| Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction6
by David Homel
IF YOU`RE English-speaking and liberalminded, Quebec is a difficult place to be these days. You`re just not appreciated; the French insist on picturing you as a fallen master, whereas you see yourself as an innocent victim of a historical turnaround. That`s Reed Scowen`s problem in A Different Vision: The English in Quebec in the 1990s (Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 172 pages, $15.95 paper).
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| | Book Review Here Comes The Judge
by Christopher Noxon
GATEKEEPING" is a bit too grand a title for what I`ve been doing the last few months around the office of Books in Canada. But as 1 read through the 632 submissions to our student writing competition, the term, with all its overtones of phoney importance, popped right up into my mind: 1 was a veritable St.
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| | Book Review The Porcupine`S Quill
by Cary Fagan
TIM INKSTER started in the basement -- that is, shovelling out the basement of 671 Spadina Avenue in Toronto, the famous address where the House of Anansi, New Press, and Press Porcepic all began. Inkster graduated from the University of Toronto in 1970 and went to work at Porcepic for one of his professors, Dave Godfrey. But he and his wife, Elke, decided that Toronto was a lousy place to live on low wages, and persuaded Godfrey to move Porcepic out of town. Godfrey chose Erin, Ontario.
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| | Book Review On The Side Of The Angels
by Rita Donovan
THIS IS THE WORLD of makers: potters, woodcarvers, glassblowers; the world of prisoners, masters and apprentices; of animals that dream of their creation and extinction.
This is also a slim, powerful book. In 13 stories, Sean Virgo`s poetic prose presents a world in which time - as it exists - exists very much in the minds of the inhabitants who call this strange place home.
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| | Book Review New Star Books
by Brian Fawcett
TRACING THE history of Vancouver`s New Star Books is a journalises nightmare. First of all, the history of the press is as much the history of the radical left on the West Coast as it is its own. Second, it coincides with the personal histories and political careers of the principal individuals involved - and those personalities have come and gone, as they are prone to do within the left. Finally, the current publisher, Rolf Maurer, who has been with the press since 1981, has a J. D.
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| | Book Review Vehicule Press
by David Homel
ONCE UPON a time, in 1972, there was an alternative art gallery in Montreal that went by the name of Vehicule Art Inc. Last month, there was a retrospective show featuring that gallery`s heroic age: a kite fly-in at a downtown plaza, the Brother Andre`s Heart exhibition, and the Corridart posters from 1976, when Mayor jean Drapeau expunged the city`s art in the name of Olympic cleanliness and order.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction3
by Daniel Jones
STRETCHING ALONG the western shore of South India, the Malabar Coast provides the setting for the stories collected in The Christians of Malabar (TSAR, 136 pages, $10.95 paper), James Leo Conway`s first book. The stories are similarly linked by juxtapositions that lend a subtle irony to Conway`s writing. Western travellers stumble upon native customs, South India is contrasted with the North, and the Indian characters are divided by religion, language, and class.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction3
by David Homel
SINCLAIR ROBINSON and Donald Smith`s Dictionary of Canadian French/ Dictionnaire du francais canadien (Stoddart, 292 pages, $18.95 paper), which should properly be called a glossary, is far from an authoritative work on the French language in North America. Then again, it`s not trying to be. Using thematic categories (sports, weather, the body, clothes, and a very large miscellaneous category), this guide skips across quebecois French to give a variety of useful expressions.
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| | Book Review How Does Your Garden Grow?
by Brian Fawcett
With the books reviewed here and a spade and some shears,
you`l1 put your green thumb in the know
THIS YEAR`S crop of gardening books is a robust one. The most comprehensive of them is The Ontario Gardener (Whitecap, 204 pages, $24.95 paper), by the Ottawa horticulturalist Trevor Cole. Its subtitle, The Only Complete Gardening Guide Written & Illustrated Specifically for Ontario Gardeners, is a marketing mouthful, but the volume delivers what it promises.
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| | Book Review The Audible Amadeus
by Arthur Kaptainis
FRENCH FOR the act of rendering the esoteric understandable to the public is vulgariser - a word whose amusing overtones in English too often are appropriate to good-natured attempts to bring the lofty business of classical music down to earth. Robert Harris, a CBC radio executive, has more serious aims in What to Listen For in Mozart
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| | Book Review An Oedipal Feast
by Eric Mccormack
MATT COHEN is writing wonderful stuff these days. Last year it was the fine novel Emotional Arithmetic; now comes Freud: The Paris Notebooks. This latest is only 120 pages long; but readers who agree with Borges that "the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance` won`t mind. To rephrase a sports metaphor: a great little one will beat a mediocre big one any day of the week
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Poetry
by Andrew Vaisius
IT`S A DAUNTING task to review a hefty book of poetry spanning 46 years of writing. This new edition of The Glass Air, Poems Selected and New (Oxford University Press, 216 pages, $1795 paper), by P. K. Page, adds 12 new poems to the original volume of poetry, two essays, and several pages of her artwork. Page is a master of rhythm - her utter musicality makes my ears perk right up.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction4
by Paul Hornbeck
IN HIS THOUGHTFUL and eclectic Some Day Soon: Essays on Canadian Songwriters (Quarry, 176 pages, $16.95 paper), Douglas Fetherling considers the careers of five Canadian songwriters: Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Robbie Robertson, and Neil Young. The book addresses not only the performers` musical evolution, but also the degree to which they retained links with Canada while achieving varying degrees of fame in the United States and elsewhere.
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| | Book Review A Kind Of Gritty Light
by Ann Copeland
IN THIS COLLECTION of 10 stories, M. T. Kelly explores, from a variety of angles, ways that we all - but men in particular - both exercise and suffer from our power to distance others. Crossing or choosing not to cross the lines that separate us from those we would understand, love, or simply know can be a difficult and troubling exercise for sensibilities that are wary, alert, intelligent, and caring. Such a sensibility informs most of M. T
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| | Book Review A Lover`S Passion
by Dennis Cooley
ANYBODY WHO can write that buffalo trails are "braided hairlines across die palm of the land" is m love. And why not? Don Gayton underwrites his reports with the Passion of the lover. The prairie figures in this book as the waiting body of the beloved.
We read of how farmers secretly gather the stone hammers they stumble on in the darkness of their work, stunned into a kind of awe, a love they hardly dare admit.
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| | Book Review Block That Metaphor!
by Alec Mcewen
APPLES AND ORANGES. Although the number of Canadian bankruptcies in January 1991 had risen sharply from the corresponding figure in the previous year, the federal bankruptcy superintendent cautioned that because of the different economic circumstances for each period, any attempt to relate the two statistics would be comparing apples and oranges.
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| | Book Review A Documentary In Print
by Merilyn Simonds
ATTEMPTING to review The Montreal Massacre is like trying to judge a howl of pain as a piece of music. The usual criteria just don`t fit.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction2
by Christopher Noxon
A DASH OF THIS, a pinch of that- from the short-story stew of the anthologist Geoff Hancock comes Fire Beneath the Cauldron (Thistledown, 320 pages, $18.50 paper), a rich, strange, and if not always consistent, certainly surprising collection of Canadian short fiction.
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| | Book Review The Mind Dancing
by Sharon Butala
"I WANT TO KNOW who 1 am before 1 sink back into the inanimate," the central character in "The Obituary Writer," one of the stories in Douglas Glover`s new collection, tells his mystified lover as he rises early every morning to type his night`s dreams.
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| | Book Review Turnstone Press
by Charlene Diehl-Jones
A STYLIZED LITTLE bird marches across the top of each page of Turnstone Press`s spring 1991 bulletin of new releases: perky and determined, it says quite a lot about this press. A small literary press in the midst of prairie flatlands, Turnstone is Winnipeg`s answer to the larger eastern Canadian publishers. Conceived in 1975 in a local pub by Dennis Cooley, John Beaver, Robert Enright, and David Amason, all then affiliated with St.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction1
by Virginia Beaton
DREAMS HAVE their own logic, in the world that Robert Zend explores in Daymares (CACANADADADA Press, 183 pages, $12.95 paper). In this posthumous collection of stories, poems, and sketches Zend, who died in 1985, displays his fascination with dreams as creative outlets; as the place where our concealed mental life bursts through each night while we sleep.
These stories have some of the elements common to dreams - abrupt shifts in time and place, and unlikely juxtapositions of people and events.
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| | Book Review The Prose And The Poet
by Phil Hall
FOR A MAN who tends to shrug off his role as a poet, Howard White is quietly revealing himself as an original and unshrug-offable one, albeit based (in very few poems. In The Men There Were Then (Pulp Press, 1983), and now in Writing in the Rain, we get to see some of this slim output. Poems must hang around in White`s head a long time, slowly defining themselves, or they must come out quickly and get set aside while he rushes, off to do something else.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction5
by Phil Hall
FOR ALL the romanticism of the subject of Where the Fraser River Flows The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia (New Star, 138 pages, $24.95 cloth), all of the rallying songs and gypo-camp anecdotes that it calls to mind, its text was originally a thesis, and it still reads as such. Formal, intricate, thorough, cautious - but not what you might expect.
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| | Book Review That"S Show Biz!
by John T. D. Keyes
BEFORE THE Canadian Film and Television Production Association delivered its brief to the Citizens Forum on Canada`s Future this past April, it ought to have made Canadian Dreams and American Control required reading - for itself as well as anyone else who professes to care about the state of our movie industry.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction2
by Theresia Quigley
CLAUDE PELOQUIN`S COLLECTION of prose pieces A Dive Into My Essence (Guernica, 94 pages, $10 paper) is an attempt to make himself "and [his] thoughts known to the general public." Peloquin also indicates that writing has helped him to know himself The author sees himself as a visionary who says what others don`t want to hear and is consequently often misunderstood.
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| | Book Review The Potency Of Symbols
by Belinda Beaton
CANADA`S NEED for poetry that expresses our national qualities and aspirations was articulated by Keith Spicer last year. Alas, he did not quote from Abraham Moses Klein. After a winter of constitutional soulsearching, this edition of A. M. Klein: Complete Poems is a welcome event. These poems capture our country, our culture, and our history in language so passionate that it soars.
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| | Book Review Ripe For Rereading
by I. M. Owen
THE TEST OF whether a detective novel is a good novel apart from its merits as a puzzle or a thriller comes on rereading: if it can hold us without depending on suspense it qualifies for an honourable place in the main stream of fiction. I`ve read all eight of Eric Wright`s novels at least twice, and they pass the test, to a large extent because they belong to that branch of the genre in which the detectives are constant characters whose stories are carried on from novel to novel.
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| | Book Review Ragweed Press
by Michael O. Nowlan
THE DESIRE "to do something of my own" plunged Louise Fleming into publishing in November 1989. To do so, she even lei a secure government job. She has no regrets, though, as she works toward building Ragweed Press in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
With a new logo for Ragweed, which bills the company as "The Island Publisher," Louise Fleming is "cautious but ambitious" for this already successful Atlantic business.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction4
by Dave Panchyk
THE FIRST COLLABORATION between the two masters of "cyberpunk" science fiction, The Difference Engine (Bantam Spectra, 429 pages, $24.95 cloth) is the long-awaited, encyclopedic novel of an alternative Victorian England in which Charles Babbage`s successful "difference engine` brings about the computer revolution 100 years too early
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| | Book Review Socialism Marks Time
by Geoffrey Stevens
THE POLITICAL LEFF is experiencing an identity crisis in Canada, as elsewhere. The collapse of socialist regimes across Eastern Europe is hailed as the triumph of capitalism over socialism
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| | Book Review One Lump Or Two?
by Susan Swan
Welcome to a tea party in which an author dedicated to exploring new worlds
turns the tables on her flat-earth reviewers
L LET`S TURN convention on its head and imagine a situation where a writer gets to review her critics at a literary tea party.
Behold the author (that`s me) dressed in what passes for her Sunday best, a denim dress with protective padding in the shoulders. She is serving tea in the lounge of a stately Toronto hotel.
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| | Book Review A Gift For Metaphor
by Don Coles
To PUT IT bluntly: Don McKay has got in Night Field, his seventh poetry collection, some dozens of passages that do for me what I have pictured myself as so greatly desiring and so rarely finding in anybody`s craft or sullen art - anybody`s anywhere. There are enough such passages that (and here I come finally to the downside) I wonder why he ever stumbles, weakens, flaws them in the way that he quite often does.
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| | Book Review Of Bliss, Beavers, And Blues
by Michael Darling
IN 1899, MANY YEARS before the invention of the grant-in-aid-of-publication, Bliss Carman wrote the following words: "If all our busy, well-meaning critical babble could be blotted out for a single decade, the benefit to art would be incredible.
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| | Book Review Trad And True
by Bruce Whiteman
A MONTH`S WORTH of Canadian poetry need not exemplify all the conflicting trends in current poetics, though the eight collections under review here run a scale, the low and high limits of which would probably complain equally of the other`s amateur music. Of course virtually all Canadian poetry is amateur, and not in the French sense. This is why so many collections are published and so few are read.
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| | Interviews Strategies For Survival
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in 1954 and lived for 10
years in Canmore, Alberta, before moving to Kingston, Ont., in 1986. She is the
author of four collections of short fiction: Double Exposures (Coach House,
1984); Frogs and Other Stories (Quarry, 1986); Hockey Night in Canada (Quarry,
1987); and The Man of My Dreams (Macmillan, 1990). The latter was nominated
for a Governor General`s Award as well as the Trillium Award.
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| | First Novels Possible Plots
by Laurel Boone
ALBERTO MANGUEL`s News from a Foreign Country Came (Random House, 288 pages, $24 cloth), is a case study of the personality-splitting that is both a cause and an effect of the banality of evil. From the beginning of the first section, "Here," it is clear that the quotidian life of Antoine and Marianne Berence, their daughter Ana, their guest, and their Argentinian servant is not what it seems.
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| | Children's Books On The Lam With The Kids
by Elizabeth Anthony
ECLECTIC AND SCANDALOUS, this spring is budding out strange.
A skunk squats in the doghouse, claiming bed and breakfast; a raccoon has clawed its way up to the barn`s highest rafters, ousting pigeons and chipmunks from their accustomed aeries; my daughter Gabrielle`s knee is afflicted with something called, as nearly as I can spell it, Osgood`s schlatters; and I`m dreaming of glossy black parrots, all named Mrs. Striker.
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