Identity
by Susan Crean
I GUESS I should be grateful that Norman Snider mentioned my name at all in his omnibus review of three anthologies of articles on the free trade deal (November). In discussing "The
Free Trade Deal," edited by Duncan Cameron, Snider writes "One of (Daniel) Drache's more interesting points is that Toronto under free trade will become more important to North America but less important to other Canadians.
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| | Letters to Editor Lowering The Boom
by Myrna Koalash
WHILE IT IS very pleasant to be noticed in your review of Yarmarok (Canadian Institute of Canadian Studies) in the December issue, I cannot allow Norman Sigurdson to get away with the unforgivable error of making me older than I am Having been born in the re doubtable year 1944, 1 do no belong? to that "group of writer born in Canada in the decade or so before the Second World War.
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| | Prose/Poetry Poetry
by Thomas Carpenter
Derek Wynand’s writing might be called the poetry of contentment. It does not rage against the world or seek out the sharp little implications of our common assumptions. It rarely asks the question, “Why?” Instead it sketches pictures of acceptance, and the measured life,
But now, like you, I have no goals:
We watch the apples burn up on
Their branches; we listen to the
Rooster crow, and that seems enough.
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| | Great Authors The Myself Generation
by I. M. Owen
ME, MYSELF, AND I: We are all disappointed, and none more than myself 'Me use of myself for I or me must be a fairly recent genteelism; it isn't mentioned in Fowler's Modern English Usage. But Gowers in his revision of Fowler gives it a glancing blow; Collins says that "careful users of English" don't do it; and the members of the American Heritage Usage Panel get violent about it: "a prissy evasion ... the refuge of idiots taught early that me is a dirty word.
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