Featured Review: Inclinations, Preoccupations, and Obsessions: A Review of Klipschutz’s “THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON” by Bill Neumire

Inclinations, Preoccupations, and Obsessions: A Review of Klipschutz’s THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON (Vancouver, BC: Anvil Press Publishers, 2013, $18.00, 96 Pages) Review by Bill Neumire

In an interview with Canadian poet Jon Cone, Klipschutz (the pen name of poet Kurt Lipschutz) confessed, “I’m a frustrated playwright, essayist, short story writer, pundit, Casanova, cultural anthropologist…the list goes on. Which leads to a crazy quilt of approaches and subject matter: it all gets poured into poems. There are no conscious themes, just inclinations, preoccupations, obsessions.” This assessment is pretty quickly confirmed as one reads his latest poetry collection, This Drawn & Quartered Moon. It’s a real buffet of form: erasure, rhymed quatrains of iambic tetrameter, ghazal, free verse lyric, epistle, prose poem. There are nonce forms and flash-fiction-esque pieces, and sometimes, as in ‘Elvis the First,’ the poet changes forms within a single poem.

This Drawn & Quartered Moon charts the collision of a nostalgic American past with the personal ‘eternal present’ of the speaker (a speaker who, in most cases, seems to be the autobiographical lyric I of the poet) and the complex comingling that follows. The poet’s father was apparently Elvis’ doctor, a point that serves as his portal to cultural commentary, sketches of characters from his life and times, and riddling songs of interior monologue. Klipschutz centers his book on a poem titled ‘Elvis the First,’ about which the poet explained, “The poem is ‘about’ Elvis Presley, but also about my family, and reaches back to some rough times, when the ’60s were just kicking into high gear, when my siblings and I were starting to do drugs, and my parents didn’t have a clue how to handle us. Then my dad became Elvis’s doctor. … the poem gave me a way to write about family.” Indeed, the collection mixes a sense of history and nostalgia with the eternal present of the speaker’s self, his running interior monologue, even as the markers of his past fall away and his anxiety heightens: “Don’t mention the old days. / You’re talking to yourself again”.

The boo’s most engaging moments are in its formal amusements and its profiles and vignettes of quirky characters. Take, for example, Oliver Othello King, Jr., a Viet Nam vet the speaker met on public transportation:

Double O. King, that’s what they call me … Airborne Rangers, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. How many people you suppose you can kill in two years? … Death from the sky. Just so you can stand here.

When these poems fail, they come across as nothing more than reportage, a workshop word wielded when a writer writes without depth and craft to transform an event or experience into something more, but when they succeed the “reportage” serves to erase the speaker and transport the reader into different eyes; this happens no doubt most frighteningly so in “Slab of Consciousness,” a poem for which the form emanates naturally from the content: it’s stilted, with periods after every word or couple words. It’s truncated life. It cuts out the speaker, makes the experience blunter, sharper, more painful:

The facts. It’s gone: Her future. Bright. The town. On it. At the Bubble Lounge. Outside. A fare like any other. Dumped. The body. Him. Her ATM … Results. Still inconclusive. Weeks away. Semen. And if so? … Breathing. She stopped breathing. People do.

It’s like the coldly clinical diction and syntax of an autopsy. The language can be fresh and arresting, witty and satirical, as in “I shall not want / for the Lord is my Home Shopping Network” or poignantly discomforting, as in “Winter passes like a meal / that sits and hardens in this sewer of stopwatch light”. In another impressive moment from ‘The Red Wheelbarrow of Fortune,’ we get expected language and the slogans of contemporary poetry, but the language is then deployed unexpectedly such that it creates tension between the lazy comfort of the phrases and the crafty new rearrangement and juxtaposition of them, all of it preceded by that image—an impactful discomfort and surprise—of the children:

Children cheer a flag of fire
A car commercial ends
Hearts of darkness fill with light
The wind is up—so much depends…

One can almost hear that “depends” slip into “deepens” at the end of the stanza, which is exactly what this strategy does: it deepens the shallow catch phrases by juxtaposing them in intriguing ways and adding that sonically pleasing yet topically disturbing “Children cheer a flag of fire.”

Alas, this self-amused collection frequently provokes a groan like a bad pun. The speaker actually verbalizes an anxiety about this cheeky cleverness (the contradictory self-referential anxiety can admittedly be funny and interesting at times), which creates a sense of self-criticism that makes this a bit of a therapy session as the voice can even get defensive: “Okay, so my ad libs are scripted. / Like you’re never wrong. / Try running a 10k in my teeth. / Go drown your lawn” (88). But sometimes the language downright slips into abstraction and sentimentality, as in “Love lusted for Itself, pent up inside the prison of the heart”. The poems are formally diverse, but as often as individual pieces feel well-formed, the whole ends up feeling purposelessly diverse and perhaps unprofitably too long.

These poems as independent units are not Steven’s poems that “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” but rather they are, to use the controversial term, accessible. That may be part of the poet’s “street sage” mission, as Klipschutz has been in the news for such public displays of poetry as reading poems to taxi cab passengers. Like most choices, though, this one to be a sort of self-proclaimed laureate of San Francisco carries a price, the price of coming across as watering down the poetry to make it easier to understand. The flipside is that it is a poetry that is approachable, that invites a broader audience than stuffy, draconian reviewers like me, a poetry that laughs and shudders, reminisces and opines. It’s a poetry that swallows history into its eternal present, the speaker’s consummate offering to the reader.

Bill Neumire‘s reviews regularly appear in Vallum, and his poems have recently appeared in American Poetry Journal, Istanbul Review, and The Laurel Review. His first book of poems, Estrus, was published last year. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

This review was published in issue 11:1 Thresholds. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: Mosaic Orpheus by Peter Dale Scott. Review by James Edward Reid.

Mosaic Orpheus by Peter Dale Scott (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009, $16.95 CDN, 182 pp). Review by James Edward Reid.

Mosaic Orpheus extends the concerns and achievement of Peter Dale Scott’s Seculum trilogy. Coming to Jakarta: a Poem about Terror (1988), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem of the Year 2000 (2000) demonstrated that both deeply personal and politically engaged poetry is possible. It is also a welcome antidote to the prevalence of navel gazing and politics of rage. The trilogy was composed in tercets, whose modest forms opened themselves to reveal a combination of the tenderness and biting laceration that recalls Dante’s limpid terza rima. In this book, poetic forms also ranges from densely packed quatrains to the celerity of two line stanzas. Other relatively free stanza forms engage with the challenge of sorting through the proliferating acceleration of information and disinformation.

Scott is a former Canadian diplomat who was appalled by the cover up of the American supported genocide in Indonesia, and wrote about it years later.Coming to Jakarta: a Poem about Terror, examined real terror, before “terror” was degraded to a cliché to justify the indefensible. Although the trilogy felt complete in 2000, Mosaic Orpheus is hopefully, not a coda, but a precursor to more poetry.

Scott’s new book opens with the memories in “Seven Canadian Poems.” The quotidian delight in the first poem (“Aunt Mary backing up the car”) was so utterly Canadian in the gentle unwinding of its humour that I found myself laughing. I tried to remember the last time I laughed out loud at a poem. But the true weight of Mosaic Orpheus rests in maintaining a balance between personal experience and knowledge of the Dickensian mills of the political world. Mosaic Orpheus looks back more than two decades to the frisson in the opening stanzas of Coming to Jakarta, “Mosaic darkness/ constellations… Why are you here?/ Have you something to tell me?”

Scott does have something to tell us: “the problem has always been/ how do we live with evil?” In addition to examining it, and sifting what truth he can from confusion, his poetry touches on the spiritual- distinct from the religious. One of the spiritual interests is Buddhism. From the evidence here, the advantage of a number of Buddhist practices is that they do not require conversion, only commitment to concentration. Possibly resembling the commitment to writing a good poem. “First Retreat: Fire Tending in the Land of Medicine Buddha” from Minding the Darkness pointed forward to “Commuting to the Land of the Medicine Buddha” in Mosaic Orpheus. Medicine Buddha practice tries to relieve the suffering of the sick and the dying. Both poems are remarkable for their honest portrayal of the discursive thoughts that surface when meditation attempts to clam the mind. In the former poem, Scott recalls “watching my mother/slowly fulfill her resolution/ to die.” In the latter he is “plotting/my early escape/ to Denise’s private memorial.” She is Denise Levertov, a fine American poet, and a good friend.

Clarity might be easier to achieve in personal poems, than in Scott’s densely argued political poetry, permeated as it is with a profound sense of history. To help the reader in both the Seculum trilogy and in Mosaic Orpheus, he provides notes and references. These notes link to Bibliographies that follow each section of the book. Notes to poetry? It makes sense- especially if you’ve ever staggered from pillar to post, trying to discern, for example, what John Ashbery’s multiple narrators are going on about.

The notes and four page Bibliography are especially helpful for “The Tao of 9/11.” This remarkable poem is the book’s sustained and ruthlessly reasoned centrepiece. It grapples with the slippery nets that entangle American Foreign Policy, the international  illicit drug trade, Al Qaeda, the Far West consortium, and possibly the worst thing Dick Cheney attempted while he was in power. And Cheney’s worst is an alarming accomplishment.

A few pages after the conclusion of this unsettling poem, Scott reminds us of Dante’s and Milton’s wager on how to live, “that to live in hope/ we must let go of our torments.” In the face of looming torments that Scott tackles head on, letting go and choosing to do what we do best, may be best. Consider his response when he returned home after one of the California fires burned his house to the ground. The fire destroyed a library built over half a century, as well as decades of writing and translating. Here is the equanimity of his response: “and the thick layer of ash/ Could this be all our books?” Peter Dale Scott’s choice to attend closely to the world, and present his experience of it, also echoes Dante’s long journey in the Purgatorio: “When Love breaths in me, I take note…and set it down.”

James Edward Reid‘s essay on Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn appeared recently in The Sarmation Review. His poetry has been published in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

 This review was published in issue 7:1 Luck. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: MISSION CREEP by Joshua Trotter. Review by Bill Neumire.

Mission Creep by Joshua Trotter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2015, $18.95, 104 pages). Review by Bill Neumire.

No poetry book or work of art will last long without beginning ambitiously, and Joshua Trotter’s second collection, Mission Creep, is loaded with dynamic scope. It’s a caffeinated spill of cultural criticism newsfeed running on an engine of repetitious wordplay, humor, irony, and wit. Though broken into separate poems with sly titles like ‘Life Is Hard and Full of Miniseries,’ the book is really one long, somewhat narrative poem peopled with characters like Iron Wind, The Oracle, and Evel Knievel. As a long poem, it employs numerous and varied strategies of propulsion, from Whitmanian anaphoras and catalogs, to Homeric repetition of phrase. The acknowledgments section explains that the book makes use of the CIA Human Exploitation Manual, but it’s also  fairly classical in many of its references, alluding to Daedalus (which brilliantly becomes “data loss”), Icarus, The Phoenix (which becomes The River Phoenix, pointing its allusion backward to ancient Egypt and simultaneously to pop culture), and the minotaur. The major character of this mythical book, though, is the “professional life risker” Evel Knievel, an American daredevil who attempted more than 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps and holds a Guinness Book of World Records entry for survivor of the most broken bones in a lifetime at 433.

Much of the excitement of the book comes from its grabbag of novel and quirky conventions: it employs the use of words stricken from official documents (“<unintelligible>”), but also Megahertz frequency numbers, mysterious page references, and seemingly random capitalizations of phrases such as “MAXIMUM DENSITY” and “THE BANALITY OF EVEL KNIEVEL.” Mission Creep’s words often disassemble and reform into other, similar-sounding words and phrases with drastically different meanings; for instance, the speaker in ‘A Growing Group of Concerned Citizens’  says, “The Oracle grew appendages. Penned adages. Adagios” (9). The book is also so full of allusions and erasures that a set of footnotes might be longer than the text itself, and at times it alters the language of those allusions ever so slightly, as in its nod to Cummings that removes the h from “hands”: ““Nobody, not even the rain, had such small ands” (32). In fact, the book constantly sets up predictable patterns of language only to veer away at the last moment, sometimes even heaping together cliches to imbue them with new meaning via new context; “a word repeated is another word” (60) the speaker claims, and later, “Each word is newfangled, unique, crisscrossing morning with a flashy trunket in its beak” (69). It is an inter-referential text that hinges on sentence-level and more overarching repetitions, such as the anaphoric “Let us” at the beginning of clauses throughout all of these poems. Without the breathing room of white space, the poems appear as prose in one thick block down the page, and they are long, multi-page pieces for the most part. As a result, the form makes it feel like a newsfeed deluge, like a stream of infinite data. There’s one section that even employs the language of an online Q&A: “<<Is the Iron Wind called the Iron Wind because of its colour/texture (iron-like), because it whips the victim like iron flails (whilts mutilating it of course) or because of something else entirely? Thanks!>>” (48). The book can, after a while, seem to become too complacent, too entertained by its own cleverness, such that a line like “Beware the Pacific Rimbjob” (21) struck too many times isn’t funny so much as groan-provoking. The speaker revels in the danger of such mutable language, though, and in ‘Transmission Creep,’ one of the last poems, that language quickly breaks down into nonsense: “Late summer remainder silence. Pwallowuime silence. Oovo-Bonarch butterfly silence. Ptanch-the lawking-Bannheim silence (…) uhese’p a flaph, apqark, pqou-telding” (87): Initially, the wordplay is fun and incisive, but tortured enough, it finally becomes fruitless.

Despite any minor flaws, Mission Creep is inventive, quirky, allusive, trendy, and clever. It wallows in pop culture with lines like “I once was lost in the mountains of Brad Pitt” (56) and “Don’t believe me, believe my status updates” (90). It’s deeply submerged in a complicated (and implicated) criticism of government, of war, of culture and capitalism; and its sense of the speaker’s own culpability, of any armchair critic’s culpability, is palpable as well, as the speaker asks,

if you think the name of her weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime? What kind of gun did Annie Oakley use? What kind of gun did George Zimmerman use? What kind of gun did Walter White use? What kind of gun did Patrick Swayze use? See Red Dawn, Patrick and Jennifer grunting in the sun. The kids grunt in the sun because they’re hungry [masculine] and they’re hungry [feminine]. The kids aren’t lost, rather, crazed with lust, loosed among foothills with endless ammunition (60).

The voice possesses a commercial quality, as if it’s a critique that can’t escape being part of what is critiqued: it’s a voice that’s willing and thrilled to be lewd, obscene, comically dark.  It’s also a voice that presents a complex sense of identity, a sense that the “I” is created by a public, that an individual consciousness is a construct of a society. Consequently, there’s a distancing from the self that happens, for example, in ‘A Growing Group of Concerned Citizens’:

I watched my myself dig a

hole and drop my myself in. I covered my myself.

Watered my myself. I watched my myself bloom. It

grew a penis. It grew a beard and glasses. It looked

familiar. The ghost is clear, it told me (31).

But there is still an other, a “you,” and the speaker yearns to be one with the public “you,” striving to thrust himself into the public consciousness: “All I ever wanted was to drift at a great height, forever gracious, soaring through local argots in my Bell Magnum, dissembling my myselves” (97). This is a self in love with pop culture and the public in many ways but also swallowed by it to the point where “The only way to travel, now, is travel by proxy, copying and pasting my myselves over vast distances” (57).

In Mission Creep, Trotter solders classical myths, epic ambition, and Whitmanian parallelism and repetition to a sardonic, twenty-first-century voice drowning in a capitalistic, voyeuristic, pop culture war machine; it’s a voice roiling with irony, puns, sexual innuendo, witty linguistic jokes, and an ambiguous, self-implicating criticism. To this, he adds a surreal and disorienting narrative in which Evel Knievel, a man who made his living by creating arbitrary obstacles and leaping them for public entertainment–maybe not so different than a poet’s work–takes center stage in a ridiculous epic of the age of memes and torture manuals.

Bill Neumire‘s first book, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award. His poems appear in the Harvard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and West Branch.

 This review was published in issue 13:1. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: A JAR OF FIREFLIES by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews. Review by Laurence Hutchman.

A Jar of Fireflies by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews (Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 2015, $15. 95, 108 pages). Review by Laurence Hutchman.

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrew’s fifth collection of poems, A Jar of Fireflies, is about quests. In particular, it is about the quest in space and time to find a balance, whether recollecting peaceful family life in Italy where Di Sciascio-Andrews grew up, or in her present-day life in Canada. The author’s journey concerns the discovery of certain moments of the past to complete her mission in poetry. The first part of her book is dedicated to her life in Italy. Often, immigrant writers are caught between the idealized past of their old country and the reality of their new country as they attempt to adapt to their present life. Di Sciascio-Andrews has a powerful attachment to the land of her ancestors and her roots. In her poem “Sicily” she writes: “You will carry her in your heart / Like a genetic memory / Of blood, of family, of race.” She pays tribute to its long history. “Homer’s odyssey of Magna Graecia / Rome’s coveted pearl” and “Precious child of Carthage and Troy.” To evoke the Sicilian life, the poet makes an energetic use of sound, onomatopoeia and words to give a mimesis of dance and music, reminiscent of W.C. Williams’ “The Dance.”

…………The wild unshackling of Turkish tambourines
…………The unexpected thump,
…………Guttural human hum.
…………Determined heel step. Knuckle drum.

In poems depicting her family, Di Sciascio-Andrews expresses a strong love for her father. In “Red Accordion” she recalls his old musical instrument and how he had planned to replace it when the mortgage was paid:

…………The sound was good regardless.
…………How like my father to make good
…………Of the words and the mediocre.
…………His fingers harmonizing joy
…………For us, in allegro, andante.
…………Improvising the frenzied flights
…………Of old world soundscapes.
…………Waltzes and tangos. Mazurkas.

Although the reader might be easily captivated by the poet’s genuine expression of emotion,some of the poems can seem too sentimental.
If Di Sciascio-Andrews would be more open to fully exercise her thought and emotion of a scene or situation, as Keats suggested in his poetic statement in “Negative Capability,” then some of her poems could be stronger. In the second part of the collection, Di Sciascio-Andrews moves from the sunnier landscapes of Italy to the more temperate climate of Canada. In these poems she can be personal and see life through a more realistic lens, as in the poem “Landscape:”

…………Why do I feel most at home
…………On a day like this
…………When after a night of heavy rain
…………Light smudges morning
…………Onto the hard edges of things.

Here as she writes she is drawn to “Mystical philosophies / Of inner and outer worlds”:

…………On this foggy morning
…………The chrome-yellow centre line
…………Painted on the wet asphalt
…………Unfurls networks of neuronal highways
…………Intersecting through old, familiar
…………Yet forever changing channels of memories.

This is analogical thinking, and her ability to develop not number of isolated metaphors, but a series of related ones is a natural and inevitable way exploring the mind/nature relationship. The external world is internalized and the world of memories is externalized, breaking down borders, as in the work of one of Di Sciascio-Andrews’s favourite poets, Pablo Neruda.

One of Di Sciascio-Andrews strengths lies in the naturally exuberant quality of her voice, expressing itself in an epigrammatic affirmation as in “Poetic Alchemy”: “I extrapolate wonder from the commonplace” and “My eyes create reality.” I like these series of interconnected states of wonder, this expression of affirmation and celebration in her work.

The final poem “Emerald City” is a humorous adaptation of The Wizard of Oz:

…………Surely, her wide-eyed awe, her peasant braids,
…………Her blue gingham pinafore may be been construed
…………For bumpkin gullibility. “And should I, at your harmless innocence
…………Melt as I do?” Said the witch. Arm in arm with an inconstant
…………Courage, an underrated brain and a gutbucket heart
…………Dorothy tore back the sash on a sham wizard.
…………“Click! Click!” Went the shoes. “Home!” Cried the heart.

The poem is a witty and personable presentation of the story’s heroine.
It epitomizes the theme of this collection, the ability to encounter and overcome darkness. Di Sciascio-Andrews recasts Dorothy, juxtaposing a formal language with the quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost with the colloquial language of the “inconstant / Courage, an underrated brain, and a gutbucket heart.” The poet displays these qualities in her protagonist to illustrate how she surpasses obstacles in order to return home.

Laurence Hutchman grew up in Toronto, receiving his BA from Western University in London, Ontario, an MA from Concordia in Montreal and a PhD from the Université de Montreal. He has taught at a number of universities including Concordia University, Western University and the Université de Moncton. Hutchman has published nine books of poetry, edited Coastlines: the Poetry of Atlantic Canada and In the Writers’ Words.
His poetry has received numerous grants and awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence.  His poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Bulgarian, Polish and Chinese. He lives and works in Oakville, Ontario with his wife, Eva.

To read more reviews please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITIONfor your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Featured Review: THE ROAD IN IS NOT THE SAME ROAD OUT by Karen Solie. Review by David Swartz.

The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out by Karen Solie (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, Toronto 2015, $19.95 , 112 pages). Review by David Swartz.

Karen Solie’s way of approaching the reality of concrete things (and names) in The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out is to compare them to people. A thing is not a person. “People don’t stand in for each other the way things do” (“Museum of the thing”). Rather, Solie speculates:

A pail is thing. So is
the water it carries. A painting
hangs like a hat on a nail.

Judgement, perception, death are things
in themselves, they’re not nothing,
though they don’t, as things, appear.

Solie reimagines the value of existential certainty in light of her analysis of thingness. Evident in her title is an adamant refusal to become entangled by an originary intent. Truth is not a direct journey, rather, an unexpected passage. Questions never get answered. While remaining unflinchingly personal, devoid of any kind of rigorous philosophical method, Solie’s poems, unsurprisingly, reveal depth of vision. The themes are loosely laidout, wide-ranging: “the road in is not the same road out” alludes to an unexpected harvest of circulatory wanderings.

As philosopher, Solie provides us with everyday common sense suggestions: “Time is short,” and “Pedestrians, obey your signals.” Then, quite suddenly, things open to larger meanings. Unexpected metaphors loom at every turn (“a doorknob / came off in my hand like a bad prosthetic”).

After leaping into a poem, Solie takes short punctuated steps, keeping the reader wanting. She’s passionate and attentive to detail, and committed to the subject of her poem, herself, her hands writing the book, our hands picking up the book to read it

Solie deliberately brings in local imagery, colour, rhetorical questions, juxtaposing on one occasion Epicurus’ notion of injustice with the acquisition of Dion Phaneuf by the Toronto Maples Leafs. She wants to know if these are things too. Certainly they are. But once again, “people don’t stand in for each other.” A person is not a thing.

In Solie’s book, multiple ideas walk hand in hand, thoughts merge with questions, visions are born out of local descriptions and impressions. Solie’s tone is, at times, whimsically philosophical, autobiographical, impressionistic. Life is a vision to the visionary. There are many things to behold. What is the sense of these things? What is behind them? What is a thing? Solie contemplates such questions in her poems bravely.

“We are all locals now,” writes Solie. “A thing is what it is called.” To identify a thing by its name makes all of us relatives in the world of words. And yet, in a world such as Solie’s, where everything is full of metonymic significance, and where “the air is thick with personal messaging,” a thing can be what it is called, so long as the “Sad storm of objects becoming things” excludes living beings. “No thing / can survive such boredom.” In her philosophical and especially terse poem “Fables of the Reconstruction,” Solie writes: “Should a single being vanish into / what is not, so all things may vanish, as is written.” We get a sense of the kinship between thingness and nothingness. In many instances, Solie alludes to the paradoxical relationship between these two seemingly opposite poles of existence. Thankfully, her poetry does not get stuck in the mud of philosophy. Like a true artist, Solie is content to juxtapose things, names and ideas, simply to see what will happen.

Solie writes in broken-down digestible sentences (“the unknown is where we played”), and pregnant fragments (“Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present”). In her poem “the Living Option,” she maintains that 80 VALLUM the questioning method of philosophy perpetuates doubt. The only reason one doubts something is because one cannot see it. “If you can’t see it, / it’s philosophy. A game between us / and the nature of things.” Nevertheless, the place and existence of things remains steeped in mystery. “One doubt hides another.” Questions never get answered.

Solie will take another path: “he sensed in her an imminent change in direction.” She begins with self-consciousness, asserting herself through selfquestioning: “Still you … We were here once, hand in hand.” By now she is working on two fronts, addressing both herself and her reader: “What we share, though, transcends / ownership …” Aware of her rhetorical prowess and not wishing to direct herself or her reader through questioning alone, Solie indirectly suggests that poetry must rise above philosophical questioning, since “Neither question nor assertion makes sense / when truth is a tone of voice.” In The Road In Is Not The Same Road Out, Solie proudly reaffirms poetry’s ability to take on the great questions of epistemology and existentialism, by turning to the ongoing relationship between human beings and the nature of things themselves.

David Swartz is a Canadian writer, editor and visual artist. He has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and is currently studying painting at the Faculdade de Belas Artes at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Check out his website: http://www.davidswartzart.com/.

This review was published in issue 12:2. To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website .

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: ASBESTOS HEIGHTS by David McGimpsey. Review by Danny Jacobs.

Asbestos Heights by David McGimpsey (Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2015, $17.95, 96 pages). Review by Danny Jacobs.

The opening section of Asbestos Heights, David McGimpsey’s latest collection, is entitled “A Harkening of Flowers.” McGimpsey is so good at parodying the tacky earnestness of Canadian poetry that I could’ve sworn I’d heard that title before. Languishing in our country’s thrift stores are likely copies of a late-80’s chapbook by a defunct publisher (Creaky Farmhouse Press?) called just that. It’s a fitting section title: this might be McGimpsey’s most focused collection in its attempt to use CanPo banality as poetic fodder: “The asters on the roadside banks, wispy blurs,/ could be squeezed one day from the roots up/ to draw out at least three Canadian poems” (“Aster”).

Asbestos Heights spares nothing in detailing “the ivory tower’s ivoriness.” McGimpsey has always been entertaining when lambasting Canadian poetry’s constructed myths and social insularity. And some of his best quatrains are cuttingly and refreshingly frank about the population’s indifference to verse:

Outside, as the yarrow whips by, are towns
where Canadians happily live their lives,
unperturbed by who was excluded
from the Can Lit? Can Do! anthology.

In “Anthem for why you write poetry,” McGimpsey is equally entertaining while taking shots at our country’s affected literary hipsterism. The anaphoristic lines accrue in hilarity, and like a lot of McGimpsey, they flirt with absurdity but somehow seem spot-on: “You do it for microcrafted microbrew,/ for speeches about ‘the community’.” The poem’s final line is my favourite: “You do it for every cat named Salinger.” You may not know someone with a cat named Salinger, but you know the type. McGimpsey’s final lines often have a pay-off like this, relentless and carefully aimed. The poems rarely peter out.

Yet you’d be misreading McGimpsey if you thought he was penning this stuff just to spitball the professors’ tweeded backs. Its project isn’t all snarky tittering at CanPo’s cheesy themes and silly cliquishness. If that’s all there was, the poems would grow tiring, even petty, and sink under their own satirical weight. The truth is, McGimpsey loves poetry, and that is evident in his craft, in the sincerity that bubbles under every gag. The brilliance also lies in the working of his complex irony within the rigging of form. So a McGimpsey poem is funny, sure, but his best ones are first and foremost effective as poems, not punchlines. The less they seem like dashed-off jokes, they stronger they are. In “Sylvia Plath,” McGimpsey once again deftly skewers poetic pretentions, referencing Plath’s line about the “peanut-crunching crowd” in “Lady Lazarus”—a kind of lowbrow society McGimpsey is at home in. Here’s McGimpsey’s penultimate stanza:

Plath imagined her art’s insensitive foils
as the ‘peanut-crunchers’ around ball games.
When I spoke of my dream trip visiting ballparks,
my poetry teacher said, ‘What a nightmare!’

But it’s the next and final stanza where McGimpsey ups the ante with a smart tonal shift, a shot of pathos that raises the poem above flippant ridicule:

My father, at ninety-nine, could not
recognize his favourite Yankees’ faces
but knew their body shapes, averages
and what they did their last time at bat.

Baseball, in the working-class Parnassus of Asbestos Heights, is just as legitimate a subject for real poetry as anything else.

The new book, like the last, is filled to the brim with McGimpsey’s signature 16-line “chubby sonnets” (the only deviation from the four quatrain form is the italicized and untitled “I Love Noodles” poems that start each section of the book). One drawback to this repetition is a sense of sameness during some stretches. But when the stanzas are working, when they clack along within their respective poems, one gets to witness a top-level writer working in his perfected form. This is a rare and pleasurable event in Canadian poetry, where a lot of books come off as scattershot in their approach to lineation and stanza structure. In terms of voice and aesthetic aim, McGimpsey might be one of the most consistent and honest poets writing today. Please visit Asbestos Heights, and experience one of our national treasures throwing our nation back at us.

Danny Jacobs’ poems have been published in a variety of journals across Canada. His first book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories (Nightwood, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2014 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. He lives with his wife in Riverview, NB.

This review was published in the digital issue 12:2 “Humour.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: SEQUENCE by A. F. Moritz. Review by Patrick M. Pilarski.

Sequence by A. F. Moritz (Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press, 2015, $19.95 CDN, 158 pages). Review by Patrick M. Pilarski.

Sequence by A. F. Moritz exists between the driven and the drawn, in a progression from “sand, heat, and panicking light” to “the quiet click of the curtain hooks in the / light wind.” Moritz fills this gap with a percussion of leaving and arriving—a shifting space that can be readily shared and inhabited by the reader. The resulting sense of an inhabitable, inevitable journey is one great strength of Moritz’s polished and well-crafted book.

The opening image of the collection, and one that recurs throughout, is that of human motion through a desert. By bringing broad views on this landscape into sharp focus, Moritz interprets the distance between two unreachable points. A cascade of untitled, unbroken poetic segments collapses that distance into a single, resonant image that unfolds and refolds throughout the work:

motion of a journey that reached
a rest it earned or seized,
or in a night without stars or wind
has died. The motion
of a journey that has turned to rest,
and continues in the form of rest.

The result is a long poem that at different times appears modern and ancient, common and rare, solitary and communal. The effect works beautifully.What makes it so engaging? The answer seems to rest in a series of risky stylistic choices made by the author.

First, Moritz has chosen to draw on a number of voices, viewpoints, and
tenses, changing these dramatically from section-to-section, even page-to-page. These shifts could have the effect of drawing a reader out of the flow of the work. However, in Sequence the transitions fall nicely into the rhythm of the poems, and Moritz’s use of the second person viewpoint is especially engaging early on in the collection (e.g. “Whenever you stop or slow, restlessness stoops / and drives you”). His specific, precisely placed use of the first- and second-person present tense helps the reader connect and remain connected with the work in the absence of poem titles or explicit contextual shifts. The only place where the change in viewpoint may be jarring to the reader is in the shift to the first-person narrative of the book’s third section, but by the end of the section the new voice has settled and comes back like a pleasant echo throughout the rest of the collection.

A second crucial stylistic choice is Moritz’s pronounced use of repetition and iteration of both words and phrases. These repetitions occur within and between poetic frames and include “belovèd,” “rest,” “dark,” and “light.” Like a skipping stone, or a “walk slowly into a vast land / uninhabited and maybe never to be inhabited / that begins to flower or will never flower,” things that are spoken repeat throughout the reader’s and poet’s collective journey. Each time these repetitions are more welcome. In a lesser collection, or in the hands of a lesser poet, readers might find the repetitions off-putting. In Sequence, they don’t become stale or predictable, instead growing in depth with each iteration. This is a challenging effect to pull off well, and Moritz does so masterfully.

Today will be the same. First a course set in darkness.
Then in the bleaching day a wandering from it.”
[…]
The wanderer prefers to know he is lost
to the other way of seeing:
that it’s the earth that wanders lost in him.

It is also important to note the collection’s contact with our shared literature. Resonance is created by Moritz’s skillful use of allusion to other works (as noted in the book’s well-detailed after matter). Most allusions are subtle, emphasizing the shared journey of the book, the feeling that it gives the reader of being both alone and not alone in the motion from one place to another.

The macro-rhythm that is created by the arrangement of poems in Sequence makes it a rare and well-executed book. Paired with Moritz’s use of changing times, places, voices, and allusions, the overall effect of Sequence as a union of restlessness and “a search / through the place to be found” makes it a collection not to miss. The reader will have ample room to leave, to wander, and to return.

Patrick M. Pilarski is the co-editor of DailyHaiku and the author of Huge Blue (Leaf Press) and two short collections. Patrick’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and he has served as Vice President for the League of Canadian Poets. He is a professor at the University of Alberta.

This review was published in the digital issue 12:2 “Humour.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: MY SHADOW IN DACHAU: Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp. Review by James W. Wood.

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MY SHADOW IN DACHAU: Poems by Victims and Survivors of the Concentration Camp (New York and London: Camden House Publishing, 2015, $85.00, 314 pages). Edited by Dorothea Heiser and Stuart Taberner. Review by James W. Wood.

Writing in his commonplace book, A Certain World, WH Auden noted that, “every poem ever written is important, since it affirms the existence of an individual mind.” Auden’s words might serve as a maxim for the reader of this collection of more than seventy poems by sixty-five writers, translated into English for the first time since its original German publication in 1993.

It would be uncharitable, if not untrue, to state that this book’s significance as a cultural and historical document possibly eclipses the quality of some of the verse included. Yet as the book’s English-language editor, Professor Stuart Taberner, notes in his considered and passionate introduction, “each of these poems embodies an individual’s attempt to confront an awful reality” – the barbarity of the Nazis as seen by those imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. For all that some of the poets may not have been “trained”, or, “literary” in any sense, the raw emotion captured in their verse rings clear across more than seventy years, asking today’s reader to compare their plight with, among others, today’s Professor of Creative Writing who simply can’t finish their next book of poems without a grant.

Divided into four sections which capture life in the concentration camps, meditations on the purpose or meaning of suffering, the liberation experience in 1945 and poetry by those who survived into the eighties, nineties and beyond, much of this poetry is the precise opposite of the selfconscious, mannered and politically correct verse one might expect from some of today’s “professional poets”. In tone and content, most of these
poets are writing in a register somewhere between Whitman’s “barbaric yawp”, and the Gerard Manley Hopkins of the “terrible sonnets” – raw horror, disgust, shame and confusion reign in this work from first to last. And yet, throughout, there is beauty in the horror.

Here is writing as a form of prayer, with post-war German intellectual Walter Jens recording that inmates would scribble “secret messages on scraps of paper”; writing as an act of memory, as poet Karl Roeder recalled how, “the ideas, thoughts and feelings [I had] screamed to be written down”; and, most of all, writing as testimony and warning, as the French inmate Arthur Hulot determined in a letter written on his liberation from the camps, “one must fight with pity and compassion for those who will follow.”

Indeed, the vast range of what’s on offer here, both in terms of languages (poets writing in Russian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Serbian, Slovenian, Czech and Polish are included), form (everything from free verse to, strangely, metrically perfect romantic sonnets) and subject matter is another compelling factor. The poets themselves range from literary professionals working as journalists, writers and teachers prior to their incarceration to scientists, architects and engineers – in other words, human souls who turned to self-expression both as succour in the face of horror, and for the ancient purpose of creating a memorial to experience.

If criticism of some of the less achieved originals is inappropriate given the circumstances of the poems’ making (one poet/inmate recalled “swapping my bread for scraps of paper”; another worked on “a single, dirty folded piece of paper” which he kept for years until his release from Dachau), then readers may feel more justified in finding fault with some of the translations, which range from the uniformly excellent work of George Szirtes, the British/Hungarian poet and translator, through to other more workmanlike attempts at rendering various European tongues in to English. Szirtes wonderful English quatrain below captures the despair and revulsion of the concentration camp inmate:

………………………..“Yesterday is past and gone
………………………..Tomorrow is a whore
………………………..Bright skies you dreamed beneath
………………………..Are not dreams any more.” (Laszlo Salamon, “Forgetting”)

Unfortunately, some other translators have chosen to render the wide range of rhymes available in certain Slavonic languages into an English which occasionally falls short of the mark. Recent translations of Brodsky (by the English poet Glyn Maxwell) and Milosz (by Robert Haas and Robert Pinsky) suggest that one can render Slavonic languages into English verse and retain their music and mood. Elsewhere, a poet writing in German makes use of a refrain which is translated two or three different ways depending on the context in English, a practice which surely detracts from the phrase’s power as a refrain.

These minor quibbles apart, both the publisher and editors should be congratulated on making this wide range of voices available in English at last. Biographies of each poet are complemented by notes on Dachau itself, a glossary of terms, and suggestions for further reading on the period. Above all else, this volume appears at a time when our world looks once more to be sliding towards a level of barbarous inhumanity last seen in these concentration camps seventy years ago, and thus its significance both as testament and warning to us cannot be underestimated. If the poet/inmate Stanislaw Wygodzki wrote that, “one day, you will enter sleepy bookshops/for a book to read about us…/forget it, you won’t understand anyway”, then he surely could not have imagined that our world would now have the horrors of Raqqa and Mosul to compare with those perpetrated by the Nazis.

Ultimately, through the despair, suffering and horror, the final message of this book is optimistic: whether they perished in the camps (as many of these writers did) or lived on for over sixty years, all seem to believe, somewhere, in the continued existence of humanity and in the importance of poetry as a form of witness – and this in direct opposition to Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted saw that, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” The poet/inmate Nevio Vitelli, who died in 1948 at the age of twenty as a result of an illness contracted in Dachau, provides the poem from which this volume takes its name. The survival and subsequent publication of this poem was only possible because his friend and fellow poet Mirco Giuseppe Camia retained the handwritten manuscript of the poem for more than forty years, believing that, “this poem holds everything: the agony of imprisonment and the elegy of freedom; the memories of earthly love and motherly love…forgiveness…I have saved this poem for over forty years [because] it became for me the essence of life: too many people have created Golgotha for others.”

James W. Wood has written four books of poetry including The Anvil’s Prayer (2013), and a thriller. He is published in the UK, US and Canada, including The TLS, Poetry Review, London Magazine, Fiddlehead, South-West Review, Boston Review and others. Educated at Cambridge, he won a scholarship to Boston University and lives in Toronto.

This review was published in the digital issue 12:1 “Surrender.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

Featured Review: REVELATOR by Ron Silliman. Review by David Swartz.

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David Swartz, poetry, poetry review, review, ron silliman

Revelator by Ron Silliman (Toronto, ON: BookThug, 2013. $17.00, 80 pages). Review by David Swartz.

To read Ron Silliman’s Revelator (2013) is to unleash a 200-mile-an-hour wind through the eye of a needle. Above all, Silliman teaches us how not to stay still, why we ought to rethink our normative views of termination, of the sentence-ing act itself, and of its relationship to reality. Revelator is a living breathing poetry machine, fuelled by the poet’s memory, and a passionate commitment to formal inventiveness; at once natural, whimsical, brilliant, and humane.

Throughout Revelator, Silliman uses five-word lines, a form borrowed from the final section of Louis Zukofsky’s poem, “A.” Clearly, Silliman views Zukofsky as his immediate predecessor and perhaps mentor. His own book reveals a vision of infinite enjambment, and takes a leap of faith in the direction of what the author calls “the new sentence” technique. According to Silliman, “the new sentence is the first prose technique to identify the signifier (even that of the blank space) as the locus of literary meaning.” The main effect of “the new sentence” is that “each sentence plays with the preceding and following sentence.” In Silliman’s hands, this idea is taken to its logical conclusion, allowing the active subject of the poem to remain perpetually in the present moment.

Seemingly composed of one sentence only, Revelator’s multiple caesuras turn words themselves into sentences, which are then juxtaposed with other word sentences, causing surprise. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the words are not intentionally linked up by logic or argument. According to Silliman, the magic is in the “blank space[s], between words or sentences.” Silliman uses caesuras and enjambments to create such spaces, and to help his spiralling song lift itself off the ground. Something different at every turn. It could be the middle of the night or the break of day. Watch out for the narrow tunnels!

As Silliman loosens his hand, words tumble forth in playful combinations. Silliman plays with words in the same way a painter might play with paint and colour. He allows us to see how language does things on its own. The poet’s role is to allow this to happen. To play curator to one’s own voices. Language does not allow for random permutations, the more reckless the abandon, the more meaningful and thoroughly poetic the outcome.

Silliman’s ceaseless stream of words seems silly. He sets us straight at the outset concerning his true intentions: “Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene.” The author’s admission of being “unseemly” is particularly illuminating. Silliman’s “unseemliness” is a way of “seeing,” a way of making a “scene.” It many cases Silliman sounds silly as a result of his mixed-up propositional logic, in conjunction with his run-on sentence from here to nowhere. Ultimately, the poet’s vision merges with an invisible, ostensibly “randomized” presentation that gives way to a close interweaving of logical and illogical elements. Words “torn” from other places become one united thing bound together by “the binding” stitched into the body of the book:

………………………………..each page would blow wild
………………………………..but for the binding stitched
………………………………..deep into the notebook’s spine

The organic nature of the notebook is a reminder that its living essence is the living man.

On another occasion Silliman writes:

………………………………..Eternity in the present only
………………………………..I shut my eyes, inhale,
………………………………..deeply to hear five speakers’
………………………………..simultaneous yatter, squirrels up high

Here the poet alludes to the metaphysical foundation of his poetic vision—to his one and his many—to the multiplicity of voices in his hands, and ultimately, to the five words spoken at the same time as a line of poetry, as a projection of thought before thinking.

………………………………..there’s an art
………………………………..to it intuited before thought
………………………………..thinks—

The slender body of Silliman’s poem adds to the ease with which it can be read and digested. Its lack of traditional subject matter and narrative, along with its exuberant and wide-ranging trajectory of ideas and ramblings, liberates the reader from being forced to follow a simpleminded train of thought. What Silliman has discovered is that the meaning of the train ride is not about ever reaching the final destination, but the experience of movement itself.

Revelator is about the power of awakening the visionary self-conception of “I-amb that Iamb,” echoing God’s declaration of His unnameable name. Only in this case, it is the poem itself declaring its sovereignty and unity over its multiplicity of disjointed voices. The word Revelator is a reference to Saint John the Revelator, the presumed writer of Revelations. The cover photograph depicts Silliman in 1978 reading his poetry aloud on Market Street by the Bank of America in San Francisco. This is the place where street preachers would address the teeming city crowds with prophecies of doom and gloom, salvation and redemption: “Change your ways, O ye people of the marketplace, the Kingdom of God is near!” Like John the Revelator, Silliman points the way to salvation through “the new sentence,” towards an end of our bondage to traditional language narratives, teleologies, and sentence usages.

Silliman’s iambic syllables dream his poem into being. His five word lines, engendered and inspired by the tangential illogic of “the new sentence” reveal a powerful source of raw energy. The magic of the book is that it seems to never end or begin. Afterwards, words merge, our notions of direction, time, and space are suspended. Most of all, ours ideas about the nature of the sentence are transformed.

Echoing Michelangelo, Silliman argues that the poem he is writing already contains itself, and needs only to be voiced:

……………………………………………………………..Stone
………………………………..said to contain its own
………………………………..sculpture thwarts choice—to voice
………………………………..vowels languidly moist lips purse
………………………………..their part—there’s an art
………………………………..to it intuited before thought thinks

In an interview with Silliman, arranged by BookThug, Silliman says: “The poems are telling me where to go rather than the other way around.” Indeed, while Silliman’s poem, like the human experience, “seeks fate through narrative causation,” we find such markers both everywhere and nowhere.

………………………………..What narrative cut asunder, short
………………………………..of a proper end, but
………………………………..ends themselves aren’t proper, fixed
………………………………..image (the camera always lies!)

Having grown into its own, Revelator refuses to go the way of all flesh. A living thing not only defies logic, but all forms of terminative fixation. There is, at least according to Silliman’s poetic philosophy, no end to the living sentence. The way things grow involves constant change. Revelator itself, the author maintains, is only 1 out of 360 sections of a larger unfinished work called “Universe.”

Silliman’s juxtapositions of puns surprise us, without confusing us; we know we are out of time, and that the author is gluing together seemingly random fragments of meaning, combined together to achieve one larger projective meaning.

Poetry is as much about form as it is about subject, e.g., philosophy, love, inspiration, or any number of things. Form not only crystallizes ideas, but also gives birth to thought. In order to reform our thoughts we must liberate them from their self-contented propositional logic, and look for “teleological justification” in what is right in front of us (“Eternity in the present only”).

Revelator is a sculpture, a river, a tonic, an inspiration; an invitation to a fantastical inner world where spectacles of seemingly silly speech reveal the boundless possibilities of poetic language. Ron the Revelator reveals the word made flesh as a living breathing poetry machine. Expect an unexpected turn anywhere. If life is a sentence (however short or long), “scream for // that which is unnameable” and “balk // at any configuration,” but above all else, don’t stop writing!

David Swartz is a Canadian writer, editor and visual artist. He has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and is currently studying painting at the Faculdade de Belas Artes at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Check out his website: http://www.davidswartzart.com/.

This review was published in issue 11:2 “Speed.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Featured Review: THE POETIC EDDA. Translated by Jeramy Dodds. Review by Eleni Zisimatos.

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The Poetic Edda (Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2014, $23.95, 280 pages). Translated by Jeramy Dodds. Review by Eleni Zisimatos.

This translation of Old Norse and Icelandic poems by Jeramy Dodds is an exceptional work of Canadian poetic achievement. The book is divided into three sections: “Mythological Poems,” “Heroic Poems,” and “Poems Not in The Codex Regius,” all of which have their own impetus and flavour. The first section is lighter, more playful; replete with sayings and advice from the old, wise ones. “Heroic Poems” is more involved and deals more with heroes and heroines, deeds, mishaps, and destinies. The last section follows along the lines of “Heroic Poems,” where we encounter strong imagery like: “‘Dan and Damp have costly halls, / more lavish lands than you; / they know how to sail, how to make / a sword bite, run the red from a wound.’”

This book brings to light the background for the Tolkien myths, brings to the forefront Viking legends—the Norse mythology we often don’t realize we are engaged with when we read about Valkyries, the undead, and magic lore. The original Icelandic poems were written by Christian scribes in Iceland around the thirteenth century, which undoubtedly were influenced by the struggle between Pagan and Christian beliefs. Kings and Queens abound throughout the volume, as do witches and magic, and the all-important ash tree, Yggdrasil. The text jumps to attention with passages like:

………………………….‘His teeth flash when he sees
………………………….his sword, or when he eyes Bodvild’s
………………………….ring. His stare is as sharp as a shiny
………………………….serpent’s. I say slice his sinews
………………………….and set him near Saevarstadir.’

There are numerous translations such as this one throughout the three sections—all lending freedom to the imagination and bringing us back in time to our own imagined mythology of these wild people.

If I was pressed to find a weakness in the book, I would say that there is sometimes (not often) a break between high and low language. For instance, a passage such as: “Whoever can rear heirs as astonishing / As those Gjuki sired would be happy. / Their courage will live on in every land / wherever people hear it,” is largely formal and contrasts with the more colloquial “‘Shut up, Freyja, I know you / all too well, you’re not flawless—you’ve been the bitch of every / Elf and Aesir on the benches here.’” But to be fair, there are differences in the style of the two texts (located in two different sections), and I could only judge properly if I read the poems in the original Icelandic.

I was also somewhat bothered by the opening epigraph that was not translated (I am a great fan of epigraphs). To make up for this minor oversight, Jeramy Dodds included an exhaustive and impressive “Annotated Index of Names” at the end of the book, an undertaking which I know from experience can drive a writer to distraction.

The Poetic Edda is a brilliant book—playful and imaginative. The language flows crisply and effortlessly in the hands of Dodds, and is accessible to both young and old readers. This translation is akin to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, and is a notable addition to Canadian writing and translation.

Eleni Zisimatos is co-Editor-in-Chief of Vallum Magazine. She lives in Montreal.

This review was published in issue 12:1 “Surrender.” To see more from this issue, please visit Vallum‘s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes