A fine memoir that gives a fascinating look into life down under with lots of sun and surf, big waves and big sharks.
A year living on the surfer’s paradise coast of Australia inspired this memoir in praise of all things romantic: family, writers addicted to adventure, and above all, the ten-story wave. Taylor, a long-distance swimmer and long-time surfer, offers us a collage of memories from the near and distant past. With his two daughters and his wife, who was on a teacher exchange from snowy Ottawa, the family dives with commendable passion into their new life in a land where summer never ends.
As well as offering his love of the ocean (“Bugga the shaks,” an Aussie friend tells him), Taylor muses on his role as a dedicated househusband. He revisits the lives of numerous writers who have left home to find the world: Gauguin, Byron, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Miller, Kerouac and others. He also introduces us to ill-fated friends and family, exhibiting a sense of nostalgia for the sixties that is so unabashed and good-hearted that it’s refreshing. We also meet the local Australians and the expats peopling the gorgeous east coast, many an eccentric among them. The writing is energetic and fluid – it rolls along like the swells and breakers of Australia’s Byron Bay, at times capturing unforgettable scenes, such as the image of a sea eagle diving into the waves and coming out “gripping the fish in its talons, the fish still swimming fifty yards in the sky.” Altogether as delightful and refreshing as a dip in the ocean, whether you own a surfboard or not.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
Book Review #31: Director’s Cut by David Solway
Another entry in the ever-expanding literature of complaint.
This critique of contemporary poetry is another installment in a growing subgenre of Canadian publishing: the literature of complaint. Other books in this realm have come recently from John Metcalf and others. The persistent theme, voiced again here, is that Canadian writing (poetry, in this instance) is not what it could be (when was it ever?) and the wrong people are getting all the recognition. Solway’s screed is delivered in a state of high dudgeon – complete with the overuse of italics for emphasis. Solway, a Montreal poet, obviously has a tremendous background in classical literature, reads voraciously and displays a superabundant vocabulary. The energy of his persistent choler can actually be engaging, at times, in the ‘highway accident’ sense of wanting to see who will be run over next. His clarion call for a return to technical form in poetry (rhyme and meter, essentially) means a host of poets (and novelists) belong on the dung heap: Al Purdy, John Ashbery, Anne Michaels, Lorna Crozier, Don McKay, Yann Martel, George Elliott Clarke, etc. Atwood, Ondaatje and Anne Carson are “a drone, an entrepeneur and a cipher respectively.”
He reserves his highest praise for a small number of past and present poets, almost all from Montreal: Louis Dudek, Milton Acorn, Irving Layton, Peter Van Toorn, Eric Ormsby, etc. Typical of any harangue, Solway mistakes his mere opinions for truths. While he has a few interesting points to discuss, the book is more diatribe than dialogue. In the end, this special plea for more recognition for the poets of Solway’s coterie is an instance of the squeaky wheel just wanting to get greased.
This critique of contemporary poetry is another installment in a growing subgenre of Canadian publishing: the literature of complaint. Other books in this realm have come recently from John Metcalf and others. The persistent theme, voiced again here, is that Canadian writing (poetry, in this instance) is not what it could be (when was it ever?) and the wrong people are getting all the recognition. Solway’s screed is delivered in a state of high dudgeon – complete with the overuse of italics for emphasis. Solway, a Montreal poet, obviously has a tremendous background in classical literature, reads voraciously and displays a superabundant vocabulary. The energy of his persistent choler can actually be engaging, at times, in the ‘highway accident’ sense of wanting to see who will be run over next. His clarion call for a return to technical form in poetry (rhyme and meter, essentially) means a host of poets (and novelists) belong on the dung heap: Al Purdy, John Ashbery, Anne Michaels, Lorna Crozier, Don McKay, Yann Martel, George Elliott Clarke, etc. Atwood, Ondaatje and Anne Carson are “a drone, an entrepeneur and a cipher respectively.”
He reserves his highest praise for a small number of past and present poets, almost all from Montreal: Louis Dudek, Milton Acorn, Irving Layton, Peter Van Toorn, Eric Ormsby, etc. Typical of any harangue, Solway mistakes his mere opinions for truths. While he has a few interesting points to discuss, the book is more diatribe than dialogue. In the end, this special plea for more recognition for the poets of Solway’s coterie is an instance of the squeaky wheel just wanting to get greased.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Three (more) Short Essays from Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (now available at your local or online bookstore)
Chair
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the worth of a word is limited only by the imagination. Take the word ‘chair’ for instance.
When I say ‘chair’ you might imagine a fine cherry wood seat in an elegant dining room, the dirty white plastic chairs in the back yard, a king’s throne, a slab of stone. The possibilities are legion. You might think of the chair you found your aunt slumped in the night she died, patterned with faded roses. You might think of a chair on the Titanic, a chair at the United Nations, an electric chair, your child’s first wooden seat. When you hear the word ‘chair’, you might think of the same word in Italian, French, Serbian, Urdu, Mandarin. You might think of the history of chairs, the construction of chairs, chairs as art, as objects to throw, to prop against a door, to stand on when changing a light bulb or reaching into a high cupboard for dusty muffin tins. The picture of a chair is certainly more restricted than the word ‘chair’, which, in its generic form, leaves almost everything open to the imagination.
Gap
Horse moves, slightest of pauses, wagon moves. There is a gap between outbreath and inbreath, between the whippoorwill drawing in its breath and the start of the song; a gap when the pianist has already begun the concerto but no music has yet reached our ears; the gap between seeing lightning in the sky and the word ‘lightning’ appearing in the mind.
That moment of groundless indecision when you don’t know if it’s a star or a shooting star.
Evanescence
It’s intriguing that poetry, that most evanescent of arts, lasts the longest of all cultural artifacts, while architecture, which one would expect to persist as long as the stones of the hills, tends to disappear relatively quickly from the face of the earth.
Thousands of poems of ancient China still exist, can be read today and, what is more astonishing, they can be understood. The poems that deal with the unchanging yet constantly changing world of nature are still extremely accessible, as opposed to those that reference the political world of their time. The four seasons still cycle around today as they did then, maples sprout leaves in the spring, the snow continues to fall each winter and catch in the boughs of the pines, and the mountains mentioned in ancient Chinese poems, while slightly more worn, are still recognizable.
Little remains today, however, of the architecture of ancient China (or any other ancient culture, for that matter, with the exception of enigmatic Egypt). What does remain are those edifices that have been brought low, literally: burial mounds and underground chambers.
Entire cities with their impregnable palaces have disappeared into dust and mist while a simple poem about the moon continues to shine.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the worth of a word is limited only by the imagination. Take the word ‘chair’ for instance.
When I say ‘chair’ you might imagine a fine cherry wood seat in an elegant dining room, the dirty white plastic chairs in the back yard, a king’s throne, a slab of stone. The possibilities are legion. You might think of the chair you found your aunt slumped in the night she died, patterned with faded roses. You might think of a chair on the Titanic, a chair at the United Nations, an electric chair, your child’s first wooden seat. When you hear the word ‘chair’, you might think of the same word in Italian, French, Serbian, Urdu, Mandarin. You might think of the history of chairs, the construction of chairs, chairs as art, as objects to throw, to prop against a door, to stand on when changing a light bulb or reaching into a high cupboard for dusty muffin tins. The picture of a chair is certainly more restricted than the word ‘chair’, which, in its generic form, leaves almost everything open to the imagination.
Gap
Horse moves, slightest of pauses, wagon moves. There is a gap between outbreath and inbreath, between the whippoorwill drawing in its breath and the start of the song; a gap when the pianist has already begun the concerto but no music has yet reached our ears; the gap between seeing lightning in the sky and the word ‘lightning’ appearing in the mind.
That moment of groundless indecision when you don’t know if it’s a star or a shooting star.
Evanescence
It’s intriguing that poetry, that most evanescent of arts, lasts the longest of all cultural artifacts, while architecture, which one would expect to persist as long as the stones of the hills, tends to disappear relatively quickly from the face of the earth.
Thousands of poems of ancient China still exist, can be read today and, what is more astonishing, they can be understood. The poems that deal with the unchanging yet constantly changing world of nature are still extremely accessible, as opposed to those that reference the political world of their time. The four seasons still cycle around today as they did then, maples sprout leaves in the spring, the snow continues to fall each winter and catch in the boughs of the pines, and the mountains mentioned in ancient Chinese poems, while slightly more worn, are still recognizable.
Little remains today, however, of the architecture of ancient China (or any other ancient culture, for that matter, with the exception of enigmatic Egypt). What does remain are those edifices that have been brought low, literally: burial mounds and underground chambers.
Entire cities with their impregnable palaces have disappeared into dust and mist while a simple poem about the moon continues to shine.
Book Review #30: Man Descending by Guy Vanderhaeghe
A classic collection of Canadian short stories by one of Canada's best writers.
First published in 1982, Man Descending, a collection of twelve finely crafted short stories set mostly on the Canadian prairies, won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Vanderhaeghe won the award again in 1996 for his novel, The Englishman’s Boy.
Showing astonishing range, Vanderhaeghe is equally adept at taking on the voice of an eleven-year-old boy stuck on a dusty farm or an unemployed husband whose marriage, like his scotch, is on the rocks (the ‘descending man’ of the title). His characters – man, woman or child – are wholly believable and achingly human. There are no superheroes here – just real human beings with all their foibles and failings, their charms and weaknesses.
He is particularly skilled at describing his creations: the grandmother with a “vinegary voice”; the father who was a “desolate, lanky, drooping weed of a man”; the child who is “loose-jointed” and “water-boned” with boredom; the husband with the “I’m-a-harmless-idiot-don’t-hit-me smile”.
In “Going to Russia”, a doctor interviews a lunatic who is telling the story. As in the other stories, the dialogue flows with the patterns and ripples of genuine speech caught and caged alive and still breathing. With wonderful twists and resonance, the two characters, in discussing a series of letters are actually tracing the ways in which Art imitates Life (and vice versa).
These are rich, satisfying stories with a touch of wry humour. Despite their layers of meaning and unspoken depth that can bear frequent rereadings, they travel lightly. They are like the prairies, in fact: allowing a clear view all the way to the horizon but revealing intriguing detail on closer inspection.
First published in 1982, Man Descending, a collection of twelve finely crafted short stories set mostly on the Canadian prairies, won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Vanderhaeghe won the award again in 1996 for his novel, The Englishman’s Boy.
Showing astonishing range, Vanderhaeghe is equally adept at taking on the voice of an eleven-year-old boy stuck on a dusty farm or an unemployed husband whose marriage, like his scotch, is on the rocks (the ‘descending man’ of the title). His characters – man, woman or child – are wholly believable and achingly human. There are no superheroes here – just real human beings with all their foibles and failings, their charms and weaknesses.
He is particularly skilled at describing his creations: the grandmother with a “vinegary voice”; the father who was a “desolate, lanky, drooping weed of a man”; the child who is “loose-jointed” and “water-boned” with boredom; the husband with the “I’m-a-harmless-idiot-don’t-hit-me smile”.
In “Going to Russia”, a doctor interviews a lunatic who is telling the story. As in the other stories, the dialogue flows with the patterns and ripples of genuine speech caught and caged alive and still breathing. With wonderful twists and resonance, the two characters, in discussing a series of letters are actually tracing the ways in which Art imitates Life (and vice versa).
These are rich, satisfying stories with a touch of wry humour. Despite their layers of meaning and unspoken depth that can bear frequent rereadings, they travel lightly. They are like the prairies, in fact: allowing a clear view all the way to the horizon but revealing intriguing detail on closer inspection.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Book Review #29: After Battersea Park by Jonathan Bennett
An extremely funny, well-wrought and highly readable first novel from a Canadian author originally from 'down under'.
Jonathan Bennett’s first novel covers a lot of ground in fewer than two hundred pages. While most of the action takes place in Sydney, Australia, and Toronto, this whirlwind tour of long-separated twins also lands in Hawaii, London, Scotland, Madrid and Mallorca.
Curt, an Australian jazz musician, and William, a Canadian visual artist, were four-year-old twins driven in different directions when their drug-addict father separated from their mother. She soon found she could not feed the children and had to give them up. At age twenty-seven, they learn of each other’s existence and begin a journey that draws them together from different ends of the world.
Bennett has a deft, suggestive touch: “Curt’s aunt, Jilly, found her slumped in her chair. Not late for tennis but dead.” He also has a flair for writing subtle erotic scenes, as in this picnic enjoyed by William and his much older lover: “Spring slid into summer that quiet afternoon, in full view of the city.”
The high points of After Battersea Park are the well-wrought scenes that sparkle with wry humor and wit. He has the ability to place the reader right on the spot: with a crowd of Mallorcans trying to extract a precious cigarette lighter from a storm-water drain (Curt ends by lighting a cigarette and draws a fine round of applause); or hiding in a bedroom closet with William while a couple whose house he has secretly entered make love not ten feet away.
A neatly constructed plot, engaging three-dimensional characters and a touch of devil-may-care impudence make this novel a delight to read.
Jonathan Bennett’s first novel covers a lot of ground in fewer than two hundred pages. While most of the action takes place in Sydney, Australia, and Toronto, this whirlwind tour of long-separated twins also lands in Hawaii, London, Scotland, Madrid and Mallorca.
Curt, an Australian jazz musician, and William, a Canadian visual artist, were four-year-old twins driven in different directions when their drug-addict father separated from their mother. She soon found she could not feed the children and had to give them up. At age twenty-seven, they learn of each other’s existence and begin a journey that draws them together from different ends of the world.
Bennett has a deft, suggestive touch: “Curt’s aunt, Jilly, found her slumped in her chair. Not late for tennis but dead.” He also has a flair for writing subtle erotic scenes, as in this picnic enjoyed by William and his much older lover: “Spring slid into summer that quiet afternoon, in full view of the city.”
The high points of After Battersea Park are the well-wrought scenes that sparkle with wry humor and wit. He has the ability to place the reader right on the spot: with a crowd of Mallorcans trying to extract a precious cigarette lighter from a storm-water drain (Curt ends by lighting a cigarette and draws a fine round of applause); or hiding in a bedroom closet with William while a couple whose house he has secretly entered make love not ten feet away.
A neatly constructed plot, engaging three-dimensional characters and a touch of devil-may-care impudence make this novel a delight to read.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Book Review #28: A Fool and Forty Acres by Geoff Heinricks
Thinking of starting your own vineyard? Read this engaging account first, by a former journalist who took the plunge.
Subtitled “Conjuring a Vineyard Three Thousand Miles from Burgundy”, this is a delightful account of the author’s experiences growing wine grapes in Prince Edward County of Ontario. The county offers a limestone-based soil typical of certain areas of France, ideal for growing the Pinot Noir grape, which is used to make red wine. Also, the presence of Lake Ontario nearby ensures less severe winters. Heinricks, a Toronto journalist, decided to move to Prince Edward County with his family after realizing vineyard land in the Niagara region had grown too expensive. The author is a bit of a fanatic (the good sort), willing to throw his entire being into his pet project, for example, using a pick and shovel to dig holes in the shallow limestone soil and grafting thousands of rootstock himself for planting.
Heinricks writes well and gives the reader a strong taste of his sense of excitement, including a fair bit of history on the area. He starts each chapter with a quote from local poet Al Purdy (and includes several visits with Purdy). Essentially, however, this is a tale of one’s man’s battle against the elements for love of the grape. It’s all about work and weather: “…a brief span of three or more days can combine the weather of all four seasons.” The obstacles to success are legion: insects, diseases such as phylloxera, pests including voles and robins, and the wind-borne insecticide of his neighbors drifting into his vineyard. But in the end, the reader gets the feeling Heinricks will succeed and has thoroughly enjoyed the struggle.
Subtitled “Conjuring a Vineyard Three Thousand Miles from Burgundy”, this is a delightful account of the author’s experiences growing wine grapes in Prince Edward County of Ontario. The county offers a limestone-based soil typical of certain areas of France, ideal for growing the Pinot Noir grape, which is used to make red wine. Also, the presence of Lake Ontario nearby ensures less severe winters. Heinricks, a Toronto journalist, decided to move to Prince Edward County with his family after realizing vineyard land in the Niagara region had grown too expensive. The author is a bit of a fanatic (the good sort), willing to throw his entire being into his pet project, for example, using a pick and shovel to dig holes in the shallow limestone soil and grafting thousands of rootstock himself for planting.
Heinricks writes well and gives the reader a strong taste of his sense of excitement, including a fair bit of history on the area. He starts each chapter with a quote from local poet Al Purdy (and includes several visits with Purdy). Essentially, however, this is a tale of one’s man’s battle against the elements for love of the grape. It’s all about work and weather: “…a brief span of three or more days can combine the weather of all four seasons.” The obstacles to success are legion: insects, diseases such as phylloxera, pests including voles and robins, and the wind-borne insecticide of his neighbors drifting into his vineyard. But in the end, the reader gets the feeling Heinricks will succeed and has thoroughly enjoyed the struggle.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Book Review #27: Civil Elegies and Other Poems by Dennis Lee
A classic collection of poetry by one of Canada's finest poets.
Dennis Lee, one of Canada’s most widely acclaimed poets, received the Governor General’s Award for Civil Elegies in 1972. Lee is perhaps best known for his zany poetry for children, although his adult work exhibits the craft and intelligence of a top-flight poet.
The collection is divided into two parts: ‘Coming Back’, sixteen poems that touch on relationships and language; and ‘Civil Elegies’, a tightly knit series of nine longer poems that explore the meaning of Canada.
For Lee, poetry is about paying attention to the world around him: “Outside, the rasp of a snow-shovel / grates in the dark. / Lovely / sound, I hang onto it.”
But every moment brings the possibility of profound questions in the midst of ordinary life: “Forty-five years, and / still the point eludes him whenever he stops to think.”
In the second half of the book, he turns outward to society, discovering he is, among other things, a citizen. He seems to be writing under the pressure of a moral imperative, internally driven to penetrate what Canada was, is and could be. Humanity is represented by the downtown crowds he observes in the vast square in front of Toronto’s city hall.
The ‘Civil Elegies’ poems are also a struggle with emptiness and meaning, as much about the human condition as the Canadian condition. In their raw questioning, in their naked revelations of a soul trying impossibly to fix its place in the world, the poems offer both great solace and great pain.
Dennis Lee, one of Canada’s most widely acclaimed poets, received the Governor General’s Award for Civil Elegies in 1972. Lee is perhaps best known for his zany poetry for children, although his adult work exhibits the craft and intelligence of a top-flight poet.
The collection is divided into two parts: ‘Coming Back’, sixteen poems that touch on relationships and language; and ‘Civil Elegies’, a tightly knit series of nine longer poems that explore the meaning of Canada.
For Lee, poetry is about paying attention to the world around him: “Outside, the rasp of a snow-shovel / grates in the dark. / Lovely / sound, I hang onto it.”
But every moment brings the possibility of profound questions in the midst of ordinary life: “Forty-five years, and / still the point eludes him whenever he stops to think.”
In the second half of the book, he turns outward to society, discovering he is, among other things, a citizen. He seems to be writing under the pressure of a moral imperative, internally driven to penetrate what Canada was, is and could be. Humanity is represented by the downtown crowds he observes in the vast square in front of Toronto’s city hall.
The ‘Civil Elegies’ poems are also a struggle with emptiness and meaning, as much about the human condition as the Canadian condition. In their raw questioning, in their naked revelations of a soul trying impossibly to fix its place in the world, the poems offer both great solace and great pain.
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