Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis by David Solway, and: An Andreas Karavis Companion by David Solway (review)

HUMANITIES 369 boundaries of criticism and autobiography, poetry and prose. >Strang(l)ed Poetics,= for example, offers an inventory of contemporary Canadian poetics that includes descriptions of proprioceptive verse, the contestatory long poem and something Wah calls >Trans=geo-ethno=poetics.= Some of this writing will be familiar to Wah readers. In typical Wah fashion, however, he has rethought and recast individual essays to reflect his own developing sense of an oppositional poetics. Earlier assumptions about estrangement in poetry get qualified by a developing gendered and racialized awareness. Throughout the text, Wah makes it clear that his commitment to pushing the limits of literary form is explicitly political. For example, in >Half-Bred Poetics= he explores the potential of a hyphenated space. In >A Poetics of Ethnicity,= he outlines a poetics of difference and argues how a tactics of refusal and reterritorialization can >enable a particular residue (genetic, cultural, biographical) to become kinetic and valorised.= In >Speak My Language: Racing the Lyric Poetic,= he says, >I=m interested in how the colouring of the negotiations, with whatever thread of the inherited lyric, has consequence for a socially informed poetic (not a politics of identity but a praxis in language).= Three of the pieces in Faking It reflect Wah=s interest in a Chinese avantgarde poetry. These >essays= allow Wah to probe a different cultural context in order to further trouble the role of nation in the making of a nonthematic , non-representational poetics. Grouping together an essay, an interview, and a series of journal entries that document his experiences in China, he foregrounds the diverse entry points that inform his investigation . The >journal journey= describes food and drink as well as conversations and ruminations about poetry, power, and cultural identity. Several essays are dedicated to colleagues and fellow writers. These pieces seem to open up a conversation in mid-stream, and, as a result, they are more challenging for the reader to engage. For example, Wah grounds a posthumous and intimate >dialogue= with his friend, the poet bp nichol, in a discussion of nichol=s >last notebook.= >Dear Hank= is an essay-letter to Hank Lazer; >Loose Change= engages the poetic concerns of Louis Cabri in a discussion of the materiality of language. All three pieces read like conversations already in process, and although they may not openly invite the reader into the critical conversation, they do clearly convey two of the key principles that characterize the text as a whole: a deep commitment to a processural poetics and a strong grounding in community. (JOANNE SAUL) David Solway. Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis Signal Editions (Véhicule Press). 136. $14.00 David Solway. An Andreas Karavis Companion Véhicule Press. 158. $14.00 370 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Since 1976, when The Road to Arginos appeared, David Solway has been known for his volumes of witty, insightful, eloquently disciplined verse about Greece: its culture, its scenery, its people. Subsequent books include Stones in Water (1983) and Bedrock (1993). The last-named announced that Solway had >providentially come upon the work of an obscure Greek poet named Andreas Karavis= and included two poems translated from Karavis. In Saracen Island, Solway has now produced a whole volume of translations, complete with introduction and notes, where Karavis is hailed as a major contemporary poet. Moreover, he has simultaneously published An Andreas Karavis Companion, containing snippets of biography, literary criticism, additional poems, and an interview, all designed to provide a full-scale introduction for English-speaking readers. Or perhaps one should say, more circumspectly, that Saracen Island purports to consist of translations, since, despite a feature in Books in Canada (October 1999) headed >Great Authors of Our Time,= there have been persistent rumours, culminating in letters and gossip-column paragraphs in the Montreal press, that Karavis is in fact an invention of Solway himself. If this is so, however, it is a deception with a carefully planned literary purpose. Here is no attempt to pass off contemporary pastiche as classic poetry in the tradition of William Henry Ireland, James Macpherson, or Thomas Chatterton. Rather, it represents an outburst of satirical high spirits, a stirring-up of the Canadian literary establishment, a more...