All Books

The eponymous first part of mclennan’s new book consists of fifty “gifts” each centred around words, phrases, or “glyphs” of language that initiate and replicate their own fractal transformations: some remain simply found fragments about which other words and phrases unfold, some lose themselves into pieces that we forget were once found, some mirror themselves in other forms, others become simply something other in language as it moves both with and away from them, each creating a syntax of meaning that is specific to its own occasion. All are addressed to the poet’s intimates—two dozen are, significantly, valentines—the rest admonitions, remembrances, messages and homages made public by the readers’ acts of witness.

In part two, “incomplete,” we are invited to watch the poet robbed of his intent as unexpected words interrupt his texts, turning declaratives into interrogatives, questions into requests: “would you leave (accidental) behind”—each poem an apparent loop of closure, but one that signifies its “failure” or incompletion by ending, or starting over again, with its first [title] word. In part three, “weightless,” the poet frees the signifier from the weight of the signified. He brackets and strikes through what we think of as “known” in the “real world” that is always outside language, because it is [named].

What unifies or makes these four parts into a book are the personae the poet assigns to the lover: in the first as an intimate; in the second as an interruption of the determinative self—the other that brings us back to the self; in the third as an undefinable and thereby unattainable weightlessness; and finally as the gravitational pull of the landscape itself—all of them “unfinished” at the speaker’s age, as the title of part four implies: “[sex at thirty-eight] unfinished shield notes: letters to g.”

‘All of Nichol’s work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant “image” of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’—Frank Davey

A quirky little set of rhymes about a crow with a bad leg blossoms into a free-flying grace of words as the clumsy bird tears free from his boring life in the prairies and his nagging “ol lady” in search of a bigger destiny. Along the way, Gimp Crow collects a magpie from Alberta and a raven from the West Coast, and learns about love and loss.This collection takes Turnstone Press back to its original poetry roots in the grand (or rather modest) tradition of Dennis Cooley, evoking prairie simplicity of language and an unpretentious approach to the age-old themes of self-discovery and yearning for a different life.Gimp Crow speaks to the reader, establishing his feisty nature, to a degree anthropomorphized into a discontented man, but still a wild crow at one­–or at odds–with the hard facts of life for urban wildlife. Kowal effectively captures the character of wild birds trapped in cityscapes, exhibiting sharp observation of the exterior world, while simultaneously capturing the heart of the captive human.Evoking dust-bowl prairie, Hank Williams songs of yearning, and a simple, but meaningful life, Kowal’s story poems bring to life a character that speaks to the heart of any prairie-dweller. Turns of phrase and constant, light-hearted word play make this collection enjoyable to read and accessible to non-poetry readers.