Poetry

In ‘Heart,’ one of the lighter poems in Margaret Atwood’s The Door, an unnamed ‘you’ surgically removes her own heart with ‘A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster’. The discarded organ then

gets passed around. It’s slithery. It gets dropped, but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty. Too sour, says another, making a face. Each one is an instant gourmet, and you stand listening to all this in the corner, like a newly hired waiter, your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden deep in your shirt and chest, shyly, heartless.

This is enough to make a critic cautious. But what makes me uneasy is not the equation of criticism with cannibalism; nor is it the suggestion that literary critics are a peculiarly finicky brand of cannibal. No, what worries me, and has cost me many sleepless nights, is the idea of Margaret Atwood lurking in the background like a waiter: do I have to give her a tip? Do I have to tip all the poets I’ve read over the last few months? I’m willing to accept the fact that I’m not paid to write this review – the thing will look good on my cv, and that’s compensation enough; but the idea that I might have to shell out some of my own cash is really a bit galling. It’s enough to make me send everything back to the kitchen – too salty, overcooked, undercooked – to complain about the dirty cutlery, to carp about the slow, sullen, self-absorbed wait staff, to do anything that will exempt me from the obligation to provide gratuities. But then I’d be living up to the stereotype of the finicky cannibal, and I like to think that I’m really not that fussy, at least as cannibals go. It seems preferable, then, to set such worries aside, to proceed as unselfconsciously as possible, and live with the consequences – economic and otherwise – as best I can. I’ve decided to save Atwood’s book for last, in the hope that the suspense might keep people reading (unlike Atwood’s ‘Oracle,’ I haven’t learned ‘to edit,’ let alone ‘get everything down to one word’). I want to start with some debut collections that particularly impressed me; after that, I’ll move on to the many volumes produced by veterans of the Canadian scene. I don’t know why, but this year the latter outnumber the former to a far greater degree than was the case in 2006, so I’ll organize those reviews into some further subdivisions, just for the sake of clarity (even cannibals like a clear menu): first, some relatively conventional lyric works; then, some novel-like long poems and strongly unified collections; third, some more avant-garde or experimental collections; and, finally, some strong volumes from veteran poets whose work has begun to take on a retrospective and valedictory quality.

First, the debutantes. The poems of Monica Kidd’s Actualities are always lucid, understated, and polished; at times, Kidd shows a knack for fresh metaphor and simile – ‘trees stand with their pants rolled up,’ ‘Like old senators, milkweed husks / bow their heads,’ ‘These woods are a wealthy uncle with / five generations of land and tales to speak.’ I don’t feel that a distinctive poetic personality emerges here; the book stays close to the lyric-anecdotal norm of ‘mainstream’ poetry (if poetry can be mainstream). Perhaps this is a function of the allegiance suggested by the book’s title –Actualities (Kidd, a former reporter, and now a medical student, wants us to think of French actualités). It bespeaks a tie to the world outside the self, rather than to the poet’s own way of looking at that world; Kidd’s poetics, then, embody one way of keeping faith with that world.

Gillian Wigmore’s soft geography demonstrates a similar faithfulness to the contours of lived experience and of the terrain around Prince George, bc. The ‘softness’ of the geography lies in the terrain’s own changingness and in its interactions with human observers; the inner world where we...