A Grave Man

The September Quill & Quire is out of the gate with the first review of Michael Lista's The Scarborough. Micheline Maylor is wowed ("technically brilliant, precisely researched, and formally astute") but is also struck by the poet's "concentrated eye on evil":

Right from the devastating cover image, Michael Lista’s The Scarborough is rife with craft and cultural implication. A VCR-tape masks a grinning skull with a sickly smile evoking Shakespeare's Mercutio: “Ask for me / tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The visual rhetoric is only the first indication that the poetry collection, which takes place on the 1992 Easter weekend of Kristen French’s disappearance and murder at the hands of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, will layer metaphor, geography, psychology, mythology and pop-culture... Lista’s intentions are not to mollify or explain, but to catalogue and signify an ugly time and place in Canadian crime history with the precision of the obsessed.

Gift Horse Review

Quick off the mark, Quill & Quire has published a review of Gift Horse in its November 2011 issue (review isn't online yet). Meaghan Strimas describes Mark Callanan's poetry as

not fussy, nor is it driven by ego; it is humble, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is, for the most part, blessedly free of sentimentality and filler. There is an exactitude to his art, displayed in the efficiency of his diction and his tightly organized stanzas.

(Love that hedging "for the most part.") Callanan and Mary Dalton read at the Atwater Library in Montreal as part of the Atwater Poetry Project on April 26, 2012 at 7 p.m

The Death of Modern Canadian Poetry

Here’s a really smart review by Jacob McArthur Mooney on the Modern Canadian Poets anthology. Jacob bills my recent Quill and Quire column as a “defense” of the Carcanet book, and, while I can see how you can read it that way, I was really trying to make a case for a growing number of younger poets—or “rebooters”—rediscovering and promoting neglected names. It’s an idea that seems to have caught fire (you might almost call it a generational effort) and I see the Carcanet anthology has a part of that trend. So the piece wasn’t meant to be a review of the anthology, per se.

Now, I can’t lie: I do get indecent pleasure from so many blue-chip names (McKay, Purdy, Atwood) being dropped. And I'm very grateful the editors included Coles, Bailey, Outram, Ormsby, Dalton and Partridge among others. But I don't want to ignore my frustrations with the book. I question some of the inclusions, from the bizarre (Joan Murray) to the you've-got-to-be-kidding me (David Moses). And I mourn the missing: Charles Bruce, D.G. Jones, Peter Van Toorn and David Solway.

But the Swift and Jones anthology is a lot like Donald Davie’s dream of rediscovering a “native” English-language tradition via Hardy. Or Yvor Winters’ alternative canonmaking (elevating Fulke Greville over Yeats). Or Ron Silliman’s “neglectrinos” (that subculture of the shunned). The editors, in other words, will argue that they are simply dramatizing an unrealized alternative. And they would be absolutely right. This is why comments about them getting it “wrong” miss the point. In a sense, Modern Canadian Poets can be called a counterfactual novel. By exaggerating certain facts and ignoring others, the anthology conjures an altered historical outcome for Canadian poetry—or at least gives us a glimpse into such a world. That’s why it sometimes makes more sense to treat anthologies like this as acts of make-believe rather than gate-keeping. As I’ve written before, the genre, by definition, is about making a statement through selection. And that statement is what you’d expect from any speculative fiction worth its salt: a radical break with the present.

Frankly, I think Swift and Jones have assembled probably the most daring Canadian anthology since Mainstream, which Peter Van Toorn completed in 1973 and never published (rumor is it was rejected). The only evidence of the anthology comes from the preface D.G. Jones was invited to write. It was eventually included in The Insecurity of Art: Essays on Poetics (1982) edited by Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn. Here’s how the preface starts:

"Dear Peter,

This is a radical, challenging, fine anthology. It must meet quite a challenge after leaving out Roberts, Carman, D.C. Scott, A. J. M. Smith, P.K. Page and Margaret Avison, not to mention others still. Certainly, even on its own terms, some poems by these poets might be included, but I gather not enough from your point of view. In any case, I think your selection can meet the challenge and justify itself."

Doug, you took the words right out of my mouth.