{"id":824,"date":"2011-09-27T09:39:32","date_gmt":"2011-09-27T09:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue10\/?page_id=824"},"modified":"2012-01-30T10:32:15","modified_gmt":"2012-01-30T10:32:15","slug":"candace-fertile","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/writings\/reviews\/candace-fertile","title":{"rendered":"Candace Fertile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poetry & Fiction Reviews<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Red<\/em><\/h1>\n
by George Elliott Clarke,
\nHallifax: Gaspereau Press,
\n157 pp., $19.95<\/h6>\n

George Elliott Clarke won the Governor General\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Award in 2001 for Execution Poems<\/em>, and execution is certainly a hallmark of his latest collection of poetry, Red<\/em>, which fits into his so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153colouring books\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Blue<\/em> and Black<\/em>. The imagery as suggested by the colours is graphic, violent and sexual. And the poems are executed with a disturbing precision and tone.<\/p>\n

Clarke displays his erudition flamboyantly, but even more than that, he reveals his utter entrancement with language. His poems take many forms and range through many subjects, but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a profound absence of lightness. This is not a guy fooling around on the page. This is not a guy pouring his heart out onto the page. This is a guy with loads of baggage filled with anger. And this is a guy who can express that anger in scary blood-soaked images.<\/p>\n

In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Repulsion,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for example, Clarke delineates the entire world as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153slaughterhouse.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Everything turns ugly: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Maggots bask in sunflower stems: \/ Every beauty turns to slime.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Repulsion is torqued to gasping heights (or depths) in the long poem \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which Clarke takes Shakespeare\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s insanely gory play and redelivers the savagery in a profanity laced narrative poem. Shakespeare\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s play has rape, mutilation and cannibalism in it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand somehow Clarke manages to make the whole thing even more awful\u00e2\u20ac\u201din both senses. Beware. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no holding back of language: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Next, Tamora\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cunt-hunting sons snatch up Lavinia. \/ Quick, she is bare-assed, spread-eagles. \/ The uppity bitch ingests two obscene spikes at once.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no such thing as a comfort zone in Clarke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s poetry, dare I say, especially for women. And I doubt that comfort is what interests him.<\/p>\n

Along with violence, sex is perceived as a commercial enterprise. In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fortuna,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a sonnet, the speaker talks of sex as making a deposit: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I deposit, withdraw; she banks, profits– \/ Time\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all we waste as we lay waste this night.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wordsworth\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The World Is Too Much with Us\u00e2\u20ac\u009d came immediately to my mind as both poems deal with an essential emptiness at the heart of life. Clarke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s poetry is much more visceral than any poetry I have read lately, and it feels like being punched in the viscera.<\/p>\n

Clarke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s imaginative abilities are vast. He riffs on other artists from Pablo Neruda to James Brown, and the collection is filled with allusions to major figures in music and literature. Race is definitely an important topic, and in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Poor Imitation,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he starts by quoting Miles Davis: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why should some motherfucker make me feel bad because of their ignorance?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The poem goes on to express identification in different places: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Among African-Americans, \/ I am African American,<\/em> \/ okay? \/ But my accent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcweird\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The colour red is explored from many angles\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut they are negative ones. Blood, rot, anger\u00e2\u20ac\u201dClarke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world pulsates with pain. In the section titled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Red Light District: Acknowledgements,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Clarke includes two lines from Amatoritsero Ede, the editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and these lines do a great job of capturing the tone of Clarke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collection: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153where are your flaming-red red-light districts \/ selling hot assorted worm-blown meat<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

I had a hard time getting through these poems, and part of the difficulty was an extreme awareness of the masculinity (yes, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just going to say that) of the poetry and the fact that I am female. Nevertheless that very difficulty suggests to me that these are poems to read to be jolted and shoved into new perceptions. I would suggest that you read them during daylight, not just before you go to sleep at night.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth<\/em><\/h1>\n
by Stephanie Bolster,
\nLondon, Ontario: Brick Books
\n79 pp., $19.00<\/h6>\n

Stephanie Bolster\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fourth collection of poetry, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth<\/em>, continues to show her skill as a poet. Her first collection, White Stone: The Alice Poems<\/em>, won the Governor General\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Award in 1998, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not hard to see why, given the range and strength of this latest book.<\/p>\n

Bolster\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s poetic structure is often the single line stanza occasionally with no verb, and the combination falls into the imagist tradition, but the structure is solid and unique while working within accepted frameworks. And the topics range from childhood to travel to art, and in in this collection, animals in zoos play a huge role.\u00c2\u00a0 Bolster like many poets makes excellent use of allusion, and so the short stanza reaches back through the ages to link to other poets and create layered nuance. In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153London, February 1963,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for example, Bolster reaches out to Sylvia Plath and notes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Left the children \/ bread and milk and turned \/ the knob that turned her off.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In a short four stanza poem, Bolster imagines Plath\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life and death in a cold winter when animals\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 water freezes in their bowls.<\/p>\n

Bolster deals with the suffering of animals in zoos in particular in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153An Education,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a clever prose poem with fill-in the-blanks for animals and place. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The animal knows nothing of Malaysia\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s forest canopy. It roams where it can. Food appears. Sparrows land within the fence and go. Knows nothing of the Serengeti. Food appears. Night pivots into day. [ . . . ]\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Simply delineating the routine of the enclosed animal, Bolster makes evident its unnatural life, its lack of connection to its home environment. And Bolster informs the reader in a brief preface that going to zoos was thought to be \u00e2\u20ac\u0153more polite\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than other activities and thus, zoos are often found in parks.<\/p>\n

Bolster has gone to many zoos and other places of interest, and her poems inspect the effect on people of travel or visiting. Or even of not travelling. In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Life of the Mind (Sanctuary)\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, she starts by referring to Gerald Durrell and his zoo in Jersey, and then turns to other subjects including Rousseau: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153In Paris, Rousseau, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcLe Douanier,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 painted after visits to the Jardin \/ d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122hiver, those velvet panthers. He never left France.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The role of zoos changes with time and with the observer.<\/p>\n

Gardens and galleries\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmore artificial enclosed spaces\u00e2\u20ac\u201dappear in several poems. In \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Frick Collection,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Bolster revisits in words the beautiful Frick house, with its amazing collection and its wonderful architecture, and she asks if all that visual wealth would change things if she owned it: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If I had such \/ foliage, such waterlit, skylit space \/ in my house? Days would still be days, \/ always about the same degree of happy. \/ Sometimes, this consoles.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The question of how having such a place probably strikes anyone who has visited a great once house, once a private dwelling. So the emotions and thoughts generated by Bolter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s poetry are realistic and often familiar, although always presented freshly.<\/p>\n

These poems are ones I will definitely return to. Bolster has a quiet confidence and a way of twisting illumination into a poem that is deeply compelling. Her pacing is exquisite, engaging readers with apparent simplicity that turns into beautiful complexity at the flick of a line.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Constance, Across<\/em><\/h1>\n
by Richard Cumyn,
\nToronto: Quattro Press
\n96 pp., $16.95<\/h6>\n

Richard Cumyn has published five collections of short fiction and one novella previous to Constance, Across<\/em>, his second novella. He opens this new novella with a quotation from Conrad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Heart of Darkness<\/em>, one of the more famous ones about Marlowe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s view that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Like Conrad, Cumyn deals with clashes between belief systems and the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rampant inhumanity, but his main character, Constance Hardy, is far less interesting than Marlowe and less plausible.<\/p>\n

Constance is an Ottawa school teacher whose marriage is imploding, along with her relationship with her two sons. Her son Patrick has given up on the family and hides out in the basement. Her other son, Colin, is trying to behave normally, but the obvious fractures in the family make communication beyond the superficial impossible.<\/p>\n

The narrative is directed to Grant Lundgren, the father of a boy who is in Constance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s English class and who commits suicide. Grant had also loaned Constance\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s husband Tom a significant amount of money to help Tom get a business going. All these aspects of the novella work, but Cumyn has Constance telling Grant the story while both are in Lahore, Pakistan. The novella reveals the past and what has brought the two to this meeting, and points to a difficult future for both.<\/p>\n

Constance takes her unhappiness to an extreme level. She falls in love with a colleague, a handsome man from Pakistan, and in order to avoid seeing Grant after his son\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death, she takes off, leaving her own sons. And she takes off with Afzal Khan, a man she barely knows and who is being deported. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all too much to be believable as she evidently cares about Patrick and Colin: she stays in touch daily by email. Leaving her husband is insignificant as she has stopped loving him, but her lightning development of feelings for Afzal is crazy. Lust would be understandable, but Cumyn makes the connection much stronger and deeper than that, and the novella shows the profound connection Constance develops for her new country, even though she will never be fully accepted and will never–by her own admission\u00e2\u20ac\u201dunderstand the rules of the Islamic world, especially the rules guiding behaviour of women.<\/p>\n

The break that Constance makes with her job, family, and country happens with breath-taking speed. That circumstance is somewhat vexing for readers as we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know much about her before she turns her world upside down. The plot is a huge hurdle to comprehending Constance. And it certainly affects readers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 abilities to care about what she does.<\/p>\n

Cumyn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s style is literary, dotted with allusions and wit: Constance notes, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I could be late, lax, negligent, eccentric and domineering, but not to record attendance in homeroom every day was a serious and immediately noted breach of duty.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The problems of the Canadian public school system get ramped up until Cumyn is tackling gigantic world issues. And like Conrad, Cumyn uses a journey to provide different perspectives.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the greatest difference between Conrad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novella and Cumyn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s is that Conrad leaves us with questions and Cumyn seems to be trying to give answers in a didactic fashion. Marlowe may have believed that the fascinating part was outside the kernel, but Conrad shows us inside and outside.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Return<\/em><\/h1>\n
by Dany Laferri\u00c3\u00a8re, trans. David Homel,
\nToronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011
\n227 pp., $22.95<\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reading anything by Dany Laferri\u00c3\u00a8re is emotionally exhausting, and his latest work, The Return<\/em>, required several naps for me to get through it. Marketed as a novel, The Return <\/em>bends genre is more than one way. It includes poetry and prose, and while it is nominally a novel, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obviously deeply infused with memoir.<\/p>\n

The original French book L’\u00c3\u00a9nigme du retour<\/em> (2009) won the Prix M\u00c3\u00a9dicis, and David Homel, who has translated other works by Laferri\u00c3\u00a8re, has done a wonderful job with challenging material, in particular with the poetry, always a tricky genre to translate.<\/p>\n

In this book the narrator is Dany Laferri\u00c3\u00a8re, and he learns of his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death. Windsor Laferri\u00c3\u00a8re (also Dany\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s real name) left Haiti many years ago, and his son decides to return, making a kind of pilgrimage for both himself and his father. The book works on the juxtaposition of just about everything: life\/death, Montreal\/Port-au-Prince, hot\/cold, son\/father, father\/mother, food\/hunger, wealth\/poverty, home\/exile. The obvious question is whether a person can go home again, and what develops in this work is the sense that home shifts. Haiti was once Dany\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s home, and his mother and sister still live there. But Montreal has been his home for decades, and no matter where he is, he lives with a sense of displacement.<\/p>\n

Displacement has driven his father to despair. Forced to leave Haiti because of his political activity, Windsor ends up in Brooklyn, and when Dany tries to visit him, Windsor has remade the past. Dany says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I can still hear him yelling that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never had a child, or a wife or a country. I had gotten there too late. The pain of living far from his family had become so intolerable he had to erase the past from his memory.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But Dany cannot erase the past: he must confront it by travelling to Haiti and his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s birthplace.<\/p>\n

After he attends his father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s funeral, Dany goes to Haiti, and the book overflows with descriptions of a shattered and yet beautiful country. In one of the more successful poems, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Human River,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Dany notes:<\/p>\n

I step into the street<\/p>\n

to bathe<\/p>\n

in the human river<\/p>\n

where more than one swimmer drowns<\/p>\n

each day.<\/p>\n

The heat of Haiti contrasts with the icy winter of Montreal, and the lush tropical setting of Haiti contrasts with the impoverishment of most of its inhabitants. Haiti\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s corrupt and brutal governments forced both father and son out, by a father and son\u00e2\u20ac\u201dPapa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand while they are gone, the mess that is Haiti continues to fray.<\/p>\n

The personal journey is both physical and psychological, and Dany Laferri\u00c3\u00a8re is profoundly skilled at putting angst into words. In most cases, the prose passages work<\/a> better than the poetry, which at times is simply prose broken up on the page. But there are deliriously good poems, and overall the book is an excoriation of man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inhumanity to man on many levels. And while that makes it challenging to read, it also makes it necessary to read works such as this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poetry & Fiction Reviews Red by George Elliott Clarke, Hallifax: Gaspereau Press, 157 pp., $19.95 George Elliott Clarke won the Governor General\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Award in 2001 for Execution Poems, and execution is certainly a hallmark of his latest collection of poetry, Red, which fits into his so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153colouring books\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Blue and Black. The imagery as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-824","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":947,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/824\/revisions\/947"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}