| Book Review A Review of: The Amateur Marriage
by Lyall Bush
Anne Tyler has a way of creating modern fables that look and feel like
realist fiction, but lack the easy resolutions of fables. The Amateur
Marriage, her 16th novel, is no exception, though the eccentric
optimism that shapes the pages of earlier novels is absent here,
replaced by a view of life no less bright and now balanced by caution.
Tyler's characteristic voice is present even in the opening pages
which record a critical, film-like moment in the lives of a young
couple in 1941. Days after Pearl Harbor, with Baltimore's St. Cassian
neighborhood swept up in a small frenzy of enlisting, a pretty girl
...
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|  | Oracle Night
by Paul Aster
H.B. Fenn & Company $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0805073205
|
Book Review A Review of: Oracle Night
by Michael Hale
Paul Auster can finally stop. After eight novels, three films, and
over a dozen poetry collections and non-fiction books, the
Jersey-born, Brooklyn-ensconced author has finally perfected the
modern American cautionary tale.
Working in a genre begun by Poe, shaped by Hammett and saturated with
the same fear that fires Americans-at their best, and at their
worst-Auster's latest novel, Oracle Night, is a tone-perfect narrative
of the modern American Everyman. And as much as we may not want to
believe it, there are universals in Auster's characters that seep
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: JacobÆs Dream
by Lynda Grace Philippsen
Elizabeth Brewster's collection, Jacob's Dream, is the latest in a
long career (beginning in the 1940s) of a poet now in her eighties.
The collection is informed by an uplifting tenacity. The poems embrace
hope and express gratitude in the face of an inevitable future: a not
too distant death. In "Dark Cottage" (which is introduced as "Gloss on
Edmund Waller's Old Age'") she writes:
And yet the broken walls
sometimes admit gusts of air,
a wind laden with violets
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: That Singing You Hear at the Edges
by Lynda Grace Philippsen
That Singing You Hear at the Edges is Sue MacLeod's second book and
poems in it have appeared in respected journals and anthologies since
1999. The opening and closing poems in the collection, "The God of
Pockets" and "Especially for a woman, reading" (the strongest works in
the collection) won first and second prizes in Arc's Poem of the Year
contest and the League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Contest,
respectively. The poems in between occasionally offer interesting
imagery and pose provocative questions:
I wonder: When we spun
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Pouring Small Fire
by Lynda Grace Philippsen
Pouring Small Fire by Susan Manchester is a work of self-revelation,
something apparent from her first awkward words of dedication: "To the
parade of feelings created by others in me / and to the infinite
shapes of all imagery, / I dedicate this small portion of who I am
becoming." The image of a drunken father staggering home with his
excuses in the opening poem "Eastern Standard" introduces an intense
pain that roots itself deeply in this collection. Pain of alcoholism,
the deaths of parents, an apparent pregnancy not carried to term,
hysterectomy, the loss of vitality to grief, and the dissolution of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Taking the Names Down from the Hill
by Susan Briscoe
Philip Kevin Paul is not a cynical poet. He is not embarrassed by
explicit spirituality or tender emotions. The poems of his first
collection, animated by his First Nations heritage, bear titles such
as "Toward the Beautiful Way", "Deer Medicine", "Ceremony", and "The
Violet Light of Healing". The opening poem reveals the hopeful tone as
well as the imagistic vocabulary of this collection:
A crow walks
its muddy
kneeless walk
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Museum of Bone and Water
by Susan Briscoe
Museum of Bone and Water is. . .difficult poetry to enjoy. This is
intentional given that Nicole Brossard has long been an experimental
poet and, as a lesbian feminist, one of her most important projects
has been the subversion of patriarchal language. For Brossard this
entails the rejection of conventions of syntax and monologic
signification in an effort to create an criture feminine. Now while
this makes for interesting theory, it does not make for very
satisfying poetry. Writing these poems may have been meaningful for
Brossard (and certainly her focus is the creative process more than
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Island of the Blessed
by Susan Briscoe
Hilary Clark's The Dwellings of Weather is her third collection, and
it demonstrates a self-consciousness of craft that is sometimes
inflated to self-reflexive angst: "I am breaking the lines / with
terrible care," she tells us. About half the pieces here, however, are
prose poems that don't have line breaks at all, and with just a few
exceptions, the other half are very loosely constructed poems with
lots of spaces and indentations and dashes. Yet the content of the two
forms is so similar that the choice between them seems arbitrary, a
varying device to keep poet and reader awake- perhaps necessary in a
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Difficulties of Modernism
by Asa Boxer
The year of crisis is 1922, the year of The Waste Land. Negotiations
between T. S. Eliot and Dial magazine's Scofield Thayer were heated.
Pound had been pimping The Waste Land as the culmination of twenty
years of modernist efforts. Bidding began at $2,850, which Eliot
declined, convinced he could get more. Interestingly, negotiations
were started without anyone having examined the manuscript. In the
end, the Dial Award was promised Eliot--again without anyone bothering
to take a peek at the text. "Literary history," writes Lawrence
Rainey, "records few spectacles so curious or so touching as that of
...
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|  | Miss Smithers
by Susan Juby
Harper Collins Canada $15.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0006392652
|
Book Review A Review of: Miss Smithers
by Heather Kirk
This young-adult novel chronicles the further adventures of Alice
MacLeod, "world record holder in the Most Embarrassing Moments
category," protagonist of Alice, I Think. In the sequel, Miss
Smithers, 16-year-old Alice competes in the annual Miss Smithers
competition in the isolated town of Smithers, in the northern interior
of British Columbia. Often very funny, the story satirizes beauty
contests, small-town life, and the Boomer generation. It also traces
Alice's tentative growth toward greater self confidence and better
relationships with family and friends. Although the book would have
...
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|  | When I Was Little
by Jamie Lee Curtis
Scholastic Canada $7.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0590124714
|
Book Review A Review of: Whe I Was Little: A Four-Year-OldÆs Memoir of Her Youth
by Olga Stein
Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born taps into every child's
curiosity about her arrival in the world. Told as a child's
imaginative reconstruction of how she began life with her parents, the
story cleverly combines truth and exaggeration in the recounting of
events which culminate in the adoption of a baby girl. A couple
receives a call during the night. They take a plane immediately, and
arrive in a hospital to receive their new daughter. It's a familiar
story but with a tiny twist. The twist is tiny because the couple's
nervous excitement at the prospect of meeting their child, their
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born
by Olga Stein
This is a delightful book for little people four to six years of age.
The book don't merely tell a story-instead it holds up a colourful,
zany and happy mirror to any child developing an awareness of herself,
her own growth, her place within a family and the world beyond the
home. When I Was Little portrays a little girl describing how things
are different now that she is four. With her baby sister always close
by-at the breakfast table, sharing a bath or a ride in the car-the
four-year-old has many opportunities for making comparisons. She feels
like a big girl and lists all the things she gets to do and is capable
...
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|  | The Clearing
by Tim Gautreaux
Knopf $35 Hardcover
ISBN: 0375414746
|
Book Review A Review of: The Clearing
by Matt Sturrock
What a surprise it is to read a "literary" novel and not be subjected
to the maddeningly slow narrative progression, precious prose, or
pseudo-philosophical noodling that so often afflicts the form. Where
lesser novels succumb to stasis and tedium, The Clearing, despite its
beautiful language and close attention to character, buffets the
reader with maximum action. And in this case, the novel being
superficially about a family's war against a Mafia syndicate in (of
all places) a logging camp, the action is of a spectacularly violent
variety. Barely a chapter goes by without some tough being
...
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|  | Beyond Measure
by Pauline Holdstock
University Of Toronto Press $22.95 Paperback
ISBN: 189695149X
|
Book Review A Review of: Beyond Measure
by Lisa Salem-Wiseman
The title of Beyond Measure, the new novel by B.C. writer Pauline
Holdstock, suggests a world in which moral considerations have been
discarded, in which even Protagoras's relativist dictum that "man is
the measure of all things" has given way to the idea that the ethical
realm has been abandoned altogether. This is the world of the Italian
Renaissance; from the opening pages, which vividly depict a crowd's
bloodthirsty reaction to a double hanging, to the final pages, which
follow the creation of "a living boy of pure gold" for a celebration,
the reader is plunged into a society which subjects the human body and
...
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|  | Lightning
by Fred Stenson
Douglas & McIntyre $32.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1553650107
|
Book Review A Review of: Lightning
by Peter Yan
One distinctive mark of the Western genre is its brutal violence. Life
is worth little more than tobacco spit in this literary world where
power resides in the barrel of a gun and where lawless cowboys kill
time between killing time by stealing, whoring, raping, drinking,
gambling and lynching. In Fred Stenson's Lightning, the sequel to his
Giller nominated The Trade, the violence is still there-one character
has her face slashed in half and lives-but tamed in order for Stenson
to tell his Canadian Western tale like a morality play.
The novel begins in Dillon, Montana in 1881, where the main character,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company
by James Roots
The first-ever American feature film was a Western called The Great
Train Robbery (1903). Although Westerns have been effectively dead at
the box-office for 30 years now, they dominated the American cinema
from the start, and established the archetypes of the filmed story
structure that persist today. Even the Matrix films are Westerns in
CGI garb.
Three men dominated the Western from its beginnings to nearly the end
of the silent era: Gilbert M. Anderson, Tom Mix, and William S. Hart.
The first of these is the worthy subject of a new book.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: William S. Hart: Projecting the American West
by James Roots
The first-ever American feature film was a Western called The Great
Train Robbery (1903). Although Westerns have been effectively dead at
the box-office for 30 years now, they dominated the American cinema
from the start, and established the archetypes of the filmed story
structure that persist today. Even the Matrix films are Westerns in
CGI garb.
Three men dominated the Western from its beginnings to nearly the end
of the silent era: Gilbert M. Anderson, Tom Mix, and William S. Hart.
The last of these is the worthy subject of a new book.
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq
by Alexander Craig
Publishing, like war, is a risky business. Dyer wrote this book just
before the Second Gulf War began. Fortunately, he's a highly
experienced journalist, and the gamble paid off. The final chapter,
over a fifth of the book, "How Bad Could It Get?", is speculative,
based in part on the assumption Saddam Hussein would be captured early
on in the conflict. Even here, however, the reader, playing the Monday
morning quarterback, can spot the shakiness of some of the US
assumptions, concerning such things as surgical strikes, and clear,
precise intelligence.
...
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|  | Mortification
by Robin Robertson
Harper Collins Canada $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0007171374
|
Book Review A Review of: Mortification: WritersÆ Stories of their Public Shame
by Matt Sturrock
"The whole enterprise of writing poetry," says Robin Robertson in his introduction to Mortification, “is a de facto folly. These people devote days to single lines and years to preparing each slim collection, and then publish their work into a yawning maw of indifference.” Yes, Mr. Robertson. An irrefragable truth, to be sure, save that “indifference” is quite often the very best outcome a poet can hope for
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| | Book Review A Review of: Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television 1950 - 2002
by Christopher Ondaatje
Anyone who reads Paul Buhle and David Wagner's Hide in Plain Sight-the
final volume of a trilogy explaining the Hollywood Blacklist and its
impact will want to read the first two volumes: Tender Comrades by
Paul Buhle and Patrick McGilligan and Radical Hollywood by Buhle and
Wagner. This superb encyclopedic volume (the best in my opinion) is as
complete a study as there can be of the Hollywood Blacklist and its
aftermath, and traces the careers of all the blacklistees after they
were literally hounded out of Hollywood. The book also successfully
explores the effects the Blacklist had in the art world in America and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Bookseller Of Kabul
by Gordon Phinn
Digging up apposite quotes and learned theories on the Middle East,
Islam and those brave crusaders for democracy is a less than onerous
task these days. Any bookstore or library of even modest means can be
relied upon to supply volume after volume of erudite geopolitical
analysis. They literally fall from the bulging shelves. Stephen
Schwartz will fill you in on the history and insidious significance of
the Wahabist movement in Islam; Daniel Pipes will advise on the
pernicious influence of militant Islam in mosques under our very
noses; Jessica Stern will remind that terrorists come in all the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Reading Lolita In Tehran
by Gordon Phinn
About twenty years ago, not long before he slipped into the editor's
chair at Books in Canada, then contributor Paul Stuewe journeyed west
from Toronto to Ontario's Huron County to uncover the outrage behind
the headlines: the ideologues of censorship had once again been
awakened from their routines and were pressuring local school boards
to remove certain books from the shelves of school libraries. Margaret
Lawrence's The Diviners was among them. Local worthies bandied about
words like blasphemous with monotonous regularity. Decadent modern
books were blamed for the rise in the rates of teenage pregnancy and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages
by A. J. Levin
Kivunjo has sixteen genders. Finnish, with its fifteen cases to
decline, is among the easiest languages for infants to learn. Chinese
has different forms of number. You cannot simply say "five", you must
use a different "five" if you are talking about people, horses,
bicycles, turnips, napkins, pencils, or guns. Yiddish-speakers have at
their disposal myriad words for "fool", each with its own subtle
difference in meaning. Those differences-say, between nar, idyot,
tippish and schmegegi-may seem negligible to outsiders, but they are
nevertheless meaningful.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Speak: A Short History of Languages
by A. J. Levin
The Swedish playwright August Strindberg, echoing Voltaire, wrote that
the purpose of language is concealment, not exchange of information.
But Swedish Academic Tore Janson reveals language in this book, Speak,
written for non-linguists-how and why language has developed and
diverged, and how language has shaped us, as much as we have shaped
it. Rather than discussing the more technical aspects of speech,
writing and thought, Janson examines the connection of language to
politics, poetry, law, religion and economics. The reader will find
answers to such questions as: What was early language like? Why did it
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z
by A. J. Levin
You may know this Monty Python routine: a woman, her husband, and
their daughter are sitting around an English country home discussing
whether words like "caribou" and "sausage" are tinny or woody. To a
native or at least a very fluent speaker, the sounds of words conjure
up a story apart from the words themselves. Just as well, or we'd have
no poetry-and Christian Bk's poetry volume Eunoia has shown us that
each of the five English vowels has a personality all its own. This is
true of consonants as well. If you think about it, "B", "F" and "P"
are all silly (bimbo, bum, frou-frou, Flubber, fumble, piffle,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
by Michael Kinsella
"Dancing with abandon, turning a tango into a fertility rite."
Marshall Pugh, The Chancer
Apostrophe, comma, colon, semicolon, question, quotation and
exclamation marks, italics, dashes, brackets, ellipsis, hyphens and
solidus are all tackled with gusto by Lynne Truss in this showpiece of
a book. And in order to sex-up a subject, which at its most basic
level is about different kinds of interruption, Truss quotes from
Thomas McCormack's book The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the
Novelist (1989), arguing that punctuation should "tango the reader
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Tests of Time: Essays
by Jeff Bursey
Near the midpoint of his newest collection of essays, William Gass
says that "Words are persuasions poured into the ear, revelations
delivered to the reading eye." There is a perhaps unconscious allusion
to the poisoning of Hamlet's father here. That words can be toxic
recalls the preface to the first section: "It will surprise no one to
learn that I much prefer my own bile and bad nature to theirs." On the
acknowledgements page Gass advises, "Each piece has suffered second
thoughts, had cuts restored, tactlessness and injudiciousness
rejoined, caution, like a scoutmaster's hat, once more thrown to the
...
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|  | Director's Cut
by David Solway
Porcupine's Quill $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842728
|
Book Review A Review of: DirectorÆs Cut
by Steven Laird
"If literature is not a responsible activity, then action is the only
course." "I believe in culture as form not spirit." Both of these
quotes are from Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist who in despair
over his nation's postwar loss of traditional culture, tried to incite
a military coup. It failed, and he committed ritual suicide. Although
it's an unfortunate association to make-few writers would want to be
linked with an imperialist and fanatic like Mishima-these two quotes
seem to provide a good framework for David Solway's recent books,
Director's Cut (essays on poetry), and Franklin's Passage (poetry). He
...
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|  | Franklin's Passage
by David Solway
McGill-Queens University Press $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0773526838
|
Book Review A Review of: FranklinÆs Passage
by Steven Laird
David Solway is often considered an artifact of an old Empire who,
like some samurai in postwar Japan, covers his head with a white fan
when obliged to walk under electric power lines as a protest against
the abomination. His point is simple: he longs for, and in rare
moments finds, a poetry that, to borrow from Louis Dudek, remains "an
awakening/A pleasure in the morning light" a poetry that redeems
debased words "to give back those old whores their virginity." As
Solway writes, "it is possible [in our poetry] to speak candidly,
engage the reader directly and at the same time lace up a poem with
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: W.B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939
by Keith Garebian
Thinking that biography was inevitable and important, William Butler
Yeats assiduously revised or rearranged his autobiographies, memoirs,
and subsequent commentaries, settling scores with antagonists in the
later part of his life, and ensuring that the importance of his own
life would not be lost on future generations. As his latest
biographer, R.F. Foster, reveals: "He constantly instructed his
collaborator Augusta Gregory about the importance of the way their
lives would be interpreted for the history of their times, and of
their country." But a problem for a modern biographer is how to deal
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Other Sorrows, Other Joys: The marriage of Catherine Sophia Boucher and William Blake
by Todd Swift
Almost exactly two hundred years ago (in January 1804) William Blake
was before a judge, charged with Sedition and Assault. It is curious
that this trial, which would have seemed such a dramatic turn of
events in his own life, no longer forms a main part of this visionary
poet's familiar biographical arc. Indeed, when one does think of
William Blake these days, it may be to ponder how a man could go from
being under- (even un) estimated while alive, to over-lionized more
than a century after his death (in the 1960s), to being canonized but
ignored in the first days of the 21st century.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
by Fraser Bell
Elizabeth Tudor and Marie Stuart. The one was to become known as
Gloriana, Good Queen Bess; the other was to metamorphise into the
stuff of legend and ballads and bittersweet folk-memory. Elizabeth's
name became synonomous with an age-the age of Shakespeare and Burbage,
Raleigh and Drake; the defeat of Philip II's Armada. The ill-omened
Stuart name is forever linked to regicide, a Pretender in exile; the
white rose of the Jacobites-a lost cause for which romantic young men
threw away their lives at Aughrim, the Boyne, Culloden Moor.
While Jane Dunn places her two protagonists against the historical
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Who Killed the Canadian Military?
by Nathan Greenfield
Jack Granatstein's Who Killed the Canadian Military? is more than a
history of the decline and rustout of a military that as late as 1966
boasted 3,826 aircraft (including cutting-edge Sea King helicopters)
as opposed to today's 328 aircraft-including those same Sea Kings and
CF-18 fighters whose avionics are a generation out of date; the same
can be said of the army and navy. Granatstein's book is a convincing
analysis of Canada's embrace of a delusional foreign policy that
equates knee jerk anti-Americanism with sovereignty and forgets that
in a Hobbesian world of international relations, "power still comes
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Dead One Touched Me From The Past: A Walk With Writers Through The Centuries
by Shane Neilson
Art Seamans is professor emeritus of English Literature at Point Loma
Nazarene University in San Diego. He is also the author of the
terribly-titled The Dead One Touched Me From The Past, his attempt at
hybridising travel literature and bio-criticism. Seamans's book is the
product of transcribing his own recently undertaken visits to the
literary haunts of John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Carlyle, William
Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Robbie Burns, Alfred Lord Tennyson, James
Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Perce Bysse Shelley,
Lord Byron, E.J. Pratt, Theodore Drieser, and, strangely, E. J. Pratt.
...
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|  | Scarecrow
by Mark Callanan
Creative Book Publishing $18.81 Paperback
ISBN: 1894294688
|
Book Review A Review of: Scarecrow
by Zach Wells
I know, I know: Keats died at 26 and Rimbaud composed "Le bateau ivre"
at 16. Still, it bears mentioning: Mark Callanan's Scarecrow is a
remarkable achievement for a 24-year-old poet.
One of the book's chief virtues is its combination of range and focus.
Callanan covers a broad spectrum of subjects in these poems, employing
techniques ranging from spare, Asian-inspired imagistic meditation to
stentorian, long-lined bardic declamation. A fine example of the
former is in the title poem, brief enough to quote in full:
A gull crucified
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: So Rarely in Our Skins
by Zach Wells
Robert Moore's So Rarely in Our Skins is a postmodern grab bag. In
this collection, we find whimsical meditations; irreverent ekphrasis;
somber pieces about death and divorce; a jazz haiku; surreal
philosophizing in prose; re-imaginings of classical mythology;
dramatic monologues delivered by famous fictional characters-I'm sure
I've left much out, but you get the picture. His poems are allusive,
drawing references not only from literary texts and Greek myths, but
also from the spheres of visual art and 20th Century popular culture.
Not surprisingly, given this mix, and given the fact that Moore is
...
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