Book Reviews

Surfing the Fragments

Garry Thomas Morse (Author)
Transversals for Orpheus & the untitled 1-13. LINEbooks
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Lionel Kearns (Author)
A Few Words Will Do. Talon Books
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bill bissett (Author)
ths is erth thees ar peopul. Talon Books
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Reviewed by Meredith Quartermain

Garry Morse is one of the most engaging and interesting poets emerging now in Canada. Wide-ranging and eclectic in thought and style—a one-man Gung Haggis Fat Choy—he adroitly weaves Dante or Catullus with plastic bags, bank machines, heroin addicts, chicks, cooking recipes, hospital wards, HBO, Robbie Burns, or the Dunbar bus. As anyone who has heard him read will attest, he’s also a wonderful performer who luxuriates in sound textures, regularly breaks into melodic tenor (he’s an opera buff), and gets lots of laughs from the audience. In Transversals, his semantic and sonic textures are reflected in varied typefaces, and ingeniously deployed open spacing and diacritical marks.

The title “the untitled” suggests the unentitled too. A disentitlement to be found in the pervasive pressure of consumer culture and private interest which fragments everything from Dante to a dying parent in bite-size sales. Surfing the fragments, Morse reconfigures them with insightful irony offering us a critique of our world with a large dose of humour. The “influx of stimuli is like a real / {pAniC aTtacK}” he notes, “I have arranged the most unnerving / impromptu   Meet me where the line ends.” The poem is an “imaginary turf war” against a real war outside. The poem is “a pair of trains” circling in thought.

In contrast to the loose, open form of “The Untitled,” “Transversals for Orpheus” is tightly constructed of dimeter and trimeter lines in three- to four-line stanzas, each “transversal” containing four stanzas. Rhyme and meter combine for megapunch, as for example in “A promissory note / dying for belief in / mythological relief,” or “wool over / feral eyes, the / wolves feeding.”

In A Few Words Will Do, Lionel Kearns gives us charming, sometimes whimsical, sometimes deeply moving reflections born of a life-time’s contemplation, many of which mull over the passing of generations of living creatures—on the small scale of father to son, or on the grand scale of bacteria to trees. Dedicated to Kearns’s conservationist, outdoorsman father, the book includes boyhood memories of forbidden matches that led to a forest fire, camping with dad, the endurance of a cookstove door in the ruins of his grandparents’ house versus the endurance of his cantankerous elderly uncle. “Trophy,” where father shows son the consequences of hunting for fun, brought tears to my eyes. Time and being during time are abiding themes. In “Taking Your Time” he writes

We carry time
in our heads, keep it
on the bookshelf,
put it on film or tape
and roll it up
or spread it on a disk.

Punctuating the book with light-hearted humour are concrete poems playfully arranging letters or words for shape as well as meaning. Playfulness emerges too in poems about poems: the poem as animal gazing at you, the poem as carnivorous, the poem as fatso, as Canadian, as lacking confidence, as ruined structure, as depressed in bookstores, as professional journalist. “Here is a poem that thinks about / the nature of its own being or not being,” Kearns writes in “Existential.” “What is the role of the poem / in a consumer society?” he asks in “Roundup Time.” Then says “This poem needs brand name loyalty. / This poem needs to be branded. / The desperate poet pulls a red hot iron . . .”

bill bissett’s ths is erth thees ar peopul brings us a mix of short, lineated poems and longer, prosy pieces (lines ragged left and right), interspersed with playful line drawings. Many of these are written for the chanting and sound-play for which bissett is renowned. They are all of course written in bissett’s trademark spelling, which importantly forces us into the sight, sound and texture of words, just as bissett, in his performances, grounds poems in the physicality of his shaking rattles and rhythmically moving body. Here the reader must articulate and feel each syllable; the experience of words is as important as any abstract conceptual meaning.

bissett is a visionary poet, and this is a deeply philosophical book, conducting us to a world of colorful spirits and opening us to bodily experience (sexual or otherwise) which is the ground of our existence. bissett sings of a gold ball radiating through us all: the sun, the earth, our spiritual radiance, while reminding us of the global gold/oil rush which has thrown the earth off balance. The cleaning of the Love Canal is both a personal sexual matter and one of global pollution. Plato’s essences and the delusions of narrative, representation, and ideology all come into this radiant eye.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #198 (Autumn 2008), Canada and Its Discontents. (pg. 151 - 152)

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