Micheline Maylor reads her poem “Rabbits and Fuckers” from Volume 30-1 of FreeFall Magazine, inspired by the late Patrick Lane.

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Blue Sonoma
By Jane Munro
Brick Books
$20.00
ISBN: 978-1-926829-88-3

Blue Sonoma is a collection that begins with a mantra and becomes a study of images, illness, and landscape. Poet, Jane Munro, in her sixth collection, does this without a twinge of nostalgia, but claims observance through immediacy and wonder. In this, Munro claims her skill as poetic observer. She studies Japanese forms actively and we see the results in her clean attentive images, bare of superfluous detail.
In the section “Darkling”, about her partner’s descent into Alzheimer’s, we see meditative simplicity reflected in the question about relationship.

Mallard above. Mallard below. Two green, iridescent necks,
one reaching up, one down. Two curls on two tails.

And us, were we substance or reflection?
Moon boat sailing high. (28)

With precision the poet answers the question using the image of moon as both object of substance and reflection. In this way Munro manipulates the words to entrance and delight. Exacting syntax building image is a habit she maintains throughout the book and her skills are exemplary.
Munro’s pedigree is long reaching and admirable, having studied with Warren Tallman, Robin Blaser, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky. Her attention to comparative structures in poetry, and daily meditative practice manifest in the poems such as “Frog”, where the accumulation of the metaphor of the “Blue Sonoma” as experiential space for ailment and withdraw become “Basho-ized”. Munro uses vehicle and tenor to connect the metaphor to her own heart.

There is a frog

in one piston
of a crankcase.
It has the power to clean
the chamber
in which it hibernates.
It eats in its sleep, delicately
scraping the walls
with its feet.
I feel it kick in me. (32)

The best metaphor draws attention to things that are believable and held in tension, but Munro deepens the connection in an unexpected way and connects more than two parallels. Munro is aware of the sense of layered meaning and implied danger that is apparent between these objects. Consider the description of her partner as the road that nearly killed him, and in turn carries further implied danger:

Before we met, while driving cab,
he broke his neck. It rewelded
off-kilter: head stuck forward.

Six years later, it’s that jut I suddenly see ahead. (13)

If a poet’s job is to find the right word, then “jut” is only word that layers the road/neck in this way. Through a dream telling, Munro further displays her skills as poet with capacity for narrative tension. The result is visceral and danger apparent.

I was on a bus

for a long ride –
the Lions Gate Bridge
(a conveyor belt),
the North Shore Mountains
(loaves of bread).

I was tired. I made a bed
on the back bench. In the aisle
there was a bucket of water
and floating in it
a doll’s fancy dress, no more
than twelve inches long. It seemed
that someone was inside, but, no –
it was only a dress. A lanky man
ogled it and smacked his lips.
What have we here? (34)

The back blurb on Blue Sonoma claims, “Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what T.S. Eliot called “the gifts reserved for age”. Munro’s elegance and deft manipulation of line and craft certainly demonstrates a skilled hand, one of the long practiced and well thought. It is easy to learn from Munro’s craft, as much as it is to enjoy it.

This review is exclusive FreeFall Blog content.

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A review of

Bull Head

by John Vigna

Arsenal Pulp Press (2012)

ISBN: 978-1-55152-490-0

$15.95

The epigraph to John Vigna’s debut short story collection begins with Flannery O’Connor’s words, “. . . the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality . . .” This is no epigraph. It is a warning, sure as the surgeon general’s on the cigarette pack.

With deft handling of character, imagery, and language, Vigna draws us to the men of logging country, B.C., their foibles, their weaknesses, their flaws, their inept dealings with love. The characters in the book reek of dysfunction. Each main character is unable to process or comprehend the situations they find themselves in.

Vigna’s portrayals are unflinching and real. While it would be easy to turn away, Vigna manages to compel and attract the reader with energetic prose and satisfactory development ~ enough to sate morbid curiosity. I am reminded of the words of Nietzsche, “and when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” These characters are full of emptiness, undefined longing, and strife. Vigna handles the question: what does a man do when he can’t make sense of his world? In “South Country,” Billy takes action.

I grabbed the scythe, clutched it tight. Hops had his back to me, his jeans were at his knees, and his belt flipped back and forth against the dirt. I raised the scythe above Hops; the girl’s eyes widened. The quad wailed closer, Harley’s voice screeched in the air. I wanted to tell her that it’s okay; it will all be okay, that it will pass and you’ll be fine. It might take some time, but you’ll learn to slash it out of you bit by bit, leave it behind until maybe there’s nothing left. Nothing left to do but survive (144).

Vigna’s ambiguous scene causes dry-mouth and heart palpitations. I read these stories wide-eyed.

Vigna’s ability to tell these hard stories, so effectively, is fascinating and a study in line-level craft. The prose takes processing time as each sentence is choreographed precisely. I had to walk away from the story to allow the imagery and desolation of the character’s circumstances and choices to settle before I could move to the next. Each man says something about the difficulty of expressing love, and the violence that comes because of it: Earl and his sex-shop blow up doll; Sonny and his dog called Bacon Face; Brian and his fighting dogs; even Maurice and his love for a lame horse lead to a violent but telling climax when it is time to put her down.

“I never miss. You should know that by now.”

Harold nodded, his head heavy in the crosshairs. Maurice steadied his finger on the trigger, wiped his eye against his shoulder, and restrained the rifle.

His first shot shattered the windshield; the sound tore open the morning. The second shot blew a hole in the grill. He reloaded and emptied again into the body of the truck, shooting and re-loading and shooting from different angles (84).

Vigna is an exceptional builder of suspense. He does not shy away from the darkness in characters, nor does he pull back. With an unflinching eye, he builds scene, dilemma, and character. There is no mistake that this collection has garnered much praise and attention, including nominations for the Danuta Gleed literary award, Salty Ink’s most dazzling debut, Steven Beattie’s book of the year list 2012. Vigna’s prose is unforgettable. But fairly warned, this is not a book for sissies.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 3.

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Micheline Maylor:

Tuesday September 9 – 1:30 – 3:00:
The Earth Works like a Poem: A Conversation about Art, Science, and the
Aesthetics of Understanding (EC1060)

Thursday September 11 – 1:30 – 3:00
Eco-Poetry Readings (EC2065)

Friday September 12 – 9:00 – 10:30
Micheline Maylor “The phenomenology of empty space,
creativity, and the Burgess Shale as Muse”

Ryan Stromquist:

Thursday September 11 – 9:00 – 10:30
Ryan Stromquist “Not all Frac(k)ing is Bad

Alec Whitford:

Tuesday September 9 – 1:30 – 3:00:
The Earth Works like a Poem: A Conversation about Art, Science, and the
Aesthetics of Understanding (EC1060)

You’re Invited!

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the id kid
by Linda Besner
Signal Editions – Vehicule Press
ISBN 978-1-55065-313-7
$18.00

A quick googling of Linda Besner reveals a clown-nose portrait, the poet reading on an excavator, and an interview with Zach Wells that starts with bed-bugs and develops into a discussion of diction and sound. This girl is different. This girl isn’t taking herself too seriously. In her debut collection, the id kid, her poems play with language skillfully.

In fact, it is easy to lump her in with poets adept in linguistic gymnastics, such as Ken Babstock, Christian Bök, and Zach Wells. But these fellas are veterans. Besner stands out because a) this is her debut collection. It seems, she’s just arrived. This is not an awkward first book where we need to patiently wait with the author as she develops her skills as a poet. They are already present, accounted for and strong. And b) The collection doesn’t drift into the incomprehensible. She retains her footing in solid narrative while she does what poets should do, plays with the language and connects emotively with the reader. Take this example from “Knick Knack”:

Mismatch.
Gimcrack gewgaws
culled from every claptrap souk in the Near East.
The bric-a-brac cabinet stacked with lowly crackerjack prizes,
that plastic horse you loved – remember?
– still ticking fitfully on its rockers. (23)

Alliteration and assonance hum the poem along as if it is a song, reminiscent of the Knick-Knack-patty-whack nursery rhyme. It fully embraces the frolic in Besner’s voice, yet the poems never wallow in frivolity. Besner tinkers, too, with concepts brought forward from the theatre of the absurd and explores irony to its fullest effect in “Joke”.

So there’s this beautiful paraplegic girl sitting in a wheelchair
by the sea. My uncles rolled her there, parading past the Orange-
You-Glad julep stand where the knock-knock schmoes hawk
bananas, rake flat the ashtray sand. I’ve never been hugged,

she recites. Player piano a dusty tinkle in her throat.
First pass, but the porpoises, those smooth bastards,
are already stifling their snorting in the spray.
Uncle Sid, who cleaned up in last week’s sunburn

sweepstakes wearing a clown nose instead of a gilligan’s hat,
leans in to his brother, murmurs, Listen Charlie, the one-liner
is not where the money is. Remember, ha-ha makes ‘has.’ C.O.D.
Harry nods – he’s tops in the desert’s laissez-faire pyramid scheme. (29)

The text is chock-a-block with punchy quips and imagery. It pushes us, the readers, to reconceptualize meaning and narrative through the use of flexible syntax. We are challenged to think beyond the first and most literal interpretation. In this way, the poet best showcases her skills. The subtext exists and can be deciphered because we are inspired to do so.

“Matthew J. Trafford” is another example of the poet’s skill. This poem is a joy to read in the way a new favourite song is set on replay. I had a desire to return to the text repeatedly to observe the stunning word manipulation. Besner dabbles with palindromic effect, with diction, to remind us that identity is a shifty business despite how we try to label ourselves.

When I came back you’d written YAG on your forehead
with my eyeliner; you were sitting on a loots
by the hallway mirror.

In was the year we devil together in Zizkov.
We’d hung my blue prat across the moor
To separate your bed and desk from the salon. (46)

The context of the wording is slippery and it becomes a game to return and discover new interpretations within the lines. The descriptive language allows ‘the best words in the best order’ to become ‘the right words in the wrong order’. The poem becomes more delectable for doing so. Distortion becomes a way to increase and imply meaning within the poems. These are not ‘one reading’ poems, subsequent readings always harvest more electricity.

Besner’s themes in the id kid are ironic and sharp edged, full of irony and wit. She’s produced a syntactically scintillating collection of poems well worth the deviation.

Linda Besner is a graduate of the UBC MFA program and lives in Toronto.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XX Number 1 Spring / Summer 2010.

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Night-Eater
by Patricia Young
Quattro Books
ISBN 978-1-927443-01-9
$14.95

Patricia Young’s Night-Eater provides a collection of portraits, not the type of portraits you would find anywhere; these are a Picasso-esque gathering of portraits with the angles jutting in odd directions and the style unique. Her choice of subject ranges from swabbies, to professor, from two stubborn Ayapaneco-linguists to a hungry somnambulist. Her topics help provide original perspectives. One of the finest portraits is “Daughter at Thirteen” (21).

She sighed in the bath, at the height of summer,
crossing the road, red jeans and black boots,
trucks whipping past.

Deep inhalations, slow exhalations.

She sighed because she sighed because she sighed,
running up and down the escalator. Tilted her head,
that exquisite sculpture, and sighed
as though her heart
were a kettle boiled dry.

Young’s accuracy of the portrayed blended with the dramatic irony, gave me a laugh. And as the poem continues, it reveals a theme in Young’s poems. Accute and quirky observation which cumulates at insight. She tackles a few poems that could be classified as eco-poetic, but manages to keep romantic pastoral out of the discourse. In the poem “Sisyphean” she talks of a man and a son who come to clean the beach every Sunday, while another poem, reminiscent of junk drawer cleaning, talks of “What Doesn’t Breakdown”:

I was on my knees sifting out Chiquita banana stickers,
Toothpaste caps, twist ties, Styrofoam chips, baby rattles,
Sunglasses, cell phones, keyboards, weather stripping,
triple AAA batteries, remote controls, airplane propellers,
medical waste, chaos, gravity, a house of cards. (33).

The mundane and small build to a subtle and profound observation. Chaos does not break down. Yet, Night-Eater’s impulse is to take what is illogical and render it digestible in these poems.

Patricia Young lives and writes in Victoria, B. C.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

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YVR
by W. H. New
Oolichan Books (2011)
ISBN 978-0-86492-668-5
$17.95

In W. H. New’s tenth book of poetry he investigates his hometown, Vancouver. The collection won the Vancouver book award in 2012 and is a nostalgic and moody view of his feeling about home and time’s effect on the place. Many of the poems begin with narrator as child observing the world around him. Vancouver locales are plentiful and specific. This observance comes from “Grade” (31).

At six I thought if I climbed into the cab of
Old Engine 374 I could see the whole world.
and I could: Kits Beach up close, the Sleeping
Beauty further off: in my head I was already
through the next range and the one after,
out of the spiral tunnel, over the top,
free pass to beyond –

New often navigates out of this voice and into the one of mature narrator enveloped in remembrance and wonder. Here we find narrator musing on the essential question, “what have I stopped noticing?” (51). The poems competently fold time and reminiscence together to create portraits of time and place, sometimes too specifically to be inclusive of everyman. Yet, there is a sense that these things matter to New, that his memory is important.

I am caught in a tangle,
fishnets of caution, repetition:

where has the moment gone, single
featherstroke, sudden

berryblush,
vermilion cheek and child hurrah –

voices –
fixed forever

and then –
dropped in fogbank,
murmured into approximation,
lost, like
willow play and grey signs – (51)

W. H. New is a retired professor of Canadian Literature and lives in Vancouver.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

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Random House Canada
ISBN 978-0-307-35970-4
$25.00

Refreshing and devastating, Kim Thúy’s (pronounced two-ee) Ru is translated superbly to English by Sheila Fischman. Ru previously won the Governor General’s award in French in 2010. It is the story (fiction/memoir hybrid) of Nguyen An Tinh and her family’s journey from war torn Vietnam in 1968 while fleeing the communists. It is a tale woven in vignettes. Each vignette is artful in its prose. Thúy shows moments, or develops character precisely. These vignettes then tumble towards a full story in an effective accumulation of impressions.

Thúy manages a deft and powerful telling of her migration, and immigration with poetic skill, potent imagery, and engaging narrative. With sensitivity Thúy recreates a number of experiences. In this passage about her journey as a “boat person”, she pinpoints her child point of view: “[F]ear was transformed into a hundred-faced monster who sawed off our legs and kept us from feeling the stiffness in our immobilized muscles.” (5). Ever increasing stakes for the narrator and her family are related in such a way that I read the entire collection wide-eyed. The tension did not relent even as the family immigrates to Quebec.

Thúy also manages metaphor with complexity. Memes seamlessly entwine: money, corruption, class, motherhood, mental illness, illusion, home, love, life, similarity, dreams, cycles of life, hopelessness, woundedness, heroes, knowledge, dislocation, and desire. Metaphor is handled poetically and creates a layering effect in the storytelling. Just one reading of this book impossible, and improbable. The author’s subtle handling of so many issues is pleasing and crafty. I re-read the book through seven times over the course of a few days and continued to extract new ways of seeing the subject(s), scenes, and characters. Every reading was equally wide-eyed for me. Perhaps this had to do with the complete absence of sentimentality and nostalgia, and Thúy’s adept use of language. In addition, her narrative point of view takes on a childlike quality, as though other realities, beyond the one told, do not exist, a trait the narrator inherits from her father.

As for my father, he didn’t have to reinvent
himself. He is someone who lives in the
moment, with no affection for the past. He savours
every instant of the present as if it were the best
and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements.
That is why he always inspired the greatest, most
wonderful happiness, whether holding a mop on the
steps of a hotel or sitting in a limousine en route to a
strategic meeting with his minister (64).

The present encompasses each narrative in Ru until the totality of the collection forms an overall dominant impression and it feels like something profound has happened, something refreshing and devastating.

In a CBC on-line interview with Thúy, she reveals the structure of Ru was not intentional. She merely, “picked up where she left off the day before,” nor is she comfortable calling it a novel or even a book. She claims, “my job was to remove the unnecessary words.” What she leaves is the essential moments that build to a full and impacting picture. Consider this partial passage, just one of Thúy’s many character portrayals:

I thought he was mute. If I ran into him
today, I would say that he’s autistic. One day his foot
slipped on the morning dew. And bang, he was
spread out on his back. BANG! He cried out
“BANG!” several times, then burst out laughing.
I knelt down to help him get up. He leaned against
me, holding my arms, but didn’t get up. He was
crying. He kept crying and crying, then stopped
suddenly, and turned my face towards the sky.
He asked me what colour I saw. Blue. Then he
raised his thumb and pointed his index finger towards
my temple, asking me again if the sky was still blue (85).

Ru allows us to consider these simple questions on the crest of subliminal and political complexities without direct questions. Thúy challenges us to different ways of seeing. The craft of the lines and words becomes spellbinding, just the way a good piece of narrative should. This book is highly recommended.

This review first appeared in FreeFall Volume XXII Number 3.

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