 | Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Vintage Canada $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0676974945
|
Book Review A Review of: Cloud Atlas
by Michael Greenstein
Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes offers a portrait of the accordion as
protagonist; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas structures itself in the
shape of an accordion with the first and last sections as bookends
squeezing the intervening musical narratives. Relying less on
traditional subplot than on more experimental multiple plots, Cloud
Atlas covers large tracts of time and space between Mitchell's own
islands of England (his birthplace) and Japan (where he has taught for
several years). He continues in the vein of his earlier novels,
Ghostwritten and Number9Dream, shape-shifting the genre under the
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Line of Beauty
by Eric Miller
W.H. Auden concluded his 1941 poem "At the Grave of Henry James" with
this stanza:
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead:
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Like Auden, Nick Guest, the protagonist of Allan Hollinghurst's Man
...
Read more...
|  | Rue du Regard
by Todd Swift
DC Books $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 091968811X
|
Book Review A Review of: Rue du Regard
by Andrew Steinmetz
Following Budavox (1999) and Caf Alibi (2002), Todd Swift's Rue du
Regard completes the final part of a trilogy. Written while the poet
stayed in Paris and London, Rue du Regard "has something to do with
looking: in, out, back and ahead."
The collection is named after a street opposite where Swift lived for
two years "in the 6th, near le Nemrod caf, which is the best in
Paris". Rue du Regard is tale of two cities. Paris is a place "made
for, and from Cinema". It is "agelessly sad, sexual and sadistic".
London is the Unreal City (all this, and more, you can learn from
...
Read more...
|  | Snow Water
by Michael Longley
Jonathan Cape $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0224072579
|
Book Review A Review of: Snow Water
by Michael Kinsella
Michael Longley has written some of the finest war poems in the
English language. Born and brought up in Belfast, Longley, like many
Irish poets, has felt a responsibility to respond to the violence in
Ulster. "Wreaths" from The Echo Gate (1979) is a well-known sequence
of harrowing poems that bring us into the homes and lives of those who
have suffered. The intimacy and the pity of the sequence are in its
details-the wife of a murdered civil servant who "took a hammer and
chisel/ And removed the black keys from his piano"; the tangerines,
dates, chestnuts sold by a greengrocer before he was shot dead in his
...
Read more...
|  | Bonfires
by Chris Banks
Nightwood Editions $18.81 Paperback
ISBN: 0889711968
|
Book Review A Review of: Bonfires
by John Lofranco
"In the direction of little towns," the opening poem of Chris Banks's
debut collection Bonfires, gave me shivers. I admit to being nostalgic
about the Eastern Ontario landscape he recreates in the book, but this
bias, I think, also insulates me from any false praise. I am
particularly sensitive to any attempt to call up Purdy's "country
north of Belleville," and not for poetic reasons (Purdy I can take or
leave), but because I spent my childhood and adolescent summers there.
Banks piles image upon image, creating a landscape where "everything
disassembles itself/into some new clarity." Cows become crows become
...
Read more...
|  | Gabriel's Wing
by Allan Cooper
Gaspereau Press $20.07 Paperback
ISBN: 1894031830
|
Book Review A Review of: GabrielÆs Wing
by John Lofranco
Allan Cooper opens his collection, Gabriel's Wing-yet another
beautifully made book from Gaspereau Press-with a single poem that
sets a rural and nostalgic tone. "The Driftwood Man" is an exemplar of
concise simplicity. Eastern influences are apparent from the start:
The potatoes grow
in neat rows
beside the brook.
The earth
breathes evenly.
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Minstrel's Daughter
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Seeing the world through somebody else's eyes takes on a whole new
eye-popping meaning in Alberta author Linda Smith's delightfully
exciting first novel in the Songs of Freya series, a follow-up to her
earlier Freyan Trilogy. Young readers -even older ones for that
matter-who enjoyed the adventures of Wind Shifter, Sea Change and The
Turning Time will get a kick out of this new story that takes place
forty years after the first trilogy.
As a former children's librarian with a BLS from the University of
Alberta and a credit in Writing for Children from Boston's Simmons
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Warding of Willowmere
by M. Wayne Cunningham
"Why should a witch be phoning a nun?" That's one of the many
questions Willowmere teenager, Claire Norton, must find an answer to
as she tip-toes through a minefield of mind games between Wiccans,
witches, warlocks, and daimons, good and bad, in Alison Baird's second
volume in the Willowmere Chronicles. Claire's tight wire act is as
suspenseful as any you'll find. For the Claire Norton you see really
isn't Claire Norton, or at least not just Claire Norton. She's also a
revenant, a reincarnation of a 17th century Scottish lass, Alice
Ramsay, and before that of Flower-in-a-drought, a maiden in the
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, Book Two in the Underland Chronicles
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Eleven-year-old Gregor and his two-year-old sister, Boots, are
down-to-earth kids, literally and figuratively. Twice now they've
tumbled down tunnels beneath New York City, first from their apartment
building basement, then from Central Park, into the Underland to
pursue adventures, decipher prophecies and defeat evil doers in the
guise of giant rats and ancient aquatic reptiles. And in their wake
they've left reviewers gasping with praise and readers clamouring for
more.
In Suzanne Collins's second novel in the Underland Chronicles, it's
...
Read more...
|  | Take the Stairs
by Karen Krossing
Second Story Press $9.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1896764762
|
Book Review A Review of: Take The Stairs
by Tim McGrenere
Karen Krossing's first novel for teens begins with an interesting
premise: thirteen stories told from the perspective of thirteen
different teenagers who all live in the same run-down apartment
building. Each character tells a story of personal adversity, and most
end with some form of personal triumph. Petra escapes "the Building",
as it is called by the tenants, and an abusive father. Tanya lets her
leg hair grow and faces social humiliation at the pool to escape the
repressive "beauty myth". Jennifer comes out of the closet. The
stories intersect somewhat, with various characters re-appearing
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: A Thief in the House of Memory
by Antony Di Nardo
All the ingredients for what may well be a gothic murder mystery are
in place in this page-turner for young adults by two-time G-G winner,
Tim Wynne-Jones: the body that is found in the abandoned, ancestral
mansion; the persistent suspicions that a murder took place; and the
surprising twists as the reader nears the end. Tim Wynne-Jones,
however, eschews the murder mystery formula in order to achieve
something entirely different, a novel of suspense that examines memory
as a central theme in the shaping of experience.
Declan Steeple is a bright16-year old whose memories of his absent
...
Read more...
|  | After Sylvia
by Alan Cumyn
Douglas & McIntyre / Groundwood $18.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0888996128
|
Book Review A Review of: After Sylvia
by Antony Di Nardo
Packaged as a sequel to the award-winning The Secret Life of Owen
Skye, Alan Cumyn's new book for children, After Sylvia, is likewise a
daily parade of mishaps, unfortunate events and those house-bound
adventures of boyhood that befall Owen Skye. The crystal radio set
catches fire, he masters the art of one-handed egg cracking by, well,
breaking a lot of eggs, and with the help of his two brothers he
accidentally crashes an old boat into the side of his father's station
wagon. He's funny, but not because he wants to be; Owen has that sad
clown aura about him. However, he can shake it off when he's after
...
Read more...
|  | Jabberwocky
by Lewis Carroll, Stephane Jorisch
Kids Can Press $18.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1553370791
|
Book Review A Review of: Jabberwocky
by Olga Stein
"Jabberwocky", the mock-heroic' poem that is famously part of Lewis
Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, is rich in word-play and sound
dynamics. The poem, which combines proper words with nonsense-type
words, steers the reader towards a general grasp of the events
described, but its full meaning is evasive. Carroll's word inventions
serve to mock not just the heroics' of the young man, but also the
gibberish-like admonitions of the father, rendering dubious all of his
pronouncements, including those that pertain to the Jabberwock.
Stphane Jorisch, whose illustrated Jabberwocky, has recently garnered
...
Read more...
|  | Peg and the Yeti
by Kenneth Oppel, Barbara Reid
Harper Collins Canada $19.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005387
|
Book Review A Review of: Peg and the Yeti
by Olga Stein
Peg is the child of fisher-folk, and by eight years of age, an expert
at fishing herself. A girl with ambition, who wants, "big, better, and
best," she decides it's time to reach for new heights, and sets out to
climb Mount Everest. Peg can do anything she puts her mind to, and
before long, she is half-way up the mountain, undaunted by the
precipices, chasms, and powerful winds. She finds a cave to spend the
night. In the cave sleeps a giant, fierce Yeti who becomes furious
when wakened by the plucky little girl. Pork scruncheons from Peg's
food supply bag soon soften the bad-tempered Yeti, and he attaches
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Stella, Princess of the Sky
by Olga Stein
Stella, still a little girl herself, never loses patience with her
younger brother Sam, even though he questions her relentlessly about
the sun, moon, and everything he encounters around him. Stella, of
Marie-Louise Gay's Stella, Princess of the Sky (also nominated for the
2004 Governor General's Award for Children's book illustration), is
unfailingly imaginative in the answers she supplies. She's also clever
at dispelling her brother's fears of wild animals and the dark, and at
turning his imagination to more pleasant thoughts.
While preparing to spend the night camping in their backyard, Stella
...
Read more...
|  | Galveston
by Paul Quarrington
Random House Canada $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0679312366
|
Book Review A Review of: Galveston
by Paul Keen
I was fortunate that my adolescence coincided with a particular string
of Hollywood movies, all of them equally forgettable and, with the
perverse logic that is adolescence, equally memorable. Towering
Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure. I was not quite the
minimum recommended age, which is to say, I was the perfect age. I
loved every minute of them. They worked because they followed a
reliable formula. A small group of people thrown into extraordinary
circumstances through sheer bad luck. Together they face the kind of
pressure that inspires heroism or, more frequently, exposes the cracks
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Lighthousekeeping
by Michael Harris
In her first novel since rounding off a seven-book cycle, Jeanette
Winterson presents Lighthousekeeping-a slim volume on Love, Time, and
plucky perseverance despite Orphan Annie-type troubles.
Our Scottish heroine is named merely Silver ("I was born part precious
metal part pirate"). The absence of a surname is appropriate as Silver
lacks blood family and, being young, a past. Dad was a lusty sailor
who dropped anchor for a night and was gone with the morning bird. Mom
fell to her grisly death during an ill-conceived climbing expedition,
which left poor Silver to be taken in by the kindly, blind lighthouse
...
Read more...
|  | Vanishing Point
by David Markson
Shoemaker & Hoard $22.5 Paperback
ISBN: 1593760108
|
Book Review A Review of: Vanishing Point
by Jeff Bursey
There is often truth in an author's belief that reviewers are hostile
to invention. Dale Peck, with his jeremiads in Hatchet Jobs: Writings
on Contemporary Fiction on the works of DeLillo, Pynchon, Faulkner,
William Gaddis and Rick Moody, presents the spectacle of one angry man
in a rope pull against Titans. The London Review of Books, proud to be
heterodox when it comes to political and social issues, is staid in
its opinions concerning fiction, while the Times Literary Supplement
also disappoints. Middlebrow writers such as E. Annie Proulx, Louis de
Bernires and Roddy Doyle are brand names reviewers respect, and the
...
Read more...
|  | Refusal Shoes
by Tony Saint
Serpents Tail $16.16 Paperback
ISBN: 1852427736
|
Book Review A Review of: Refusal Shoes
by Tim McGrenere
The 2003 movie, Love, Actually, opens with a series of sugar-sweet
soft-glow images of London's Heathrow Airport-all huggy and kissy
reunions at the baggage carousels and Hugh Grant, in a breathless
voiceover saying "love, actually is all around' Well, in Tony Saint's
first novel, Refusal Shoes-a searing and brutally funny portrait of
corrupt immigration officers at Heathrow-love isn't anywhere to be
found. In fact, love has been refused entry and cannot even claim
asylum.
Saint's book arrived with some controversy in England where it was
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
by Michael Greenstein
Aaron Lansky quotes part of Isaac Bashevis Singer's acceptance speech
for the Nobel Prize in Literature: "The high honor bestowed upon me by
the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language, a
language of exile a language which possesses no words for weapons,
ammunition a language that was despised by both gentiles and
emancipated Jews." Stockholm's high honor contrasts with the humble
stature of Yiddish, a language that ironically has no word for Alfred
Nobel's discovery of dynamite. Even non-emancipated Jews distinguish
between the Hebrew loshn koydsh (the holy tongue) and Yiddish mame
...
Read more...
|  | Apikoros Sleuth
by Robert Majzels
The Mercury Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551281058
|
Book Review A Review of: : Apikoros Sleuth
by Michael Greenstein
Robert Majzels's Apikoros Sleuth is the opposite side of the same coin
as Outwitting History, if not a different coin altogether. Quebec
translator, playwright, and novelist, Majzels has composed his most
demanding work in his third novel, as he stretches the genre to its
limits. An amalgam of murder mystery and Talmudic format, high and low
brow, scatology and eschatology, Derrida, Jabs, Barthes, Kafka,
Beckett, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Leonard Cohen, as well as other
modernists and postmodernists, Apikoros Sleuth defies the reader's
expectations, challenging the act of reading itself. Replete with
...
Read more...
|  | The Red Queen
by Margaret Drabble
McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771029063
|
Book Review A Review of: The Red Queen
by Barbara Julian
Are characters in fiction more or less real than figures in history?
Neither: both equally people the imagination of the living. Both live
through their stories. Oedipus and Hamlet have had at least as much
impact as, say, Frederick the Great or Catherine the Great or any
other "great". Margaret Drabble suggests that the lives of both
literary and historical figures manifest archetypal themes and
therefore express a Universal Self.
The Red Queen of Drabble's title-Lady Hyegyong, Crown Princess of 18th
century Korea-is both a historical and literary figure, the latter
...
Read more...
|  | Duet
by David Helwig
Porcupine's Quill $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842477
|
Book Review A Review of: Duet
by Ingrid Ruthig
Carman, a recently widowed, retired cop with a restless streak and
heart trouble, and Norma, a junk shop owner whose mouth is as
unchecked as both her weight and her inventory, embody two lives
winding down. And since misery loves company, these two cranky,
abandoned strangers can't go solo for long, even though they've
convinced themselves that solitude is what they want. When they do
meet up, one expects (and gets) immediate dissonance. Yet, beneath all
that noise, there's music, as David Helwig fashions the truest of
voices with skill, unadorned honesty, and a clear-eyed understanding
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Oxford Companion To Canadian History
by Clara Thomas
The publication of Norah Story's Oxford Companion to Canadian History
and Literature in 1967 was a great event, one of many in that
Confederation Centennial year. Miss Story, after a career in the
National Archives, had given up her position to work full-time on the
project, instigated by I.M. Owen, Canadian manager of the Press and
assisted by the enormous and enthusiastic labour of William Toye, its
editor. We who were teaching Canadian Literature, a very few at that
time, were delighted at its inclusion of Literature. In Toronto, at
Glendon College of the newly founded York University, I was able to
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
by Barbara Julian
Curious Minds left me with the conviction that scientists are the most
interesting people in the world, which is just the conviction its
editor must have begun with. The 27 contributors whose backgrounds
John Brockman asks about are not just scientists-they are also
philosophers, activists, humourists, wunderkinds and prima donnas, and
even if you are a humanities sort of person you will find their minds
uncommonly curious in both senses of the word.
The contributors were asked "what inspired them to choose their paths"
in science. Some write about family, while others talk about their
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis
by Barbara Julian
"My mother had the idea that I was a little bit special," deadpanned
Murray Gell-Mann about his wonder-child, PhD-at- age-21-background.
Psychoanalysis would explain Gell-Mann's exceptional career in terms
of his early childhood relations with authority figures in both his
immediate family and the wider culture. In his exhaustive Secrets of
the Soul, Eli Zaretsky analyzes the contributions of analysis to
modern culture.
It began with Freud's writings in the 1880s and '90s, but its roots go
back further. Psychoanalytical thought grew out of earlier interest in
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture canÆt be Jammed
by Gordon Phinn
Finishing The Rebel Sell, possibly the most overwrought bit of
cultural handwringing encountered this past decade, the perplexed
reader looks about, in the stupefaction reserved for the suddenly
contrite, for the raison d'etre, the joie de vivre, the lost tab of
LSD, the memoirs of Timothy Leary, the original vinyl of Sergeant
Pepper, the great poem your buddy wrote when he was really cooked,
that lovely piece on Jimi Hendrix by Germaine Greer in The Mad Woman's
Underclothes, Grace Slick singing "You, you are the crown of
creation/and you've got no place to go," anything really, anything
...
Read more...
|  | The Afterlife
by Penelope Fitzgerald
HarperCollins Canada / Counterpoint $23.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1582433208
|
Book Review A Review of: The Battle of the St. Lawrence: The Second World War in Canada
by Fraser Bell
Of the Second World War, Winston Churchill famously remarked that,
"the only thing that really frightened me was the U-boat peril."
Churchill had every reason to be frightened, for during 1942 alone,
5.4 million tons of shipping were sunk; during the six years of the
war, 2,259 merchant ships were sent to the bottom along with their
crews and the food, oil, and munitions that Britain so desperately
needed to keep on fighting. By the war's end, the Royal Canadian Navy
provided half of the escort vessels which guarded the slow-moving
convoys as they sailed across the Atlantic.
...
Read more...
|  | Gielgud's Letters
by Richard (ed) Mangan
McArthur & Co / Orion Con Trad $50 Hardcover
ISBN: 0297829890
|
Book Review A Review of: GielgudÆs Letters
by Clara Thomas
This collection, a total of almost 800 out of 1600 of Gielgud's
letters, has been chosen and edited by Richard Mangan, the
administrator of the famous Theatre Collection at Greenwich. Before
Gielgud's death in 2000, Mangan had edited John Gielgud's Notes from
the Gods. He was chosen by the executors of the estate to search out
letters and to edit this volume. The result is a remarkable
collection, arranged chronologically and with a minimum of editorial
intervention. For an armchair theatre enthusiast, or for any theatre
scholar, it is irreplaceable.
...
Read more...
|  | The Lost Amazon
by Wade Davis
Douglas & McIntyre $45 Hardcover
ISBN: 1553650786
|
Book Review A Review of: The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes
by John Oughton
"Botanist" conjures an image of a meek, Mr. Magoo-like scholar
inspecting flowers through a magnifying glass. But the specialization
of "ethnobotany" (the study of plant use by indigenous peoples)
obviously produces far more daring scientists, willing to endure
physical danger, isolation and hallucinations to expand their own
minds and human knowledge itself. Long-time Harvard professor Richard
Evans Schultes, an "extreme" ethnobotanist if there ever was one, and
his disciple Wade Davis (whose discovery of the drugs used to create
zombies is detailed in The Serpent and the Rainbow), have undertaken
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas
by Nancy Wigston
For thirty-odd years, BC poet, playwright, and author Gary Geddes had
been fascinated by the tale of a Buddhist monk named Huishen, who had
travelled from his native Afghanistan and, forty years later, ended
his journey in China, where his amazing tales of strange new lands was
recorded by Liang dynasty historians in the year 499AD. This much is
certain. But Geddes wants to know whether it's possible that lands
Huishen described could have been what is now the western coast of
British Columbia or other parts of the Americas? Could Huishen have
preached to the Haida and the Maya during his extraordinary voyage?
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool
by Asa Boxer
Douglas Adams once said something about the nature of the universe
being such that it is impossible to figure out, and if someone were to
stumble upon an understanding, the universe would change at that very
instant. As a satirist, Adams is especially appropriate here, because
at the centre of Marius Kociejowski's superb The Street Philosopher
and the Holy Fool-with its collection of ideas regarding irony,
satire, simplicity, idiocy, and madness-stands the Fool. Kociejowski's
story takes place in Damascus, Syria over a period of about five
years, and focuses on three central characters and their interactions,
...
Read more...
|  | Wilfred Thesiger
by Alexander Maitland
HarperCollins Canada / UK Non-Fict Hc $74.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002572249
|
Book Review A Review of: Wilfred Thesiger: A Life in Pictures
by Christopher Ondaatje
Some day soon someone will write the definitive biography of Sir
Wilfred Thesiger, without doubt the twentieth century's greatest
traveller and explorer-but also a complicated man and an anachronism.
Hopefully this will be done by Alexander Maitland, Thesiger's friend
and authorised biographer. But this book is not that biography.
Instead Alexander Maitland has produced a pictorial volume celebrating
Thesiger's achievements and introducing nearly two hundred of his
unique photographs, some of them not published before. It is a
pleasing retrospective with an outstanding introduction by the author.
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Tales of Endurance
by Christopher Ondaatje
There have already been two good anthologies on exploration in the
last two years: Travels, Explorations and Empires 1770 - 1835 (Four
volumes) edited by Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson; and The Faber Book of
Exploration edited by Benedict Allen. Both these books offer sensitive
and thought-provoking discussions on the writings of the world's
greatest explorers, as well as providing us with a wide selection of
the explorers' own writings. Now, however, Fergus Fleming, the author
of the best-selling Barrow's Boys, has produced another anthology,
Tales of Endurance, writing it himself and covering over 40 stories of
...
Read more...
|  | Mirabel
by Pierre Nepveu
V+¬hicule Press $15.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550651919
|
Book Review A Review of: Mirabel
by David Solway
A bargain, Mirabell? With us as prize?
James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover
They're not only incredibly faithful, they're true poems in their own
right.
A.B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride
>From time to time the Governor General's Award juries get it right.
Not often, mind you, but every once in a while a jury manages to come
up with an appropriate choice to salvage the institutional life of an
organization known more for endemic cronyism than enlightened
...
Read more...
| | Unsettled
by Zachariah Wells
Insomniac Press $11.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894663764
|
Book Review A Review of: Unsettled
by Graham Good
Poetic debuts need to clear a space in an already crowded field. When
a new voice is raised, it needs to be distinctive to gain a hearing.
Voice is not merely a metaphor: poets increasingly have to take their
work onstage at live readings and develop some kind of vocal persona.
The Homeric epics were oral performances long before they were written
down. Now, poems often exist in both dimensions of reading: aloud, and
on the page.
But even in print, poetry still "voices" itself: poets invoke the
muse, provoke with satire, evoke scenes and experiences. The voice
...
Read more...
|  | Postscript
by Geoffrey Cook
V+¬hicule Press $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550651900
|
Book Review A Review of: Postscript
by Graham Good
Poetic debuts need to clear a space in an already crowded field. When
a new voice is raised, it needs to be distinctive to gain a hearing.
Voice is not merely a metaphor: poets increasingly have to take their
work onstage at live readings and develop some kind of vocal persona.
The Homeric epics were oral performances long before they were written
down. Now, poems often exist in both dimensions of reading: aloud, and
on the page.
But even in print, poetry still "voices" itself: poets invoke the
muse, provoke with satire, evoke scenes and experiences. The voice
...
Read more...
|  | Monks' Fruit
by A. J. Levin
Junction $15.04 Paperback
ISBN: 0889712026
|
Book Review A Review of: MonksÆ Fruit
by Andrew Steinmetz
Monks' Fruit is A. J. Levin's first collection, and what strikes the
reader before anything else-before sense can be made of the poems,
before a personality emerges from them-is the poetry's linguistic
compression. The grammar is intentionally strained and words are
packed together to generate a syntax impatient with the normal order
of things. Meaning is hard to come by on a first reading. The poems
are not obscure, though they are often opaque. A perfect example is
the opening of "Henry Moore":
Still after sharing a one-sheeted tight bed months
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Fruitfly Geographic
by Andrew Steinmetz
The poems in Fruitfly Geographic, Stephen Brockwell's third book, are
generally hard and clear, clean and spare: pure things made by an
imagist. The poem "Dart" is a good place to begin. The clarity and
attention to rhythm and careful use of enjambment will fascinate, and
reward, the close reader. Here, in the first 13 lines, Brockwell's aim
is true:
I've spent half my life
learning to play darts
in the dark. To find
...
Read more...
|
|
