Vanity Shades by Mary Howes, and: I Wanted to Say Something by Barry McKinnon, and: Remains by Stephen Scobie, and: Story for a Saskatchewan Night by Douglas Barbour, and: These Lawns by Monty Reid (review)

142 Western American Literature Vanity Shades. By Mary Howes. (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1990. 95 pages, $8.95.) I Wanted to Say Something. By Barry McKinnon. (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1989. 61 pages, $8.95.) Remains. By Stephen Scobie. (Red Deer, .Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1990. 48 pages, $8.95.) StoryforaSaskatchewanNight. ByDouglas Barbour. (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1989. 96 pages, $8.95.) TheseLawns. By Monty Reid. (Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1989. 64 pages, $8.95.) For many U.S. readers, the existence of an apparently flourishing poetry publisher in Red Deer, Alberta comes as a welcome, heartening surprise. And if these five handsome paperbacks—all part ofthe “Writing West”series from Red Deer College Press—are any indication, then contemporary western Canadian writing is distinguished by its vitality and contrasts. The poems in Mary Howes’ Vanity Shadesoften tumble down the page with the breathlessness and insistence ofa speaker entirely caught up with the seamy flash and glitter of an urban lifestyle. With titles (always entirely lowercase) like “lick” and “there’s a good girl,” Howes’ poems are often blunt, sexual, and wildly exuberant, their lines entirely unpunctuated and incantatory. One can only imagine her reading these poems in person; on the page their mania sometimes seems forced. Still, Howes has the courage to use explicit, sometimes reckless language to shock her readers; she wants to wake us up. Barry McKinnon’s I Wanted to Say Something is one-hundred-and-eighty degrees from the work of Mary Howes. McKinnon’s subject in this book is no less than the settling of the Prairie West. Often anchored in the images of period photographs, this long poem wants to give language and testimony to the hugeness of the settlement undertaking; it wants to be part history and part meditation. If the result is, on the one hand, a somewhat sprawling whole, still there are fine moments in this poem, especially when the speaking voice moves from large issues to small descriptions, struggling to get them precisely right. Stephen Scobie’s book Remains consists of forty-six numbered sections, all but the lastvery short, all apparently meant to be both poetry and prose, “inside, in the heart of.” Such a book has to work on two levels: each individual short piece must be interesting enough, rewarding enough in its own right, to hold readers’ attention; and cumulatively the book must build, echo, resonate. Scobie is experimenting in this book, and one has to admire the attempt. And this book does carry some sense of narrative—of a friend’s death. But Remains depends on a basic sympathy and identification with its speaking voice—some­ thing it does not always sustain on the page. Reviews 143 Looking at a typical page in Douglas Barbour’s StoryforaSaskatchewanNight, you might think his typewriter was broken, the lines sometimes adhering to a left margin, the words sometimes spaced unevenly, most punctuation omitted, and the contractions allwritten without apostrophes. But these aren’t accidents, they’re conscious (if initially distracting) devices; they tell us to pay attention notjust to sentences or paragraphs, but also to individual phrasings, particular words. Barbour manages this with a voice that at its best stays at once disci­ plined, focused, and unpretentious—genuine. Unlike the other three books so far discussed here, Storyfor a Saskatchewan Night does not force itself to a single, book-long form or subject. The result is a collection that lets each poem make its own demands. Monty Reid builds the poems in TheseLawnswith care and intelligence and an ear that loves rhythm and images. These aren’t formalist, rhymed efforts, but they are in-formed, the result of discipline, continuing regard, and an interesting human imagination. In poems like “Dressing Mannequins” (in which a woman thinks of her own daughters as she dresses mannequins for display) and “Sauna” (in which we learn how a place of relaxation can become a place that kills), Reid knows how to slow us down. His roughly iambic lines and his long, relaxed sentences encourage and produce a focused, even elegant meditative attention. Reid also knows how to turn images...