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Barwin's wondrous words exciting

Poetry By: Jonathan Ball
Posted: 4:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jun. 24, 2017

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Gary Barwin’s No TV for Woodpeckers (Buckrider/Wolsak and Wynn, 96 pages, $18) offers more of his trademark exuberance, in poems where strange, surreal imagery develops startling, affecting scenes. “I tried to board with a suitcase of blackbirds. I had forgotten the blackbirds. They scanned me, patted me down. Confiscated my blackbirds, my beaks, my wings.”

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/6/2017 (1788 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gary Barwin’s No TV for Woodpeckers (Buckrider/Wolsak and Wynn, 96 pages, $18) offers more of his trademark exuberance, in poems where strange, surreal imagery develops startling, affecting scenes. "I tried to board with a suitcase of blackbirds. I had forgotten the blackbirds. They scanned me, patted me down. Confiscated my blackbirds, my beaks, my wings."

Barwin’s poems are struck through with a wide-eyed wonder, and when they aren’t revelling in the sound of language or crafting crazed imaginings, they work to dig out the strangeness of the everyday: "here are a thousand photos / remember them / a universe in a jacket pocket."

"I planned to park in my usual place / but a whale became available / convenient and close," begins one poem, while another questions: "Is this poetry? Maybe. / Let me tell you how terrible the world is. / Also how beautiful. / I have longings." In four lines, Barwin manages to summarize the main themes of all poetry with a wry smile. Another fun, exciting collection from one of Canada’s most enjoyable poets.

● ● ●

Allison LaSorda’s Stray (Icehouse, 62 pages, $20) offers dense, sometimes-musical lines that pack their images tightly: "Once dead we all disappoint someone. / On the highway’s gravel shoulder, / life dribbles out of bottlenecks / like a slo-mo New Year’s Eve."

LaSorda’s musicality is often evident in her sparing but strong use of rhyme: "One time, his double swayed me / south of where I’m supposed to be: / stirred into a mind’s eye levity. / I want a love that flows preternaturally." Sometimes wry and near-snark ("I want every song sung by Springsteen. / I need a boss for my home life") and at other times sad and meditative, LaSorda’s poems gleam like fine china, pristinely beautiful and stronger than they first seem.

● ● ●

Douglas Barbour’s Listen. If (U of Alberta, 140 pages, $20) offers a sad statement on literature: "the way I feel now a / poet is a sad thing indeed he / has nothing to show for his efforts & / none will pay him / attention." That gap before "attention" lets you read "none will pay him" alone, and it works just as well — Barbour has a deft hand and a strong sense of how a small move like adding a few spaces, adding a line break, adding or taking a word away, can open up the poem in myriad ways.

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Fractured, fragmentary lines twist and sparkle throughout the collection, with Barbour experimenting with rhythms and seeming to freeze thought in flux: "is the world still with us / at all the planet turns / beneath us impersonal."

● ● ●

Michael V. Smith’s Bad Ideas (Nightwood, 96 pages, $19) presents itself as "a book of anxieties" and includes an outstanding sequence of poems concerning dreams: in which babies are blended into milkshakes for meal-burials, sex takes place in a church on the Titanic, and white terrorists trundle toward a queer couple in suburbia.

Smith’s surrealistic images often work to cover or convey a sharp sadness. In a poem about "whining" on social media, he admits: "It’s a wonder we aren’t shouting / all the time. We should be amazed / our women friends aren’t / shouting all the time. Hashtag / grateful."

These are poems brimming with pained laughs, with echoing sorrows, that hold "silence in this loneliness // loneliness / in some muscle / God’s hand / that holds everything // and lets go."

Winnipeg English professor Jonathan Ball (@jonathanballcom) lives online at JonathanBall.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.

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