NERVE Squall (Coach House, 112 pages, $17), Saskatoon writer Sylvia Legris's third collection, is neurotic in the best sense. Edgy and unsettled, the poems are also whimsical and fluid.
"Crossing the nerve squall is crossing from eye wall to eye," she writes in Nerve Storms, highlighting the interior weather at work in the book.
Legris's writing doesn't so much link images as it picks them up, carries them for a while, and then puts them down in a different spot. Birds, clouds, fish, and horses circulate, connected by puns or allusions.
Into the Bizarro Squall provides a good example of this play: "Crayfish, craw (Daddy don't choke on surprise!). Split-open sky, spitting wind, and yes/ those are cows on the roof! Fish at the window!//Caught caught caught in whirlpool and drama."
The result of this movement is a collection that works through a dream-logic, where up is down. The elements speak, but can a listener hear?
Legris's world is full of language, from the "loquacious, articulate birds" in Ravenousness to the "half an alphabet" lying on the ocean floor in Fishblood Sky. Awareness, however, comes only through nervous connections.
The Burning Alphabet (Brick, 135 pages, $17), Ontario writer Barry Dempster's ninth collection, was a finalist for this year's Governor General's Award.
In these lyrics, Dempster's conversational tone belies the grimness of much of his subject matter: death, disease and loss.
Dempster's poem Explicit could serve as his poetic manifesto. "Above all, I cherish the explicit," he writes, "the green light at the corner/ of now and then; the thrust of words/ like grab and shout." The poetry works through the collection of precise details, combining the vernacular with the sophisticated in accessible and thoughtful verse.
The book's final section, The Crowd of Him, considers the speaker's late father from a multitude of angles. "On angry days, I sizzle my father/ in a wok full of oily red peppers and/ onions searing black around the edges," he writes in Anger Song.
Other poems, like All These Bodies, grieve more gently: "I will dream about my father and me sharing the same space in a revolving door." Memory here is an ongoing process.
Experimental
It's no longer valid to say that only lyric poetry has a place in Canadian publishing. Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 192 pages, $20), edited by Derek Beaulieu, Jason Christie and Angela Rawlings, collects experimental work by 41 writers from across the country. Work included ranges from poetry in relatively traditional stanzaic form, to experiments with typography, to cartooning and text/image integration.
The influence of bp nichol and Steve McCaffery is obvious. Some of the work here is heavily derivative; other writers manage to surprise the reader into recognizing linguistic conventions usually taken for granted.
Sharon Harris's question-and-answer format in Fun with 'Pataphysics has fun recognizing that even experimental poetry can be a cliché:
"If I place a poem and its translation across from each other, and I stand between them, can I see my reflection stretching away into infinity?//In theory, you could get an infinite number of reflections in the poems, but only if the poem was perfectly translated and you stood there forever."
Jennifer Still's first book, Saltations (Thistledown, 95 pages, $16), centres on family and birth. Still, who lives in Saskatoon, reaches back to her grandparents by focusing on what she's inherited from them, like a salt doll or memories of blueberry picking.
Many poems focus on her attempt to trace a family narrative, as in her description in Picot of how examining her grandmother's embroidery leads her to "look for stillness/ in the stitches flowing, a direction/ of waves pointing/to some beginning/or end."
Other poems uncover her Métis roots. "Drawing history from veins,/ I am learning the equation/ of mixed blood, the face// of my salt doll," she writes in A History of Blood.
Still's poems show skill with line breaks and demonstrate a nice eye for images. Overall, this collection is promising, but many readers may wish it were broader in scope.
Alison Calder teaches Canadian literature at the University of Manitoba. Her poetry column appears on the fourth Sunday of the month.
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