B.C. poet offers astute insights

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/03/2002 (8856 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tammy Armstrong is originally from New Brunswick and she now lives in Vancouver. Her debut collection, Bogman’s Music (Anvil Press, 89 pages, $14), challenges the stereotype that young Canadians are self-centred, materialistic powermongers.

At 28, Armstrong has astute insight into the environment in which she exists, a world full of ironic social dysfunctions and strange idiosyncrasies. Hers are poems of memory and recollection weighed against the moral fabric of what it means to be a young Canadian.

In the title poem, Armstrong addresses notions of inherited desire: “Three generations in Canada,/yet each one sick for something,/somewhere they’ve never been. . ./I swore I’d saddle the horse. . ./head West to bring back to Grandfather/nothing better than my own stories of place/where craving belongs.”

Despite her age, though, Armstrong is mature enough not to take life too seriously. In the hilarious poem Hockey, she writes: “I pretend to comprehend icing,/try not to think of children’s birthday parties/which always end in tears and bad photography./ Offside, high sticking, slashing –/ all parts of a relationship gone bad. Or the poem Divorced at Twenty-Four, where she concludes: “I reassured myself this is fine,/this divorce at twenty-four./Just another story.”

Clinical Studies (DC Books, 73 pages, $14) by Montreal poet George Slobodzian is a classic example of in-your-face poetry.

Nearly three-quarters of this book touches upon the topics of genitalia or the excrement of bodily fluids. These poems lack metaphorical or lyrical merit, making them purely dependent on shock value.

Some examples: “Our lady of excrement,/of multiple comings/and goings” (Prayer for Zoe); “Left alone the adult male/masturbates and writes” (Extreme Unction); “Spooning papaya uterine rind/onto genital tongue” (Credo Tropicanum).

Clinical Studies is simply a blatant expos of one-dimensional male banality.

On the back cover of B.C. poet Jason Dewinetz’s Moving to the Clear (NeWest Press, 81 pages, $15), Lent insists, “Read this book. Here is a new voice that has something to say. Strong stuff.” Indeed it is.

Dewinetz is a powerful poet who craftily snares and articulates those fleeting moments of profound self-dialogue. He has the gift of a poet’s eye; he is able to weave the obvious into the subconscious and transcribe it into tangible words on a page.

For example, in If We Could Just Forget How to Speak, Dewinetz contemplates the inadequacies of language when it comes to naming passion: “Like the newly deaf/a small chalk-board around our necks/so that I could write what will not find sound.”

Or in Observations Midway Through October, the narrator’s melancholy digression into a visit from his father: “These days my heart is set, blue plum in a bowl./My father carries a tomato in his/briefcase, a thousand kilometers from his garden,/and gives me this.”

Moving to the Clear is a collection of long sequences, prose and lyrical poems that resonate long after the cover is closed.

Born in Vancouver, now a resident of Denmark, editor Heather Spears offers a strong collection called Line by Line: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (Ekstasis Editions, 143 pages, $20).

This collection features such heavyweights as Margaret Atwood, P.K. Page, Patrick Lane and bill bissett, all who write on “the mystery of what is line — verbal, tactile or visionary.”

In the introduction, Spears confesses, “Drawing Canadian poets in performance has always been my particular pleasure.”

Appropriately, each contributor’s poetry is paired with a drawing Spears has created while observing the poet read.

While not all the portraits are flattering (Atwood, for instance, appears to be crazily lunging off the page), this anthology offers both literary and literal images of a handful of well-known poets active on the Canadian literary scene.

Treena Kortje is a Saskatoon poet and performance artist