 Note from Editor Note from Editor
by Paul Stuewe
What's in store for 'Books in Canada' readers during the coming year? Two theme issues on Atlantic Provinces and Prairies writing, for starters.
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| Book Review Biting the Hand
by Larry Scanlan
Often humourless, often funny, and full of contradictions, Salutin makes little attempt to charm his reader, to write about himself, or even to be liked - the secret ambition of many columnists.
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| Book Review A Polemic for hte Defence
by Heather Robertson
At 8:30 A.M. on January 31, 1969, the bloody, frozen body of 20-year-old Gail Miller was found in a Saskatoon alley by a child on her way to school.
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| Book Review Getting Better
by Ruth Sky
Merrily Weisbord is approaching her 50th birthday soon, and is becoming anxious about aging. She looks about and is distressed by the stereotypes of the elderly.
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| Book Review A Classic Restored
by Rupert Schieder
Fortunately, with the publication of the complete, original text, the betrayal of W. O. Mitchell and Brian O'Connal has come to an end.
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 | Selected Poems
by Margaret Avison,
192 pages $21.95 TP
ISBN: 0195408594
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Book Review The Ciphering Heart
by Bruce Whiteman
MARGARET AVISON has a unique reputation in Canadian poetry. Though she will turn 74 this year, she has been slow to publish, and 'Selected Poems' is only her fifth book.
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| Book Review The Facts of the Case
by Royce MacGillivray
As of the date of writing, I have never been mugged. Apart from petty thefts, mainly of school equipment and personal objects in my high school days, I have never been the victim of crime in any way.
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| Book Review Psychodrama
by Elizabeth Anthony
The preservation of a legacy of thought can be problematic. Publication may only be an embalming procedure for a body of theory if there is no coterie of believers to animate it with living breath, to exercise and safeguard its interpretations.
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| Book Review What Needs to be Read
by Brian Fawcett
A retrospective look at 1991's most culturally significant titles.
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| Book Review Dramatic Histories
by Ann Jansen
Past times and resonant places assume leading roles in these recent examples of the playwright's art.
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| Waiting for the Whales
by Sheryl McFarlane, Ron Lightburn,
Putnam Publishing Group, The
32 pages $14.95 LB
ISBN: 0399225153
|  | A Happy New Year's Day
by Roch Carrier, Gilles Pelletier,
24 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0887762670
|  | My Mother Is Weird
by Rachna Gilmore, Brenda Jones,
24 pages $6.95 TP
ISBN: 0920304834
| | | Mr. Sweetums Wears Pink
by Charlotte Hutchinson, Brenda Jones,
L P C/InBook
24 pages $5.95 TP
ISBN: 0921556187
| | Melinda's No's Gold
by Gail Chislett, Helene Desputeaux,
32 pages $14.95 LB
ISBN: 1550371967
| | Travels for Two Stories & Lies from My Childhood
by Stephane Poulin, Stephane Poulin,
32 pages $15.95 LB
ISBN: 155037205X
| | | What Do the Fairies Do with All Those Teeth
by Michel Luppens, Phillipe Beha,
24 pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 1552090019
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Book Review Children's Books - An Antidote to Grey
by Carole Corbeil
I don't know what it says about me, but out of all of the beautiful, glossy, radiant children's books I got for reviewing purposes, my six-year-old daughter has picked ...
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| Book Review Espousing Politics
by Arlene Rae
The interplay between the personal and the political is at the heart of Heather Robertson's lively foray into a neglected corner of Canadian History.
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 | The Tangible Word
by France Theoret, Barbara Godard,
161 pages $15 TP
ISBN: 092071756X
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Book Review A Concert of Voices
by Eileen Manion
Theoret's texts do not make easy reading, not only because of the abrupt transitions and the departures from conventional rhetorical strategies, but also because her narrators speak so intensely and so bitterly.
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| Book Review Journalistic Mediums
by I. M. Owen
Of these three writers of newspaper columns and magazine articles, Brian Fawcett is perhaps the most original. Originality in non-fiction writing does carry its dangers, of course.
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| Book Review Extraordinary Provinces
by Roger Mason
The core of the collection is a group of stories about writing and art, although they are presented as narratives about individuals.
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| Book Review Haunting Elements
by Susan Walker
An artist who suffered a lifelong sense of confinement deserves to be celebrated in a book that opens the doors on her inner life.
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| Book Review Not Our Man
by Daniel Jones
At 57, Leonard Cohen is seven years older than Bob Dylan, and nine years the senior of Mick Jagger.
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| Book Review Behind the Barricades
by Douglas Glover
On July 11, 1990, the Surete de Quebec police attacked a party of Kanesatake Mohawks protesting the expansion of a golf course onto land to which they had no legal title, but which they regarded as theirs by tradition.
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| Book Review True Confessions?
by Michael Coren
The story is quintessentially pre-Vatican II, before the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s ushered in a radical alteration of the Roman Catholic church.
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| Bourassa
244 pages $27.95
ISBN: 0771591489
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Book Review More Quebecois than Thou
by Sheldon Gordon
Michel Vastel has dedicated his portrait of Quebec's premier to "Robert Bourassa, a Quebecois'' no mere statement of fact but rather an accolade.
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| Book Review From Cradle to Retirement
by George Galt
This kind of autobiography is often penned by people who are natural raconteurs, or natural hobnobbers and name-droppers. Or they're written by what the media call "high-profile personalities" who believe they have Something Important or Witty to Say.
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| Father Must Stories
by Rick Rofihe,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Incorporated
186 pages $18.95 TC
ISBN: 0374153841
|  | Blue Husbands
by Don Dickinson,
128 pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 0889841233
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Book Review Debuts For Two
by Michael Darling
Not a promising idea for a story, perhaps, but Rofihe makes it a metaphysical puzzle: who is wasting time here - the boy who didn't move for 15 minutes or the lady who watched him?
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| Book Review Behind the Screens
by Chris Whynot
The National Film Board of Canada is, and always has been, a strange kind of beast.
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| Interviews Sacred Monsters
by David Homel
Michel Tremblay's characters always go beyond realistic truth: 'Once youre on stage, who cares about real life?'
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| Letters to Editor Letters to Editor
Her letter not only demonstrates but proves the existence of that bedrock racism that surfaces as soon as there is any attempt to present a fuller and more detailed picture of what has been a thoroughly Eurocentric and inaccurate view of Africa.
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| Prose/Poetry The Mysterium
by Eric McCormack
We'd heard only rumours, mutterings about 'plague' and 'disaster.' But no one really knew what was going on...
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| Profiles Profile - Mutability and Meditation
by Cary Fagan
Graced with a rich central theme and the time to develop it, Don Coles has produced a quietly rewarding poetic oeuvre.
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| Opinion Opinion - Cross-Country Check-Up, Part 1
by Kenneth McGoogan
Tired of getting all your news from Toronto? Here's how things look from Calgary (Calgary Herald).
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| Opinion Opinion - Cross-Country Check-Up, Part 2
by Bryan Demchinsky
Tired of getting all your news from Toronto? Here's how things look from Montreal (The Gazette).
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| Opinion Opinion - Cross-Country Check-Up, Part 3
by Claudia Pinsent
Tired of getting all your news from Toronto? Here's how things look from Halifax (The Chronicle-Herald and The Mail-Star).
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| Opinion Opinion - Cross-Country Check-Up, Part 4
by Marke Andrews
Tired of getting all your news from Toronto? Here's how things look from Vancouver (The Vancouver Sun).
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| First Novels First Novels - Trash and Treasures
by Laurel Boone
It's a pleasant change to say something nice about a book that has been almost universally trashed.
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| Field Notes Field Notes - Architects and Termites
by David Homel
If you wanted to hear the Canada Council praised this last fall, the place to be was on Parliament Hill. Not the one in Ottawa, mind you - its homologue in Quebec City.
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| Field Notes Field Notes - Hoping for the Best
by Joel Yanofsky
I grew up and still live in a suburb a half-hour drive north of downtown Montreal. Whenever I do come into the city to attend a literary event, I'm asked the same question by fellow writers: why do you live out there?
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| George Fetherling Last Words - Technical Corrections
by Alec McEwen
'Won't' is an odd-looking contraction until it is recognized as a short form of 'woll not', in which 'woll' is an ancient spelling of 'will'.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Pat Barclay
Curtis's achievement in this novel is all the more impressive because he does not present it as the "star turn" that in fact it is.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Pat Barclay
GIVEN the popular appetite for tales of murder and mystery, publication of yet another collection may be justified; but titling it 'Great Canadian Murder and Mystery Stories' is not.
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 | Saltwater Trees
by J. Jill Robinson,
L P C/InBook
pages $11.95 TP
ISBN: 0889782415
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Virginia Beaton
While the author has a talent for creating quirky characters and situations, her writing focuses on minute details of sensation and thought, and consequently the stories lack animation.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction
by Mary Coady
This book will be close to the bone for women brought up according to the tenets of religious institutions. It is a welcome addition to the growing ranks of books by women that are trying to break the male stranglehold on Christianity.
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 | Undercover
by Dubro,
McClelland & Stewart/Tundra Books
pages $6.99 PT
ISBN: 0771029020
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction
by George Kaufman
If the book has a weakness, it is that the style sometimes goes flat and reads more like an emotionless police report than a real-life crime thriller.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Keith Nickson
A few selections are too thin to merit inclusion. Alberto Manguel's brief memoir of Borges reads like a leftover from a literary machine always working overtime.
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| Six Months Rent
by Anne F. Walker,
Firefly Books, Limited
pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 0887532209
|  | The New Long Poem Anthology
by Sharon Thesen,
General Distribution Services, Incorporated
384 pages $26.95 TC
ISBN: 0889104077
| | Reasons for Winter
by Guttman,
pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 0919626513
| | | Down to the Golden Chersonese
by Nancy Holmes,
pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 1550390058
| | Evenings at Loose Ends
by Gerald Godin, Judith Cowan,
87 pages $9.95 PT
ISBN: 1550650157
|  | Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyanna
by George Woodcock,
120 pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 1550820052
| | | In the House of No
by Ken Morris,
90 pages $12.95 PT
ISBN: 1550820079
| | In Broad Daylight Stories of Sex, Love, & War
by John E. Sorrell,
Mercury Publishing Company, The
80 pages $10 TP
ISBN: 1895419123
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Ann Diamond
LET'S START WITH a declaration. Despite a certain familiarity with the English language I am at times totally lost in the byways of its traditions. As I perused these volumes, I recognized a few landmarks. Here a Black Mountain outcropping, there a Victorian panorama. Pausing to bathe, I smelled the lichenous odour of paleontology, saw the colourfully bloated corpse of Dada half submerged, the engulfing mists of imagisme drifting languorously downstream.
Let me begin with the fattest, which n
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