Dream Elevators: Interviews with Canadian Poets ed. by Beverly Daurio (review)

390 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 conversational reference (now virtual as well as real), a way to express and share everyday joys, sorrows, and aspirations at the same time as allowing them a temporary and entertaining respite from their own lives by entering vicariously into someone else=s. The absence of a definite theoretical perspective is both a strength and weakness in Other Worlds. On the one hand it enables Anger to cover a broad territory ranging from soap opera writing to production practices to acting styles to content and viewing in a way that is readable and free from jargon. The comparative focus makes a real contribution to the literature on soap operas, which has tended to be confined to analyses of particular national forms. At the same time, it means that the book lacks overall integration and unity. The different aspects of the study hang together very loosely, and at times it is difficult to see what the point of a particular discussion is. The effect of this is that the book ends on a weak note. The concluding argument that soaps appeal to their viewers because they offer a point of both everyday reference and entertainment has been made many times before, and now seems banal at best. (GRAHAM KNIGHT) Beverly Daurio, editor. Dream Elevators: Interviews with Canadian Poets Mercury Press. 218. $19.95 As Beverly Daurio points out in her short prefatory note, despite covering >a wide range of work from poets across the country, ... this does not mean that in a book of this kind there are not, inevitably, glaring omissions.= This is true, but the interviews she has collected here do range widely, in time as well as kinds of poets, and the volume is stronger for that. There are ten women to four men, which is especially interesting, but also points to the continuing importance of women=s writing in Canada. Four of the poets, Roy Kiyooka, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Libby Scheier, and Anne Szumigalski, are dead, yet their voices remain important. The interviews with them, like the ones with Leonard Cohen and Claire Harris, go back to the 1980s, and even 1978, for the one with Kiyooka. The most recent interview, with perhaps our eldest poet, P.K. Page, covers both her most recent work, the >glosa= poems of Hologram (1994), and her sense of a personal ending, one she says she is preparing for by arranging her papers, but which she also says she believes is not imminent. As one might expect, she approaches both kinds of questions with a high good humour and articulate wit. Many of these interviews tend towards the merely journalistic. Questions about recent books, about lives, tend to outweigh a serious investigation of poetics in those cases, although the poets, almost always generous as well as playful, will get at some sense of the how as well as the why of their HUMANITIES 391 writing. Daurio has chosen poets with often different, and even opposing, ideas of poetry, and the implied argument enlivens the book as a whole. Yet sometimes a poet will surprise the reader with a comment that might be expected from one of her opposite numbers. All the poets expect to be surprised by what they write, but they express this in different ways. So Lorna Crozier says, >I have no idea where it is going to end up or even what I want to write about until it is already written,= while Fred Wah insists that writing is >simply a way of calling out the information that=s already there. Discovering what=s there and generating new ways into a world that=s already there.= To a degree, they are coming at the poem from different perspectives, especially in so far as Crozier tends to think more in terms of narrative than Wah does, but the sense of exploration and discovery is important to them both. Some of the writers want to talk about politics, both the politics that has to enter their writing and the politics of writing itself. Others seek to avoid that, but can=t quite. Claire Harris, for example, speaking of her time in Nigeria, insists that being in Africa...