Book Reviews

A Walking Review

Johanna Skibsrud (Author)
Late Nights With Wild Cowboys. Gaspereau Press
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Barbara Klar (Author)
Cypress. Brick Books
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Meredith Quartermain (Author)
Nightmarker. NeWest Press
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Barbara Pelman (Author)
Borrowed Rooms. Ronsdale Press
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Aaron Giovannone

"What justification is there," A.R. Ammons asks, "for comparing a poem to a walk?" His answer suggests that both poem and walk require an orientation between "the external and the internal," that both move through physical and intellectual landscapes. I think Ammons' question applies equally well to a poetry review that strolls through four recent books, taking notes when they come into view of each other and admiring their most suggestive vistas.  

While the title of Johanna Skisbrud's Late Nights with Wild Cowboys stirs up visions of wide open spaces and the fireside intimacy of a western-themed Harlequin romance, this book only has a few cowboys in it. The phrase, however, does convincingly evoke the collection's restless, unsettled, even westering poetic. In the title poem, two women travel through the American west in an emotional rollercoaster over mountains and melodrama: "Montana, she told me, was the closest you could get on the / green earth to God, and Idaho was / ten thousand Montanas in one." It seems like a lot of fun until the two women settle, finding themselves fantastically transported to the old west and unsatisfying, gender-defined lives in service of itinerant cowboys. While Skibsrud seems fascinated by literal and figurative domesticity, she usually rejects it to follow an imagination that is continually displacing itself in search of its own boundaries. In the suite "Suburban Dreams," the speaker fantasizes about a rooted, comfortable life where "we'll be / lonesome when away from home, and not in an / abstract way, but precisely- / for an exact address." But even her fantasy of at-homeness is most compelling when imagined away from home. While Skibsrud's poetry is quite confessional-and often quite ‘moving'-she is at her best when she keeps moving, doesn't rely on static self-revelations, but remains evasive, locating the centre of being somewhere off-centre, outside.

Unlike Skibsrud, who is most graceful performing echappés over definite geographic boundaries, Barbara Klar digs ruthlessly into the sensual and imaginative experience of a precise place. Klar's second collection, Cypress, is inspired by her work as tree planter in the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatechawn, a powerful landscape that provokes in the speaker simultaneously alienating and ecstatic visions: "Valley so deep the oceans have forgotten it, sky wringing dry. I can smell stone. It is rolling full of missing in a steaming line between the sun and someone who thinks of me." Klar's abandonment to nature is a gesture of great risk and great reward: like a "black cell / dividing and dividing into more alertnesses," her language keeps slipping, is worn out by cultural and historical processes as implacable as the weather. As an endnote points out, the Cypress Hills have no cypress tress: its English name is derived from a mistranslation of the Métis. This place, then, is strangely unnameable, uncontainable, unfolding in a spiral of sensuality that often ends only in exhaustion. The anxiety to respond adequately to this place can, sometimes, seem unvaried, perhaps like the repetitive labour of the tree planter herself.  

In Nightmarker Meredith Quartermain's wanderings through place, if less visionary then Klar's, are more measured and layered. Quartermain combines numerous discourses-lyrical, historical, scientific-to construct a multiform and politically-infused portrait of her hometown, Vancouver. Two dominant voices structure this book: one is a flaneur who catalogues her experiences among neighbourhoods, monuments, buildings, and people. This voice is not limited to the observation of the immediate present, however: she has a keen sense that the past's exploitations, expropriations, and injustices continue to underpin the contemporary place: "Corner of Hastings (Vancouver mill) and Hawks (John Francis, 1890s stockholder, Coal Harbour land syndicate.) Astoria Hotel parking lot-the Sheway Community Projects trailer-hut. A she, in shiny lo-slung pants, drifts past the door, fingering her spaghetti strap..." The second voice, which signs her lyrical epistles ‘Geo', offers a more holistic view of the city, situating it in a global and even metaphysical context, sometimes even offering a commentary on the methods of the flaneur herself: "the Human can never catalogue all the moving parts let alone figure their levers and linkages." In some instances Nightmarker's particularities can exclude a reader unfamiliar with Vancouver, but overall Quartermain provides an ambitious and compelling model for the poetic exploration of urban space.

Barbara Pelman sketches the floor plan for a somewhat more modest space in Borrowed Rooms, her second collection. While the poems often move outside the literal confines of the house, picturesque depictions of blue skies and epiphanies tend to repeat themselves in decorous patterns. "I long for your quick laugh, your youth, / the days of red pomegranates, and the willow / bending her green hair into the water." Vivid metaphors sometimes enliven the lyric formula, but missing is the movement to, or engagement with, a world beyond the walls of the personal.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #201 (Summer 2009), Disappearance and Mobility. (pg. 189 - 191)

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.