Saturday 20 September 2008

Praising Wiseman to the skies


In today's Montreal Gazette, Cary Fagan salutes Christopher Wiseman's book of WWII poems 36 Cornelian Avenue.

"Part memoir, part history, employing contemporary interviews as well as memory and research, Wiseman does a good job of conjuring the wartime atmosphere: the air-raid shelter in the dining room, the blackout cloth on the windows, the wartime songs and naughtier rhymes, the fear of German planes. Some of his memories are highly personal, but the most touching are the collective ones -- tasting bananas for the first time at war's end ('Delicious past belief;) and running toward 'our fathers coming home.' "

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