| Book Review The Home-Made Look
Sloppiness, corner-cutting, wilful ignorance, and neglect
of quality for the sake of quantity are allowed but
not created by electronic gadgetry
I LIKE the mail publishing, houses because they bring Out virtually all our poetry, many novels and story collections, and most regional histories and life writings. But lately I`ve felt ripped off. Why am I paying $24.
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| | Book Review The Peak And The Trough
by Joyce Marshall
I OPENED Ernest Buckler Remembered, a memoir written by Claude Bissell in tribute to a 30- year friendship, with the query: But did Buckler have a life? Is there anything that can or need be added to what we know of him: that he lived in a house not far from his birthplace, near Bridgeport, Nova Scotia, and that he became more and more unwilling to leave home even for a day (as I know from having been on a committee with him during the 1970s and obliged to communicate with him entirely by letter
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| | Book Review Work In Progress Alligator Alley
by Paulette Jiles
I STOOD IN the phone booth in the R.V. camp in Chokolosee, the last town at the edge of Florida. I was looking Out into a mangrove swamp watching a blue storm full of washtubs and howling balls blow toward us, trying to make sense, talking to Rosemary Nixon in Calgary, trying to think about the writing business in Canada. Rosemary is a good friend and she finally said, "But your head`s in the tropics, Polly, so happy journeys
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| | Book Review Not As I Say
by Dennis Cooley
I AM ONE of those who thinks Miriam Waddington has been wrongly overlooked as a poet. I am less sure about her skills as essayist.
There is a lot I do like in them -- 23 of them written between 1958 and 1989, many of them in the last few years. For one thing, they are informative. We learn quite a bit about modernism in Canada and Waddington`s own personal history
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| | Book Review Maker Of Manners
by Royce Macgillivray
GEORGE BROWN was one of the two Fathers of Confederation to die by assassination. The other was Thomas D`Arcy McGee. Brown was sitting in the office of his newspaper, the Toronto Globe, one afternoon in March 1880 when a former employee appeared in the doorway, demanding a letter of reference. In the verbal and physical scuffle that followed Brown was slightly wounded by a gunshot. Six weeks later he died of gangrene.
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|  | On Double Tracks
by Leslie Hall Pinder
Lester & Orpen Denim
256 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0886192390
|
Book Review Dreamtime
by Douglas Glover
LESLIE HALL PINDER`s second novel, On Double Tracks, is one of a spate of recent Canadian novels written about the Indian problem. I am thinking in particular of M. T. Kelly`s Governor Generals Awardwinning A Dream Like Mine and Joan Clark`s The Victory of Geraldine Gull (also nominated for a Governor Generals Award).
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| | Book Review The Wilds Of The Past
by Peter Buitenhuis
In these new stories by Alice Munro, the narrators travel
deep into memory and the `imagination of disaster`
IN ONE OF 1-14E stories in this collection, a character observes: "Honey ... professors are dumb. They are dumber than ordinary. I Could be nice and say they knew about things we don`t, but as far as I am concerned they don`t know shit."
There I am, pinned and wriggling on the wall, and with the nagging sense that maybe she is right.
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| | Book Review Tangents And Trajectories
by Paul Stuewe
IN THE NOT so long ago days when women were discouraged from thinking or acting independently, journeys abroad were one of the few socially acceptable ways of escaping from oppressive lives at home. Travelling Ladies, Janice Kulyk Keefer`s new collection of short stories, has many affinities with the work of such expatriate writers as Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Mavis Gallant, but also makes its own distinctive contribution to this rich literary tradition.
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| | Book Review Souvenirs Of The Future
by Dayv James-French
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN employs an astonishing range of narrative techniques in the 14 stories of her fourth book. The complications of romance and reality are deftly played our in startlingly original constructions, from subtle variations on traditional realism to a check-list that duplicates the Cosmopolitan-simple language of a self help questionnaire. Her control appears effortless. Her energy carries the reader into each new territory; theres no homesickness for the familiar.
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|  | Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco, William Weaver, William Weaver,
560 pages TC
ISBN: 0151327653
|
Book Review Eco Logical
by Don Nichol
FEW FIRST NOVELS have had a better reception than 11 nome delta Rose (1980). Published in English in 1983, The Name of the Rose -- "Naturally, a manuscript" -- then had the remarkable fortune of being filmed as "a palimpsest" by jeanJacques Annaud.
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| | Book Review The Dark Seductive God
by Rosemary Sullivan
WITH MARY DI MICHELE`s Luminous Emergencies one has the sensation of walking into an autonomous, textured mind weaving its stories one inside the
other. One is reminded that poetry is not simply pleasure in the skilful play of language but also pleasure in the integrity of the mind using it. A mind at the farthest reaches of itself, out on a limb where the cost is high.
The poetry of Mary di Michele has always moved me. Few poets are as erotic as she
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| | Interviews The Real Life Of Mario Vargas Llosa
`I am a novelist who, in a transitory manner,
is engaged in politics`
As WE WENT to press, Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Arequipa in 1936, was leading in the first round of presidential elections in Peru. He has written nine novels: The Time of the Hero (1963, translated 1966), The Green House (1966, trans. 1968), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969, trans. 1975), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973, trans. 1978), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977, trans.
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| | Letters to Editor Post-Torontoism
I`M GRATEFUL FOR Alan Filewod`s perceptive review of my Six Plays (March), recently published by Talon Books -- but what is this about "Now that he is in retirement in British Columbia..."?
Has central solipsism gone so far in this country that a man cat* leave Toronto for Vancouver -or for that matter for anywhere -- without it being assumed that he`s gone into retirement? Is Filewod losing his Newfie perspective? Hell, I`m busier than ever.
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| | Profiles A Novel Zolf
by Barbara Wade Rose
MANY YEARS AGO in the wintry village of North Winnipeg there lived a sharp-witted and sharp-tongued boy named Laibel. The boy lived with his older sisters and brother and their parents in a two-bedroom shack heated by pipes that ran upstairs from the kitchen stove. They froze in the winter. Sometimes fires would start in the wooden-walled basements between the apartments. But almost everyone in the neighbourhood lived the same way, so they all counted what blessings they could
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| | First Novels Turning The Screw
by Gary Draper
One OF THE MAJOR strengths of Margot Livesey`s Homework (Viking, 339 pages, $24.95 cloth), a first novel of remarkable sophistication and craft, is the evocation of place. On the narrative Sur-face, the novel`s primary setting is Edinburgh. Not only does Livesey create a credible facsimile of the Scottish capital, she invests its parts with symbolic resonance without in the least damaging the story`s flow or distracting the reader.
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| | Brief Reviews P.Amanuensis
by E.M.
As ITIS: dense, compact, elliptic, fierce, without evasion.
Then they put our cages on wheels
and let us (stinking of snacks) push them--
we push them out of their parking-lots
into fields of wild carrot and chicory
but they always find them and drag them back
hove each cage into the muzzle of the next
cage.
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| | Brief Reviews P.Thewholeelephant
by P. H.
IT WOULDN`T SURPRISE me to hear that Marlene Cookshaw is writing a collection of short stories, because this hook of poems, The Whole Elephant (Brick, 76 pages, $9.95 paper), uses many fictional techniques, and each of its four sections reads like out-takes or soliloquies from a single story. Characters are featured throughout the poems of a ection and are always named or assigned initials. And the poems are crammed with domestic and fauna/flora details.
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| | Brief Reviews P.Coldrubberfeet
by P. H.
I HAVE NO RESPECT for flaunted cleverness, and am Suspicious of professed awe when it is buttered with sarcasm. I also take exception to a first book whose jacket notes proclaim its author to be "an emerging master" -- to me that is as oxymoronic as the term "modern classic." So I think little of Bruce Taylor`s Cold Rubber Feet (Cormorant, 117 pages, $9.95 paper), even as I recognize its accomplished, unfaltering voice and versatility.
The opening poem, "Social Studies:` which won the E. J.
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| | Brief Reviews Not The Half Of It
by From "Meneseteung"
Of Course, Almeda in her observations cannot escape words. She may think she can, but she can`t. Soon this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words -- not specific words but a flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her. Poems, even.
Yes, again, poems, Or one poem.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Elizabethposthumasimcoe1762
by R.M.
MRS. ELIZABETH SIMCOE, the wife of the governor of Upper Canada (Ontario) in the 1790s, was an heiress and a member of the English ruling class in the days of its greatest self-confidence and power. Despite her cultured and protected upbringing, she reacted to life in the new province with fascination, not repulsion
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Thegreenpeacebookofthenucle
by L.J.
IN 1964, the explosion of a nuclear-powered U.S. navy satellite increased the total world-wide atmospheric burden of plutonium by four per cent. Plutonium is a man-made element so carcinogenic that a dot-size particle can kill.
Mexico`s first nuclear power plant is built on a geologic fault near an active volcano, only 30 kilometres from the epicentre of a recent major earthquake. The United States has dumped thousands of barrels of nuclear waste into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans
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| | Brief Reviews P.Time`Spower
by S.T.
ADRIENNE RICH`s Time`s Power (Norton (Viking/Penguin), 58 pages, $10.95 paper) is a selection of poems that look back to lives and hopes and necessities of the past and come to the conclusion that, while some things have changed, the underlying power structure has not, and so every voice crying in the wildernesses of the past becomes a contemporary voice. Among the personae Rich speaks through are Harriet Tubman, Hannah Senesh, and Malintzin, the Aztec woman who was given as a slave to Cortez.
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| | Brief Reviews P.Natoandthewarsawpactareone
by P. D.
A LONG POEM, touted as an epic, "full of songs, gaiety and humour" (as noted on the cover copy) and of news about Robert O`Driscoll`s professional vicissitudes and the International Conspiracy of Military and Fiscal Powers (which appear to he related), NATO and the Warsaw Pact Are One (Zespol Press, 64 pages, unpriced) is solidly immersed in the poetics of T. S. Eliot and David Jones. Notes galore to fill you in on all the allusive material.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Canadianvolunteersspain1936
by D.M.
WILLIAM BEECHING`s previous book, an unauthorized and occasionally frank biography of the Canadian Communist leader Tim Buck, got him and his coauthor Phyllis Clarke into hot water with his comrades. His current book, a memorial to the 1,442 Canadians, himself among them, who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, should cause him less trouble.
At the time, Canadians split on the merits of a war crudely portrayed as a struggle between Communists and Fascists. Quebec M.P.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Congenialspirits
by B.C.
V!RGINIA WOOLF`s favourite reading material ("when I`m incapable of Shakespeare") was autobiography. Of Course letters are also a form of autobiography, and perhaps even more revealing because they`re intended for the eyes of personal acquaintances, not the general public. Although Woolf determinedly shied away from setting down her memoirs, she left (along with her diaries) a wealth of correspondence.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Morethanwordscansay
by L.J.
TRUE LITERACY HAS more to do with the delights than the mechanics of reading:` suggests Janice Kulyk Keefer. She is one of 20 authors and poets whose reflections on literacy makeup More Than Words Can Say (McClelland & Stewart, 145 pages, $9.95 paper).
Like others in this anthology, she writes of being "saved" by print. In her case this means rescue from solitude and from a painful but precious sense of being different.
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| | Brief Reviews N.F.Kit`Skingdom
by P. B.
BARBARA M. FREEMAN explains, in Kit`s Kingdom: the Journalism of Kathleen Blake Coleman (Carleton University Press, 198 pages, $14.95 paper), that 11 given the limitations of the biographical material on her, this is not the story of Kathleen Blake Coleman, but an account of her public persona, Kit." Kathleen Coleman was an Irish immigrant who began writing for the Toronto Daily Mail in 1889.
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| | Brief Reviews F.Theoxfordbookofcanadianghosts
by P. B.
THIS BOOK IS an excellent example of the successful realization of a felicitous idea. Who would have thought that a collection of Canadian ghost stories would have been possible, let alone make entrancing reading? Yet, as the editor Alberto Manguel writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories (Oxford University Press, 276 pages, $16.95 paper), "by the turn of the century the ghost story ...
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| | Brief Reviews F.Travellingin
by D.J.F
THE FIRST COLLECTION of short stories by Jean Rysstad presents the world as a difficult vehicle to be Travelling In (Oolichan, 124 pages, $9.95 paper).
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| | Great Authors Creeping Terminology
by I. M. Owen
THE OTHER DAY I bought a tube of silicone sealant to cover some cracks in the bath room tiles. One of Nature`s unhandymen, I read the directions with great care for fear of committing a fatal blunder. I par ticularly wanted to know when the stuff could be expected to be dry so that it would be safe to use the shower. The word dry didn`t appear; the one reference to time was Curing takes place in 24 hours.
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| | Great Authors Growth Sector
by Brian Fawcett
A FRIEND WHO`D just been in Toronto to auction her new book mentioned in a letter that she`d overheard a conversation between several editors at a major Canadian publishing house. They were discussing gardening books. They were talking about them, she said, as the perfect sales-boosting vehicle for the new environment- and ecology -conscious age, which for many of us seems lamentably overdue.
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