All Books

Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment and a shoebox of photos his prairie grandfather had taken of the family homestead, he began to piece together his first long poem: “I Wanted to Say Something.” Though this story had nothing to do with Prince George, the form it generated was large enough and open enough to set the possibilities for writing in the larger dimensions of self and place he had been searching for: the political, the social, the institutional, the environmental—the layered and fragmented outside/inside he now found himself in.

Leaving “‘I Wanted to Say Something” behind as an absent precursor, The Centre: Poems 1970–2000 begins, appropriately, with “The Death of a Lyric Poet”—the sequence of poems that initiate his engagement of and life in the north with new and unavoidably present recognitions as sources for the work. The “centre” in this sequence of ten long poems thus shifts from a nostalgic, idealized and elegiac rural singularity to a new relentless multiplicity of the urban, where the centre constantly threatens not to hold. The “centre” in these books becomes simultaneously the shopping centre, the community centre, the industrial centre: a multiplicity of urban attentions reproducing itself as an articulate awareness of a fractured and fragmented self. Beauty appears in this wasteland only through glimpses of externalized objects of desire: a new, materialized “arrhythmia” of the heart, grounded in the scarlet fever of an ever-receding innocence of youth.

Billie Livingston’s poems drive straight for the sharp edges–from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives and friends grappling with the torturing frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death.These jagged realities also collide with the innocence of childhood–a toddler being offered LSD by the next-door neighbor, a Catholic schoolgirl being dropped into the frontlines of a fierce abortion protest and a young woman trying to relax with a book in a park but instead facing an unwelcome exposure. Livingston also includes a selection of poems written from the disparate voices of a self-destructive family that eventually developed into her popular novel.

In this eagerly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning, critically lauded debut, Rob Winger’s sophomore collection, The Chimney Stone, bends the contemporary lyric into startling new shapes. Concentrating on a splendid mess of headlines, wars, politics, relationships and artistic influences, Winger’s ghazals ask us how to negotiate the complex commitments and chaotic tumult of our dailylives. Making use of the ghazal’s original address to both a secular lover and a sacred ethics, Winger’s four sections move from examinations of gender in “Iron John” and “Bloody Mary,” to an ironic investigation of common experience in “Idiot Wind,” to a record of both human rights abuses and personal epiphany in “Blind Date.” In the process, Winger not only engages in dialogue with other poets–John Thompson, Phyllis Webb, Adrienne Rich, Ghalib, and more–but also welcomes other voices, measures, and musical phrases into his couplets. Here, Rimbaud rubs shoulders with Joe Strummer and David Byrne; Dylan exchanges one-liners with Gaston Bachelard; Johnny Cash spars with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and Gretzky makes a pass to a smooth right winger. Drifting from razor-carved sternums, to Lhasa runways, to Southeast Asian temples and beaches, to eighteenth-century shipwrecks, bloody tanks, rusty apartheid, blind genocide and burning teddy bears, The Chimney Stone urges us to re-examine not only how we order the contemporary world, but also how we become its citizens or revolutionaries, grandparents or kids, protestors or politicians. Ethically charged, tenderly observed, and masterfully realized, Winger’s poems are a vital addition to the ghazal’s continued evolution.

“John Terpstra’s meditations have the soundness and snug fit of consummate carpentry, measure in language and in thought… This is religious writing from the ground up, negotiating the difficult moral terrain between wildness and ‘development’ with an imaginative grasp reminiscent of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. This is an important book, with the toughness of maple, the compassion of cedar.”

? Don Mckay