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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Sly wit apparent in Marvin Francis's second book

By: Maurice Mierau

25/01/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

WINNIPEG writer and visual artist Marvin Francis died of cancer in 2005 at 50.

His first book, City Treaty, was a long poem -- or maybe a literary cabaret -- about First Nations' experience of urban life.

Francis's second book, Bush Camp (Turnstone, 84 pages, $16), displays the sly wit of his earlier work and of his public readings (which can still be heard on the CD, Soup for the Hood).

Bush Camp is about a romance between two workers in a northern bush camp, Jenny and Johnny. Jenny "reads captivity narratives with red eyes/ hates escalators," while Johnny is "street bush sorter in-between," a bit like Francis himself, who worked in bush camps but was finishing a doctorate in English.

Francis keeps mixing levels and styles of diction, and playing with the page layout. Sometimes he indulges in gentle self-mockery like this:

"and, as for the perfessor, who really was a lost, lost grad student,

he stopped reading and got very oral, and burns his books one by

freaking one and nobody notices, after all, bushed was bushed, and

this guy couldn't hit the damn spike anyway."

"ô "ô "ô

Montreal writer Carolyn Marie Souaid's fifth book, Paper Oranges (Signature, 112 pages, $15), is the kind you keep coming back to.

Many of her lines have an aphoristic quality: "When you haven't done/ freedom in a while/ you forget/ what it sounds like."

Other times Souaid's clarity is gripping:

"Were we busy watching all-night sports?

The good news is good news, of course,

practical tips on how to replant:

Once daily, kiss an apple.

In case of injured ova, make salt.

Sing as though the sky were a bowl of oranges."

Souaid is funny too, often just in the choice of titles such as Stuck in Traffic, Listening to a Yuletide Message of the Emergency Broadcast System.

There's anger, wit, and social comment here, in lines that sing on the page.

"ô "ô "ô

Mari-Lou Rowley is a Saskatoon science writer and poet. Her fifth book, Suicide Psalms (Anvil, 80 pages, $15), uses an intriguing mixture of scientific and so-called poetic vocabulary.

"Dendrite spines adjudicate psychotropics," begins one poem, breaking rules about keeping the objective language of science away from emotional experience.

There's also a spoken voice here, intimate and colloquial: "bridges, this city of sky/ whoa, who jumps there?" begins the first Suicide Psalm in the book.

A piece called Snow Sirens, dedicated to the late Saskatchewan poet Anne Szumigalski, beautifully combines the lyric with scientific observation:

"Gaze-dazzled

snow showing off

a spectroscopic dance

blue green red

frequencies so clear and pure

you want to remember

only this."

"ô "ô "ô

Toronto writer David Livingstone Clink's debut, Eating Fruit Out of Season (Tightrope, 78 pages, $15) is notable for being both heart-felt and entertaining, often in the same poem.

Clink has arrived at his distinctive esthetic partly from intense participation in Toronto's poetry scene. He has run a number of notable reading series, published other poets, and read very actively himself in these venues.

Perhaps the best example of his public style is My Latest Poem, which begins:

"The VCR is broken

and we don't want to miss our favourite programs

so we have to stay home

every night this week."

Clink ends the piece by repeating these comic banalities, then saying: "I love you./ Maybe that's the only line that bears repeating./ I love you."

He often invokes emotion through simple syntactical variations in poems such as Flowers on a One-Way Street and the moving Now It Can Be Told.

Clink's debut suggests the possibility of a less isolated and obscure voice for the contemporary poet.

Maurice Mierau is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His column appears on the fourth Sunday of each month.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 25, 2009 D3

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