Poetry

The approach of 2012 inspired apocalyptic fears in those enchanted by misread prognostications of the ancient Mayan calendar, but in North America the annum was marked by cultural continuity rather than abrupt change. Among the few indicators of evolution were successful public referenda in some American states supporting same-sex marriage and decriminalization of cannabis, signs that the demographic bulge of the baby boom generation, young adults in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has crossed the median age of influence at the ballot box. The appeal of Canada’s best-known poet, Leonard Cohen, whose career as a singer-songwriter blossomed during that period, remained undiminished among that cohort and younger audiences alike. Cohen sold out arenas around the world with his “Old Ideas” tour and gave consistently moving performances in spite of his advanced age. At the same time, the continued rise of poetry slams showed Canada’s youth to be more interested in poetry as a participatory art form than an elite one. A Toronto poetry slam team featuring Dwayne Morgan and Greg Frankson, experienced performers creeping into middle age, emerged as national champions at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word held in Saskatoon. Frankson, who goes by the stage name “Ritallin,” earned a regular spot on CBC radio, signalling the emergence of slam-style performance poetry into mainstream consciousness.

Whether in spite of or because of the ongoing resurgence of performance poetry, the number of poetry books published by commercial presses in Canada grew again in 2012, with more than 120 received by UTQ for this review. Nationally recognized veterans Don McKay, George Elliott Clarke, Erín Moure, Dennis Lee, and Tim Lilburn all published collections but none that could be counted as a significant advance on their earlier work. As a result, the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Award short lists featured books by comparative youngsters James Pollock (Sailing to Babylon), Ian Williams (Personals), and Lisa Pasold (Any Bright Horse), all published by small, lesser-known presses. Nevertheless, the Griffin Prize was awarded to the senior member of the bunch, seventy-three-year old Hamilton, Ontario, resident David W. McFadden for his book What’s the Score. Julie Bruck, a Montrealer now living in San Francisco, earned the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Monkey Ranch, an honour for which Albert Moritz’s The New Measures was also nominated. Thematically and conceptually unified collections remained in vogue as publishers attempted to produce saleable books and poets aimed to stretch beyond the limitations of the individual lyric or sequence, with predictably mixed results.

It is impossible to do justice in this review to the vast range of books received, or to pay adequate attention to all the work deserving of it. This essay comments on three dozen or so of the most interesting and signifi-cant English-language poetry books published in Canada in 2012, hoping to strike a balance based on gender, geography, aesthetics, and age. The Griffin and Governor General’s nominees are considered first, followed by books with a big-picture evolutionary focus: Lee’s Testament, McKay’s Paradoxides, Lilburn’s Assiniboia, Jan Conn’s Edge Effects, and Gillian Savigny’s Notebook M. Woman-centred works are reviewed next: Indigena Awry by Annharte (aka Marie Baker), Church of the Exquisite Panic: The Ophelia Poems by Carole Glasser Langille, Jeanette Lynes’s Archive of the Undressed, and Madeline Sonik’s The Book of Changes. From here we transition into a discussion of experimental texts: Moure’s The Unmemntioable, Oana Avasilichioaei’s We, Beasts, Susan Steudel’s New Theatre, Jonathan Ball’s The Politics of Knives, Michael Boughn’s Great Canadian Poems for the Aged, and Adeena Karasick’s This Poem. Books with a looser conceptual orientation but high-quality technique follow, many rich with classical allusions while casting a canny eye on our relationships with the natural world: Patrick Warner’s Perfection, Steven Price’s Omens in the Year of the Ox, Norm Sibum’s Sub Divo, Peter Sanger’s John Stokes’ Horse, and Robert Moore’s The Golden Book of Bovinities; Basma Kavanagh’s Distill, Nancy Holmes’s The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems...