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38 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Rooke, Leon. The Fall of Gravity. Thomas Allen. 272. $32.95 Rosenfarb, Chava. Bociany. Syracuse University Press. x, 430. $46.50 B Of Lodz and Love. Syracuse University Press. viii, 354. $46.50 Rothman, Claire. Black Tulips. Oberon. 124. $29.95 Russell, Andy. The Life of a River. McClelland and Stewart. 184. $19.99 Shields, Carol. Dressing Up for the Carnival. Random House. viii, 238. $32.95 Taylor, Patrick. Pray for Us Sinners. Insomniac. 306. $19.99 Tefs, Wayne. Moon Lake. Turnstone. 362. $18.95 Thompson, Margaret. Eyewitness. Ronsdale. 188. $8.95 Unwin, Peter. Nine Bells for a Man. Dundurn. 268. $18.99 Vasey, Paul. It=s Only a Broken Heart. Black Moss. 212. $19.95 Virgo, Seán. A Traveller Came By: Stories about Dying. Thistledown. 256. $18.50 Winter, Michael. This All Happened. Anansi. 290. $24.95 Wyatt, Rachel. Mona Lisa Smiled a Little. Oolichan. 208. $17.95 Yalfani, Mehri. Two Sisters. TSAR. vi, 138. $15.95 Poetry JULIA REIBETANZ Any review of Canadian poetry in 2000 must begin with Don McKay=s magnificent collection Another Gravity (M & S), winner of the GovernorGeneral =s Award for Poetry: Sometimes a voice B have you heard this? B wants not to be a voice any longer, wants something whispering between the words, some rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will hearken back to breath, or even farther, to the wind, and recognize itself as troubled air, a flight path still looking for its bird. (>Sometimes a Voice [1]=) This supremely self-conscious voice sets an elegiac tone for the volume, recognizing itself as troubled air, exploring the lift and drag of human relationships, responding >with mind akimbo where the wind / riffles the ridge= (>Lift=). Recalling Yeats, McKay writes a poem for the >Dark of the Moon=: where the dead fade from view and are >both here / and not here, lose interest in us and descend / below the reach of roots.= The poetry reads itself reflexively: >On tombstones / names and dates are fading into vague / depressions, or else (not impossibly) / We have forgotten how to read= (>Dark of the Moon=). This is poetry to be savoured B as McKay puts it, POETRY 39 >Slow, / slow jazz: it must begin before the instrument with bones / dreaming themselves hollow and the dusk / rising in them like a sloth / ascending= (>Lift=). The second section of the volume begins with another dark moon poem, >Before the Moon / was a moon,= celebrating the imagination by contemplating its absence, celebrating love by catching the >stray wisp hovering against your cheek.= As always, the poetry is sublimely reflexive: without moon, there is >no second gravity and no / dark art of reflection.= As always, McKay=s layered and responsive diction just shines: The sun owned all the media and it occurred to no one to resist its health-and-fitness propaganda. Whatever a thing was, that was it, no ifs or airspace. Place was obese before the moon was moon, so full of itself there was no leaving home, and so no dwelling in it either. Longing was short and sedentary. Blues were red. (>Before the Moon=) This poetry declares itself for all kinds of blues, as another poem titled >Kinds of Blue= suggests B a language >we have almost learnt, or nearly not / forgotten, with its soft / introspective consonants, its drone / of puréed names= (>Kinds of Blue # 41 [Far Hills]=). This language is the idiom of poetry: >It says we ought to mourn / but not to grieve, it says that even loss / may be a place, it says / repose.= Remembering Richard Wilbur=s celebration of his muse (>How should I fathom her whose white hands fold / The rainbow like a fan?= [>Complaint=] ), McKay echoes the image: >The eye would like to fold its rainbow / like a fan, and quit / discriminating between this and that / and indigo and mauve, / and go there.= Going there, to >Another Gravity,= is what this book is about. In the third section, yet another moon poem (>Nocturnal Migrants=) offers us the title phrase, >Another gravity=: and now the volume=s title and cover design come into focus. Alder leaves...

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