POETRY: Anthology showcases Canadian avant-garde women poets

Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Coach House, 407 pages, $30) is the first anthology to exclusively showcase Canadian avant-garde women poets.

This is surprising considering the significant influence of the writers collected here and the four-decade time span in which some of them have been publishing.

Scrupulously co-edited by Heather Milne of Winnipeg and Kate Eichorn of New York, the volume features 15 poets, including such lauded voices as Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt and Gail Scott alongside their emerging contemporaries Sina Queyras, Rita Wong and Catriona Strang.

This is a dense collection that offers a dynamic range of concerns, motivations, influences, constraints and perspectives, from significant women poets in conversation. The interviews or, perhaps more accurately, conversations, are deft, fluid, sincere dialogues, delightful in the ways in which they inform not only the respective poets' work, but their work within the context of their peers.

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Ossuaries (McClelland & Stewart, 14 pages, $19), a 10th collection by renowned Toronto novelist and poet laureate Dionne Brand, is an incantatory, beguiling long poem that sings from the tomb of a "fatal future."

Yasmin, the poem's central figure, restlessly wanders a 21st-century underworld narrating the remains of language, body, governments, desire, technology, and freedom: "if we could return through this war, any war, / as if it were we who needed redemption, / instead of this big world, our ossuary / so brightly clad, almost heroic, almost dead."

Brand's politically spined lyrics are so imaginatively tuned that names, dates and borders fall from relevance, allowing for a sense of the timeless and universal to emerge. Here Brand's poetic voice channels both the ancient and the prophetic "her neck crackles to the radio voice, that coastal beacon."

Intensely musical, punctuated almost entirely in commas (two full stops in the entire book), Ossuary paces the dense depths of syntax through a ceaseless, rhythmic line with enough force to rattle our 21st-century zombies awake.

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A cynic takes on herself in The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 111 pages, $17), Vancouver-based Jen Currin's third collection.

Written in the "surrealist lyric," in this case, an image-based composition of statements/fragments that work against any linear notion of narrative, The Inquisition Yours is clever and playful in its obscure titles and idiosyncratic imagery. But it seems to expend most of its energy dodging its subject rather than querying it. Which could very well be the point.

Many of the poems seem to work simultaneously toward and against an essentialism of identity "who people really are when we peel ourselves away." Some of the strongest images are those relating to childhood.

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Ah, to write one's way to boundlessness as Montrealer Erin Mouré does in O Resplandor (Anansi, 145 pages, $23).

In her 13th book, Mouré translates the boundaries of the self -- the tangibles and intangibles of love, grief, language, body, friendship, time and origin.

Through the praising of the phenomenal, Mouré works her way forward and back to the raw places, quite simply, the acts of voice and hand.

O Resplandor, among many things, is an elegy to a mother, to origins, to language ("the tongue of no one"), the self, sense of a double, the indistinguishable parting of bodies and place. Mouré has composed a joyfully aching, tough and vulnerable poetry of lyrical splendour, a liberated culmination of the transgressive, language-based poetics that has so richly, powerfully and playfully hinged her poetry, essays and translations to date.

This is not a book of frames or constraints or formal struggles. This is a book of air and fields. A "laud of the phenomenal" through the very particular place of the body: "I know in myself a feeling of bliss / in every particle and date."

Jennifer Still's second collection of poetry, Girlwood, will appear in 2011 from Brick Books.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 24, 2010 H9