Book Reviews

Poetry's Underdogs

Wiliam Anselmi (Editor)
Mary Melfi: Essays on Her Works. Guernica Editions
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Gregory M. Cook (Editor)
Alden Nowlan: Essays on His Works. Guernica Writers Series
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Linda Rogers (Editor)
Joe Rosenblatt: Essays on His Works. Guernica Writers Series
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Vanessa Kent

These books, selected texts from Guernica's "Writers Series," initially present a conundrum for readers: how are we to read them?  And what sort of audience are they directed towards?  Certain elements suggest this series is for academic purposes: selections from book reviews, critical literary articles, and bibliographies; while others suggest a more general readership: effusive praise and personal anecdotes from friends and peers, interviews, and creative responses to the authors.  The lack of an index or any indication of the original dates of publication of each individual selection may frustrate some readers.  In addition, there are an unfortunate number of typographical errors that plague the series.  The individual books offer no guidance and it is only when one searches the publisher's website that we learn the works are "ideal tools for students and for anyone interested in the work of contemporary Canadian writers."  With this in mind, what at first seems frustrating to the academic eye evaporates as one reads through the collections and accepts their place as texts to read alongside the poetry of each author.  Expectations shift from an analytical, precise document to a more personal sketch of the artists-their personalities emerge from the texts as unique and engaging poets.  Each book has a very specific way of approaching its author and the introductions penned by each editor (notably, each themselves a poet) clearly indicate what that focus will be.   Gregory M. Cook sets up a reading of Alden Nowlan by addressing the tendency of critics to conflate class and region in his work, which Cook sees as a "disservice."  Linda Rogers focuses her collection on Joe Rosenblatt's Jewish heritage as forming a poet who writes in an ornate, surreal style she identifies as "Canadian literature for European readers."  Finally, William Anselmi focuses on Mary Melfi's ability to write skillfully across genres of the contradictions inherent in inhabiting particular gender, ethnic, and class positions.  While each collection presents strengths and challenges, the free range with which each editor shapes the text results in portraits of the poets as individuals, achieving coherence to uneven levels of success across the series as a whole.   

The Alden Nowlan collection presents the most challenging read in terms of how it has been structured.  For example, the inclusion of Thomas R. Smith's introduction and afterword to two editions of Nowlan's collected poems, What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (1993; 2000), produced for an American audience, cuts down on the variety of voices that the other two author-series achieves.  The point of view of the collection clearly is one that desires to move beyond classifications of Nowlan as a regional writer, a term Cook identifies as "a critic's mark for class-ism."  I wonder, however, if Cook's emphasis on the damage caused by such labeling goes a bit too far.  While he laments that reading Nowlan simply as a regional writer does his work a "disservice," I worry that reading his work without acknowledging his identity as a Maritimer does a different sort of disservice.  Considering that many people view Nowlan's greatest strength as his ability to capture an authenticity of voice, I find his writing works very powerfully to undo the damage of regional stereotypes by humanizing his characters so effectively that they are relatable to readers regardless of class or origin.

Rogers' collection emphasizes Joe Rosenblatt's eccentricity, his restless poetry of a world of animals and humans always in the midst of a metamorphosis, a comic uncanny, a grotesque Sublime. His identity as an artist is described as paralleling his poetics.  He is Toronto embodied yet his eventual move to Vancouver Island connects him to a natural landscape as fecund as his poetry.  He works across mediums as a visual artist as well as poet, having had twelve solo exhibitions of his drawings between 1972-1999.  He is Canadian yet has also gained literary attention in Italy-a country as Baroque as he.  Interestingly, Rogers also includes four short contributions from Rosenblatt alongside the personal, creative, and scholarly contributions about his work.  This crystallizes a sense of the poet's work more successfully than the other two author-studies.  Of the three books this is the least analytical yet the most intimate-and the reader has a well-formed sense of Rosenblatt as a poet as well as a character.  Unfortunately, the Rosenblatt text is also the most distractingly plagued by typographical errors.

In a series that highlights the struggles of the marginalized or "underclass[ed]" poets, one of whom is firmly established in the canon, however problematically, and two who have yet to break into the Canadian literary imagination in a substantive way, it is the Mary Melfi collection that most thoroughly interrogates the politics behind canon formation in our country.  As a writer who works across genre lines, producing an impressive number of plays, poetry collections, novels, children's books, and biography, Melfi's work explicitly addresses issues of class, ethnicity, and gender in a highly ironic, surrealistic style.  It is this well-developed sense of style, and her precise, careful manipulation of narrative form, Anselmi notes, that allows her work to acknowledge the irresolvable contradictions inherent in the Canadian subject, specifically a subject marked by ethnicity (Italian-Canadian) and gender.  Of all three collections, this is the most academically-focused, offering complicated and well-developed literary analyses of her works.  While the Nowlan text offers a confident yet narrow view of a poet whose style effortlessly innovated the ways in which writers in Canada and beyond negotiate issues of voice and authenticity, and the Rosenblatt text presents an intimate portrait of a brilliant, eccentric writer from the perspective of friends, lovers, and admirers, the Melfi text presents, unarguably, a writer whose skill and complex negotiations with identity is glaringly absent from the Canadian literary canon-a gap that causes readers to question the effectiveness of the current literary establishment to showcase contemporary working writers. 

Related book reviews

• Autofiction et dévoilement de soi by Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska (ESSAYS)

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #204 (Spring 2010), Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska. (pg. 169 - 170)

***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.