Jul. 15, 2009 - Issue #717: Edmonton Musicians Directory 2009

Poet Canada

Trio of poets offer differing takes on landscape and language

The opening lines of Tim Bowling's The Book Collector (80 pp, $16.95, Nightwood) tell us, "It's a new world" but, as the businessman sips his "green tea to display his globalism," we know where we're going—back to the familiar waters of Bowling's beloved Fraser River: "it begins, / another salmon run ... / Several million sockeye hang at the mouth, / a swarm at the entrance of the hive, / turning their hunger inland, all feeding done."

And the question becomes: is the salmon a metaphor for Bowling himself? Is his feeding done, his feeding off his past as a fisherman in the wilds of BC? Bowling, who recently won the prestigious Guggenheim, became Canada's bard only after years of writing poetry collections—and a work of non-fiction, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture—about his longing for this fading world. But you get the sense from this collection that the old salmon runs of his youth have spawned imagery Bowling cannot easily or willingly escape—he's trapped in a knitted loop that keeps hooking him back to the coast even as he lives the urbanite's life in land-locked Edmonton. His speaker's a husband and father who hangs out at rep cinemas which show The Seven Samurai and yet, in "Cineaste," the scene always cuts to the "Sound of salmon striking a net."

In "The Return," the salmon overtakes the speaker, torturing him as his wife and children look on: "I can't get out of bed this morning. / It isn't what you think ... / Simply, I'd become a tributary of the Fraser River / and the last wild salmon / had chosen my body in which to dig her redd." He seems on the verge of release or new maturity like the salmon of his seas.

Though I sometimes found myself crossing out stanzas, yearning for a more disciplined distillation, especially of his characters—such as a Jesus-like brother in "1972" and an outcast schoolmate in "The Soccer Players"—I still recommend The Book Collector for the generosity of its vision and because even a slightly rambling Bowling is more poetic than most, even if tormented and dragging "the cracked mirrors of salmon up the gangway of an uncherished place ... see[ing] himself,/a thousand deceptions/on the condemned surfaces of life."

In sharp contrast, rob mclennan, who was the 2007-08 writer-in-residence at the U of A, comes out of a tradition of urban experimental verse that isn't for the faint of heart. Even though his latest collect is called gifts (160 pp, $18.95, Talonbooks), this work can't be described as generous.

In his offerings, mclennan juxtaposes words and phrases in an effort to find new combinations that are incomplete, weightless and, as the back-cover blurb explains, "frees the signifier from the signified." Although there are some fresh lines here—"like he does / speaks death-rattle soft / a wind-shook path & sunk / about as then; through uncolonized boundaries"—for the most part I find this attempt to unhinge words from meaning an eye-crossing, skin-scratching pain. "a smoke signal for derek," for instance, grates: "where endless nights & bryan camps / the mines go wild; costume / if you see the state; pretend, & thanks, thumbs".

While reading the lovely "a valentine for lea," though, I discovered that the poems work better while read aloud and there's an unexpected pleasure in listening to his verse on the tongue. The lines even begin to make momentary sense until I get to the final stanza: "why dont you wish the white pacific? why dont you wish the corridor?" Say again?

Mclennan is suspicious of connections, conjunctions, even of completion. Part of the reason for the confusion is his resistance to "ands" and "buts" and "ifs." Even his semi-colons and commas are left to drift in space, calling attention to themselves. A poet like this is oceans apart from Bowling's anchored imagery.

But a word of warning: these are poems to be read intermittently, not one after the other on a long night (as I did with the other two collections). Only then can you shake the feeling that gifts is luring you from the fringes of a private party of masturbatory PhDs. If you can refrain from taking the exclusion personally (or if you're willing to work hard and read Derrida), you just might appreciate mclennan's strange music and find joy and challenge in someone else's valentine for someone else's special occasion.

Red Deer-based Joan Crate's third collection, the blandly titled subUrban Legends (82 pp, $16.95, Freehand), is a lyrical revising of the Snow White fairy tale and of the speaker's childhood tales of loss (her mother the Queen in childbirth), abandonment (her father the King), and escape (an abusive Prince Charming who met her at the altar). This is the most well-crafted and disciplined collection of the three, even if the writing is at times less purely poetic as it weaves its wicked story for us—in interlocking frames that sometimes soar to a lovely pitch and sometimes drop to prose chopped up.

This collection looks into the mirror, mirror on the wall to find the speaker's archetype, Snow White, as her unconscious. Her childhood feelings are the seven helpful dwarves. Crate expertly navigates past and present, trekking through the dead of winter, which she tries to "forgive" with lines every Albertan can appreciate—"something murderous / lives in this climate, lingers in the corners of gardens and mouths, /freezes the delicate language of birth." Finally she finds spring ("You and I listen / small and silent as seeds") and summer-on-the-verge-of-fall where the speaker and Snow White finally reconcile "injuries and questionable decisions." The speaker conjures Snow White—"All I need is a bite of childhood"/(rosy-red, half-poisoned)"—as a vessel for her addictions, pain, and depression. And one doesn't need to know Freud or Derrida to understand what the poet's doing when she brings Snow White in from the Alberta cold so August might come to baptize her as she, like her magpies, finds "nourishment in what's left over." V

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