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Current Issue: 50th Anniversary Interventions (#204)

Canadian Literature's Spring 2010 issue (CL#204), "50th Anniversary Interventions", looks back on Canadian Literature's 50th Anniversary Gala, and celebrates Canadian culture with papers about Duncan Campbell Scott, book policies, copyright, civil war poetry, and new Québecois literature.

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Cover of issue #159

#159 (Winter 1998)
Gay and Lesbian Writing in Canadian Literature

Editorial

Alain-Michel Rocheleau

Articles

Susan Sheridan

Shane Rhodes

Beverly Curran

Stephen Guy-Bray

Marilyn Iwama

S. Leigh Matthews

Victor-Laurent Tremblay

Poems

William F. Hall

  • Hallowe'en (p. 11 - 13)

Susan L. Helwig

  • Chet Baker's Dog (p. 36) Show/hide Poem

    • The pet he left behind in a mid-west hotel

      prisoners dragged out randomly at night, to be tortured

      every misery in the world collects
      in a sticky pool
      losses drip down

      my father's birthday tomorrow
      (no celebration this year)

      the poem I wanted to write earlier today,
      about cherries and virginity,
      clever as dark glasses hiding puffy eyes

      Surely a chambermaid pitied Chet's dog,
      took him in, loved him

      not like Laika left in space until she died, alone

      this is not about pets or fruit
      leave all that and sit with the sorrow

      my mother fattened herself on this brand of
      loneliness: big bowls of whipped cream after school

      dust in my garden
      tomatoes still green, even though it's August

      the child my body never gave me
      (who pulled that string?)
      and then there's the dog again;
      it cries, it scratches.

Kevin McNeilly

  • Rites of Passage (p. 37)

Neile Graham

  • Delicate as the Shapes of Spirits (p. 54)

Susan L. Helwig

  • Coming out to my mother (p. 55) Show/hide Poem

    • This flower I want to give her
      droops in my hand; I stand & knock
      but some Aryan Jesus got there first
      and now she's nailed the door shut
      even to her child whose confidence
      grows and dies in one burst

      how I could blossom under a warming sun
      open up, as my body does now to
      female hands

      she offers only the old withering look
      no bread for my hunger, no water for my thirst

      stone-cold fruits in the garden betray her

      He said they would.

Zoë Landale

  • For Phyllis in Hospital… (p. 72)

Dave Margoshes

  • The waking (p. 73) Show/hide Poem

    • one morning—
      it may have been in
      april, perhaps november—
      we found we no longer were
      the people we'd started
      out to be

      your hand
      at the window
      traced circles in the frost
      until the world revealed
      itself to us, naked
      as we'd been

      the bird
      tangled in blue branches
      ruffled its feathers
      in your throat, singing
      something we only half
      remembered

      and the dream
      of a shape we might
      still take shone
      in the porcelain sky, a dream
      to be had
      for the waking

Eric Miller

  • Berlin (p. 89 - 90) Show/hide Poem

    • 1. The battles have passed.
      The holes, however—the holes they have made remain.

      Emptiness—not vacuity—remains.
      Berlin is nothing...nothing if not world capital of holes.

      2. On the holes, therefore,
      has fallen the work of filling—of fulfillment.

      Shadow fills the holes, and sometimes lamplight,
      and sometimes the lamps of dawn and dusk.

      3. In a Museum in Berlin
      you can see the Gates of Babylon,
      the Gates of Babylon sacred to the Goddess Ishtar,
      the very gates over which great King Nebuchadnezzar ruled.

      Shrapnel and shells have pocked the massive masonry
      of that Museum.

      We only do what the Babylonians did.
      They found their pleasure, and they died.

      It is true that King Nebuchadnezzar
      suffered at last from a strange ailment.
      Lycanthropy.

      He found he had four legs after all.

      4. Berliners have learned to make
      windows out of wounds.

      It keeps things in perspective.

      What you cannot—that's precisely
      what you can take with you.

      Gather it into your arms as a pigeon
      draws the great ghost of the sky to its side
      though itself nondescript.

      How it glitters, glitters, glitters on the heights.

      5. So we ask: What are our eyes but holes?
      Shattered, even before they open,
      with the exigencies of sense.

      Ruin alone has receptivity.

      6. An absence is the best nest for absences,
      likewise for the children of truant graves

      Yet from today's broken shell the blackbird
      blossoms with the old dusky song. .
      Here is elsewhere, elsewhere is here
      is the dusky old song the blackbird sings.

      7. All that the dead souls have left is what they do not have—
      their breath,
      that dome wherein the clouds, the gold, the pigeons glide.

      Every speech, every curse is ceded to the birds as air,
      for music's sake, in oblivious perpetuity.

      8. Puncture remains, in the nature of things,
      the only means of breathing;
      through holes alone we sustain ourselves.

      For souvenirs we pack away holes on holes
      that glitter like goldleaf of the wind
      in the blue-smoking sun—

      the sun daily atop its victory column,
      the sun that is night's hopelessly radiant monument.

John Reibetanz

  • Mining for Sun (p. 111 - 112)

Deirdre Dwyer

  • for the moon (p. 113)

Debbi Waters

  • Sex Sells on the Street (p. 138)

Thomas O'Grady

  • They Became Mermaids (p. 139)

Anne F. Walker

  • semyon (p. 140)

Books in Review

Reading India (p. 161 - 163)

by Stephen Guy-Bray

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Distant Desire: Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E.M. Forster's Fiction by Parminder Kaur Bakshi (Peter Lang Publishing Group)
  2. Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19th-Century U.S. Literature by Scott S. Derrick (Rutgers University Press)
  3. Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism by Joseph Allen Boone (University of Chicago Press)

Sex, Gender and Space (p. 163 - 167)

by Geraldine Pratt

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Mapping Desire by David Bell and Gill Valentine (Routledge)
  2. Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary space by Margaret R. Higonnet and Joan Templeton (University of Massachusetts Press)

Sexuality and Identity (p. 167 - 169)

by Leslie Harlin

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. The Eugelion by Louky Bersianik (Alter Ego)
  2. Soundless Loves by Claire Dé (Exile Editions)

Translation Incorporation (p. 169 - 171)

by Dean Irvine

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Esprit de Corps: Québec Poetry of the Late Twentieth Century in Translation by D. G. Jones, Bernard Pozier, and Louise Blouin (Muses' Company)
  2. Body Inc: A Theory of Translation Poetics by Pamela Banting (Turnstone Press)

Witnessing Brandt & Tostevin (p. 171 - 172)

by Lorraine Weir

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Dancing Naked--Narrative Strategies for Writing Across Centuries by Di Brandt (Mercury Press)

Witnessing Brandt & Tostevin (p. 171 - 172)

by Lorraine Weir

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Dancing Naked--Narrative Strategies for Writing Across Centuries by Di Brandt (Mercury Press)
  2. Subject to Criticism by Lola Lemire Tostevin (Mercury Press)

By River and by Rail (p. 173 - 175)

by Bryan N.S. Gooch

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Canada's Forgotten Highway by Ralph Hunter Brine (Whaler Bay Press)
  2. A Thousand Blunders: The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and Northern Birtish Columbia by Frank Leonard (University of British Columbia Press)

As for Fraser and Ross (p. 175 - 177)

by Andrew Lesk

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross by Keath Fraser (ECW Press)

Alternative Routes (p. 177 - 178)

by Christl Verduyn

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women's Writing by Marlene Goldman (University of Toronto Press)

Feminist Debates (p. 178 - 181)

by Susan Knutson

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Lesbian Utopics by Annamarie jagose (Routledge)
  2. Politcs and Scholarship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge by Patrice McDermott (University of Illinois Press)

Writing the Homosexual (p. 181 - 182)

by Terry Goldie

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. A Magic Prison: Letters from Edward Lacey by David Helwig and Edward Lacey (Oberon Press)
  2. The Time of the Kingfishers by David Watmough (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Faces of Love (p. 183 - 185)

by Karlyn Koh

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Other Women by Evelyn Lau (Vintage)
  2. Daruma Days by Terry Watada (Ronsdale Press)

A Book of Mornings (p. 185 - 186)

by Marlene Goldman

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Taken by Daphne Marlatt (House of Anansi Press)

a phrase petalled deep (p. 186 - 188)

by Lynda Hall

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Readings from the Labyrinth by Daphne Marlatt (NeWest Press)

Endgame Tap-Dancing (p. 188 - 190)

by Kerry McSweeney

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler (Knopf Canada)

Love and Work (p. 190 - 191)

by Joann McCaig

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Larry's Party by Carol Shields (Random House)

Transcultural Passages (p. 191 - 193)

by Louise Ladouceur

Book(s) Reviewed:
  1. Culture in Transit: Translating the Literature of Quebec by Sherry Simon (Véhicule Press)
  2. Marcel Pursued by the Hounds by Michel Tremblay, John Van Burek, and Bill Glassco (Talon Books)
  3. The Drama of Our Past: Major Plays from Nineteenth-Century Quebec by Leonard E. Doucette (University of Toronto Press)

Opinions and Notes

Margery Fee and Louise Ladouceur

  • Fat Useful Books (p. 196 - 197)

Eva-Marie Kröller and Louise Ladouceur

Alain-Michel Rocheleau and Louise Ladouceur


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