| Book Review Women of Wood and Woods
by Janis Runge
Kate Braid used to find Emily Carr's paintings "dull, dark, and depressing". But two years of living in a cabin in British Columbian forest prepared her to look at them again. She found herself writing poems about them, and then also about Carr's prose.
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| Book Review The Not So Secret Hope
by Robert Clayton Casto
It's daft, I hear voices-the voices of times past, of ego, ambition, and hope, and they seems callow and eagerly helpless now. They're not an illusion: they belong to contemporary anthologists of poetry, announcing the ever-repeated manifestos
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| Book Review Impractical Translation
by D. L. Simmons
Upon first reading, this book of poems seems frustratingly eclectic. The reader is expected to negotiate radical shifts in spatial geography and spiritual iconography. Clusters of poems jostle uncomfortably against each other, moving from the Canadian
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| Book Review Between Salters
by I. M. Owen
An Eric Wright detective novel without Charlie Salter seems like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, it's a fact. The central figure in Buried in Stone is Mel Pickett, whom we have met before: in A Sensitive Case (1990) he was assigned to help
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| Book Review Once a Canadian
by Norman Ravvin
Canadian readers are quick to lay claim to writers from abroad who set down roots in Canada, but they are far more unreliable in their affection for Canadian authors who establish their careers and home abroad, even if their work continues to address
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| Book Review More Bridges, Please
by Sherie Posesorski
It is too easy to dismiss bestselling mass market fiction, and to sneer: to sneer at the sappy sentimentality and purple crudity of the prose of Robert Waller's The Bridges Of Madison County; the cardboard characters and no-style prose of John Grisham's
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| Book Review Sad, Valorous, & Funny
by Trevor Ferguson
Arguably, the Canadian prairie has produced more writers per capita than any region of similar girth on the planet. Various theories, none credible, have proposed why this is so. The wondrous sky, the restless horizon, a mythic and mystical landscape,
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| Book Review Folk Tales of Bicultural Anxiety
by Bruce Meyer
As the McMaster University professor Graeme MacQueen aptly acknowledges in his foreword to The Monkey King and other stories, good stories travel well. "They speak," he says, "to our common needs as human beings: our loneliness, our fear, our love, and ou
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| Book Review Motherhood without the Danger
by Maggie Helwig
It is not easy for me to review Hide and Seek, because I have so much personal sympathy for Susan Glickman's motives in writing it. The book-a series of long poems detailing her much-wanted and difficult-to-achieve pregnancy, and the birth and infancy
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| Book Review History Pending
by Michael Greenstein
Perhaps the most curious feature of Canadian-Jewish literature is its tale of two cities-Montreal and Winnipeg-while Toronto, by comparison, with the largest Jewish population in Canada, suffers a failure of the imagination. By far the richest cultural
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| Book Review An Alien World That's Going to Stay That Way
by Jim Christy
A few years ago, the nineteenth-century adventurer, linguist, and polymath Captain Sir Richard Burton was the central character of a film dramatizing the search for the greatest prize in exploration: the source of the Nile. It wasn't a very good movie, as
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| Book Review Which New Children's Books Will Last?
by Allison Sutherland
Anyone who likes children's literature and deals with children has a scenario of the reading that people ought to experience before they become fifteen years old. We do try to be flexible. A children's librarian I knew in the 1960s adamantly refused to
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| Book Review Young Adults Who Cross Some Borders
by Bernadette Barber
There is a divide between contemporary children's and young adults' fiction. It is a literary version of the gap between the rich and the poor. On one shelf is a large and varied collection of creatively illustrated stories, reflecting the child's
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| Book Review How the West has been Taped
by Joseph Phelan
Is Western civilization on the verge of committing cultural suicide? University students no longer have a passion for serious reading, and departments of literature are in the hand of professors who stand in the way of those who want to understand and
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| Book Review Light from Brain Damage
by James Morton
Jay Ingram is well known to Canadians from his weekly newspaper science columns, radio and television appearances, and popular science books. At least within the English-speaking community, he is one of Canada's leading popular science writers.
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| Book Review Aristotle Meets Diversity
by David Foster
The Canadian enchantment with diversity, to say nothing of personal freedom and equality, often prevents us from wondering too much whether one way of life might not be better than all the rest. The mere idea seems elitist and intolerant. So it is with
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| Book Review Identity Politics as Management Fad
by Martin Loney
Canada's recent obsession with identity politics is not confined to the campuses. Diversity disciples have made substantial inroads into the business community. One of the more successful companies at work, in what is now a multi-million dollar industry
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| Book Review Is West West and East East?
by Christina Blizzard
A federal state, such as Canada, can be very frustrating for its members, since it often seems almost impossible to come to any sort of unanimous agreement. However, this very diversity is also the greatest strength of federalism, as has been very evident
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| Book Review We Definitely Have a Situation
by Gerald Owen
A few years ago, David Cayley began working on a program on Uwe Poerksen's Plastikwörter for CBC-Radio's Ideas. He knows little German. He asked his wife, Jutta Mason, to write a précis of the book. She left Germany when she was nine, so she has not real
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| Interviews Triplets in the Works - J.R. (Tim) Struthers speaks with Jack Hodgins
by J. Struthers
TS: I want to ask you about any special questions that were raised for you in the writing of your new novel, The Macken Charm. And I also want to ask you if there were any models that you had in mind, at least on the edge of your consciousness,
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Did Robertson Davies Write to You? I am collecting Robertson Davies's correspondence for a volume to be published next year. If you have any letters (or know of someone who has) would you please contact me, Judith Skelton Grant,
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| Essays Letter to a friend who is a bureaucrat and is thinking of writing a book
Okay, so you've been yakking about writing this book for three years, and now you're freaking out. I remember a jazz teacher one time who said that the only reason to become an artist is because there are no options left. Because you are such a hard-heade
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| Profiles Professor Robert O'Driscoll, 1936-1996
Robert O'Driscoll died in Ireland on February 29th. He and I, both outharbourmen from Conception Bay, became close friends in the 1950s at Memorial University in St. John's. We took our B.A. and M.A. in English together. His M.A. thesis, on the eighteenth
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| First Novels First Novels - Dentistry for Primates
by Eva Tihanyi
When a book comes as heavily hyped as Claudia Casper's Reconstruction (Penguin, 259 pages, $27.99 cloth), one tends to approach it with equal measures of skepticism and expectation. Fortunately, in this case,
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| First Novels First Novels - Dentistry for Primates
by Eva Tihanyi
Diana Hartog's The Photographer's Sweetheart (Overlook Press, 228 pages, $29.99 cloth) explores a very different aspect of the human condition. Her novel, based on the life of an actual man who lived in California during the first half of the
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| First Novels First Novels - Dentistry for Primates
by Eva Tihanyi
Dilemma (Oberon, 128 pages, $27.95 cloth, $13.95 paper), by Agnes Jelhof Jensen, translated by Bodil Jelhof Jensen, takes place during World War II in German-occupied Denmark. Fiona Larsen, a waitress in a Copenhagen café, had three years
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| First Novels First Novels - Dentistry for Primates
by Eva Tihanyi
Ernest Hekkanen's From a Town Now Dreaming (New Orphic Publishers, 332 pages, $20 paper) is based on Dr. Kevin Koski's first-person journal account of bizarre happenings in Blazon, Wyoming. These happenings include monks juggling,
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| First Novels First Novels - Dentistry for Primates
by Eva Tihanyi
Goso's Tale (HodgePodge Press, 194 pages, $8.95 paper), by Peter Myers, also deals in the realm of the fantastic, but at least it does what it sets out to do: entertain. Here, too, is an improbable cast of characters-Goso, the master
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 | Horse Sense
by Tillen Bruce,
64 pages $7.5 PT
ISBN: 1895449510
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First Novels First Novels - Dentistry for Primates
by Eva Tihanyi
Tilden Bruce's Horse Sense (Thistledown, 64 pages, $7.50 paper) is a novella-length fable. It is set in the fictional prairie village of St. Martin, a place still divided by the feud of its two founding fathers, Augustus Valéry and Flammonde
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Gerald Owen
Grace: A Story, by Paul Davies (ECW, 80 pages, $11.95 paper) is an engaging, interesting, and implausible combination of historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, with didactic elements from comparative mythology and elsewhere,
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Judith Fitzgerald
A low-key kind of guy, Gerry Gilbert's linguistic dexterity sets him apart from most practitioners of poetry in this country. An astute eye for detail, an unwavering ear for inflection, and an unerring sense of the ridiculously
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Judith Fitzgerald
Bill bissett is well-known as this country's most successful linguistic innovator (morphologically speaking). In th influenza uv logik (Talonbooks
144 pages, $14.95 paper), he offers readers a view from the depths;
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by William Christian
John Courtney, a political scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, is the leading authority on national leadership conventions in Canada. Do Conventions Matter? (McGill/Queen's, 494 pages, $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper) is the definitive
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| At Large At Large
by Michael Coren
Of all the many books written about the Nazis' attempted genocide of the Jews one of the most significant has just been published. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners is an important volume in that its central
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Smug Swagger
by Douglas Fetherling
This is partly a notice of Marilyn M. Litvak's book Edward James Lennox: "Builder of Toronto" (Dundurn Press, $19.99 paper) and partly a fable on the subject of context.When you stumble on the name Al Capone in Colombo's
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| First Novel Award First Novel Award
It was not easy to come to a result this year. We had asked the judges to rank the six books in numerical order, but also to assess them by percentage, to give an idea of the comparative weightings that lay behind the rankings.
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