STEPHEN SCOBIE`S two most recent collections of poems form a trilogy with his yet-to-be-published critical study of Bob Dylan, according to a note in Remains. An odd trio, perhaps, although Dylan does turn up from time to time in both poetry books. But the fascination with pop musicians of the echt troubador type (Scobie has also written about Leonard Cohen) says a good deal about Scobie`s own strengths as a poet; for despite his whole-hearted conversion to literary theory in recent years, and his ability and willingness to out-Derrida even the most Derridarivative critics in the business, his gifts as a poet are conventionally lyrical. He may wish to dress up a collection of prose poems structured around word associations with a title rife with Derridean and theoretical implications ("ghosts," "intertext"); but it`s still old and worthy cloth cut to look faddish and hip. Ghosts: A Glossary of the Intertext is a collection of 59 prose-poem meditations arranged alphabetically by their mostly single-word titles (hence glossary) from A to W (no XYZ, and no EHJKNQV either). Individual poems are sometimes clever, on one occasion too clever by half. the title poem is merely a blank page. They are also sometimes tender, arising from memory and feeling (as good prose poetry does) as well as simple word association and narrative. Nostalgia, that essential quality of ghosts and haunting, is a motivating factor in many of the poems, as indeed it is in much prose poetry, that of Lautreamont and Rimbaud for example. Scobie`s nostalgia is not as metaphysical as those French writers`; it is more sentimental and exploratory: The hands of the dead, what remains, bright bracelet about the bone [ ... }Remains are the remainder, the sum left over, the excess M can never be accounted fur This glossary tracks the remains of other writers` intentions. That last sentence is certainly part of the story, for other writers - indeed art in general - haunt these poems a good deal. Call it "intertext," if you will, though here the word seems unnecessarily to theorize Scobie`s writerly preoccupations. The writers who get entries to themselves in the glossary are an interesting group: Derrida, Dylan, Pound, Shakespeare, Stein, Woolf, and Wordsworth. Shakespeare obtrudes a little, but is included perhaps because "his favourite role was the Ghost: slipping away whenever you try to conjure it" Wordsworth unpredictably "is the ghost that will haunt Canadian poetry." The elasticity of the prose poem allows such sentences, escaped as they must seem from a scholarly essay, to be integral parts of the score, and it is intriguing to imagine the book that could be written out of this one idea. Where there are ghosts there are (or were) remains. The prose poems -or prose texts in Remains are emptier of programmatic elements than the pieces in Ghosts. They are shorter as well, more austere, and generally built around a single image, idea, or piece of the world: Remember Ptolemy, the music of the spheres. Remember those nights you used to hear it. the moment after midnight: that thin, that wild mercury sound, the pinpricks of starlight stabbed through the parchment of heaven. Many of these brief poems have an ele. giac feeling to them, a feeling that is made explicit in the last (and longest) one, which remembers bpNichol. On its own terms it is a tender memorial, and gives me to think that behind Scobies title is Pound`s wellknown "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" Spoken from the heart, then, the poems in Remains may not quite make one jump for joy (as Phyllis Webb`s wrapper blurb has it), but they are effective and sometimes moving miniatures.