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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 helped her to understand how much she could never know about that place and how it gave her a more distant view of what it means to be a poet in a province like Alberta. Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, especially since he=s being interviewed just after Book of Mercy was published, speaks more of the spirit, and also of the various audiences his songs and poems like prayers find. Libby Scheier confessed >I=ve always had a lot of struggle and confusion and heartache around the relationship between politics and art and my art.= Daurio=s own interviews, with Scheier and Erin Mouré, suggest just how malleable a form the interview can be. With Scheier, she talks, they exchange confidences, there is a real conversation; with Mouré, who doesn=t like to talk, she carries out a kind of exchange by e-mail, but must fill in most of the gaps herself through research. The interviews I found most interesting were between writers and other writers with whom they shared a general poetics: Lola Lemire Tostevin with Fred Wah; Roy Miki with Roy Kiyooka; Smaro Kamboureli with Phyllis Webb. But Dream Elevators has much to offer any reader interested in the lives and works of some of our major poets. (DOUGLAS BARBOUR) Dawn Thompson. Writing a Politics of Perception: Memory, Holography, and Women Writers in Canada University of Toronto Press. x, 144. $35.00 Unsuspecting souls should not approach this study expecting to find tidy close readings of contemporary Canadian fiction. Instead, in this briskly paced, slim volume, Dawn Thompson invokes a wide range of interdisciplinary theory (poststructuralist, semiotic, holographic, neurobiological, and quantum physics) to fashion her own theory of cognitive mapping 392 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 based on the technology of the hologram. This holographic model is then applied to novels by five writers: Nicole Brossard=s Picture Theory, Margaret Atwood=s Surfacing, Marlene Nourbese Philip=s Looking for Livingstone, Beatrice Culleton=s In Search of April Raintree, and Régine Robin=s La Québécoite. As Thompson states in the introduction, >what follows attempts to avoid being a model for reading different literary texts. Rather, it is a strategy for thinking that attempts to bypass mimetic representation and dualistic thinking.= The study opens with a brief analysis of poststructuralist reconsiderations of memory that challenge linear conceptions of time and acknowledge the transformation of the remembering subject. Foucault=s notion of >counter-memory= and Derrida=s >radical memory= provide the context for the study=s inquiry into the politics of perception and memory. The introduction and first chapter go on to forge parallels between poststructuralist notions of memory and holographic theory. For those whose knowledge of holograms is limited to the tiny rainbow images on their credit cards, Thomson=s initial chapters provide the answer to a pressing question, namely, what is holography? As Thompson explains, a hologram is...

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