Lush, playful book manages to be sparse, controlled

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This article was published 27/04/2009 (6041 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LEAN-TO (Gaspereau, 96 pages, $20) is Halifax poet Tonja Gundvaldsen Klaasen’s third book. It’s lush and playful, but manages to also be sparse and controlled.

On the surface the book deals with a summer of camping trips in Nova Scotia, and the daily life of a young family. Domesticity transformed is a cliché, but that’s exactly what happens in Lean-To.

Gundvaldsen is a linguistic pack rat, flashing fragments of Plains Cree, German, French, Mi’kmaq and Old English, and also bits of Gaston Bachelard, Erin Mouré, Paul Muldoon and Ted Hughes.

She also has a very good ear. For example, in August after August, a cycle based on traditional wedding anniversary gifts, the poem Wood begins:

Pheremones. Something roan. Billy Bragg on the stereo./

broom handle, collarbone. Just a lucky so-and-so.

Or in Steel, which also buzzes with rich sound:

confetti, illicit driftings, Aspirin-dulled, I’m awake and/

blinking through viridian: the filigree, the forgery/

the shining affidavit tracing the temples.

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Poet and novelist Anne Simpson’s new book of essays, The Marram Grass (Gaspereau, 160 pages, $27) is an extended and profound meditation on how poetic language works and what it accomplishes.

Each of the six essays opens with a locale in or near Antigonish, N.S., where Simpson lives. She then ranges out to discuss writers such as Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger.

The last essay, Waterwords, contemplates the mantra of the Heart Sutra, a Buddhist teaching. Going through a discussion of Robert Hass, social responsibility, and child prostitution, Simpson concludes that “poetry shows us how metaphor works as a principle, not just within a poem, but within life: it shows us ourselves as if we were others.”

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Ontario writer Jeramy Dodds is one of those poets who suddenly emerges on the national scene, apparently out of nowhere.

Actually, he won the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award in poetry, and his debut, Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House, $17, 96 pages), was just shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Award.

Dodds is incapable of writing a dull line. He has a brilliant sense of sound, as here in Prosthetics: “Cyclones of terns/ turn atop prop-churned debris” and “…stunt men falling/ through awning after awning.”

Then he also has a fey, nimble humour at work in pieces like The Official Translation of Ho Chi Minh’s August 18th, 1966, Telephone Call and Moorhen, where “A poem/ is meant to replace what the olfactory erased.”

The Donald Barthelme epigraph for one of the poems seems perfectly apt for someone who is so alert to disrupting received ways of saying things, as in “The mind is a terrible thing/ to keep chaste. If you can’t be drawn to my quarters,/ do I part the sea and split?”

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One of the mysteries of modern poetry to the uninitiated is how to distinguish it from prose that’s chopped into short lines. Unfortunately many poets do nothing to clear this up.

An example is British poet Ruth Padel’s latest, Darwin: A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, 142 pages, $22).

Padel is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and resident poet at Christ’s College Cambridge. She has terrific credentials.

In her lengthy author’s note and acknowledgements she says that “what I most wanted to give: his voice.” Here’s how Darwin, a great stylist himself, sounds as channeled by Padel:

I at once commenced

to make notes on the expressions

he exhibited, looking for the earliest

signs of each emotion…

Although classified on the cover as poetry/biography, this reads like chopped prose.

Winnipeg writer Maurice Mierau is most recently the author of Fear Not.