Book Review #36: A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart

A very fine novel by one of Canada's master fiction writers. In the typical Urquhart mold, this is a novel about the past, the land and art, subjects found in many of her previous novels. A young artist, Jerome, is alone on Timber Island to take photos of temporary art creations, or “absences”, he has dug in the snow. While there, he finds the body of Andrew Woodman, an Alzheimer’s sufferer, frozen in the ice of the river. Later, an older woman, Sylvia, searches out Jerome and his girlfriend in Toronto. Slightly autistic, she has fled her doctor husband in rural eastern Ontario because she wants to talk to Jerome about Andrew, her lover. The three sections of the book are intelligently constructed, with the two contemporary sections framing the central section, which recounts the history of the Woodman family, 19th century shipbuilders and hotelkeepers on Lake Ontario. Urquhart’s writing is extremely resonant and always echoes her larger themes: “How wonderful the snow was; every change of direction, each whim, even the compulsion of hunger was marked on its surface, like memory, for a brief season.” Her writing is also highly cerebral – little happens in this novel but there is an enormous quantity of thoughtful reflection. The depiction of the Woodman past, with its near-mythical characters and its grand hotel invaded by sand, is so deeply realized that the present feels amorphous in contrast, its characters infused with the ambiguity of modernism. In the end, however, Urquhart shows how this makes perfect sense for, with profound subtlety, she raises a startling question: In the face of shocking change—in landscapes, in memories that fade to nothing, even in the complete dissolution of the human personality in Alzheimer’s—what can still be called reality? Urquhart is a subtle master at work.

Book Review #35 : Airstream Land Yacht by Ken Babstock

A fine Canadian poet with a great ear. The Airstream Land Yacht is a brand of American motorhome as well as Ken Babstock’s third collection of poetry, shortlisted for the 2006 Governor General's Award. In this vehicle, Meaning and Sense take a back seat while Sound drives. Babstock doesn’t so much mean as sing, packing each poem with a flurry of sonorous details. At times, his images can be utterly exact and startling (“clutching tongs that pincer-gripped a heat-split wiener”), or surreal and humorous, as in this reference to autumn: “…the valley’s trees pulled their embarrassing sports coats on.” The book is divided into four parts: Air, Stream, Land and Yacht. Too often the author whips up an impenetrably dense froth of language; at other times, when he is not quite so intent on revealing the blur inside his head, he can conjure a poem that whispers down and settles inside the reader like a fine, even snowfall, as in ‘The Tall Ships Docked in Kiel Harbour’. There’s little doubt that no one else in Canadian poetry today (except perhaps, George Elliot Clark) has quite the Babstock ear, as he sets the reader whirling with his complex rhythms and rhymes that are never simple but always refreshingly devious: “we finished early to a round / of applause from a bank of thundercloud.”

Book Review #34: Lambsquarters by Barbara McLean

An enjoyable visit to the country and the quiet ways and objects of country life. Subtitled 'Scenes from a Handmade Life', this back-to-the-land memoir is constructed of numerous short sections, many of which are meditations on familiar country things: a leaning barn, a crowbar, a snapping turtle, a towering beech tree, a corduroy road. But the book comes fully alive when McLean recounts her many experiences raising sheep. When the author and her physician husband, Thomas, first came to Grey County in southern Ontario, they gave their farm the singularly appropriate name, Lambsquarters, the name of a local edible weed. The tales of delivering, raising, shearing and caring for sheep and lambs have the scent of authenticity – the reader can smell wet wool and lanolin in the air of the old barn. McLean is good with a simile: a lamb born dead is “neatly contained in a pellucid envelope, as beautifully wrapped as a Japanese present”; half-grown chicks are watched by barn cats “following their moves like tennis fans.” The broader considerations of life in the country are all present (weather, wildlife, social gatherings and so on) but this book excels in its homey, almost invisible details, for example, the way moisture quickly evaporates from a freshly laid egg. At times the book feels somewhat overwritten with too many references to the gods and goddesses of classical myth, and McLean fails to make the few characters outside her own family come alive. Nevertheless, for its quiet reflections on country ways, this is a most enjoyable read.

Book Review #33: How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

I enjoy Jonathan Franzen's essays, which can address any number of wide-ranging subjects, but I can't bear his novels. I had to stop reading The Corrections after about 100+ pages. He seems to despise his own characters. Many of these fourteen essays, by the author of the 2001 novel, The Corrections, first appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere. Franzen is smart and brash, the kind of person you want as your social critic but not as a brother-in-law. A long, much-discussed essay on the American novel, titled ‘Why Bother?’, is included, as well as essays on privacy obsession, the U.S. post office, New York City, big tobacco and new prisons. At his best, as in ‘My Father’s Brain’, on his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, (a piece reminiscent of the masterly John McPhee), Franzen can make the ordinary world utterly riveting. At times, however, it can be difficult to discern where Franzen stands on any particular subject as he often seems to take both sides of an argument. Valid attempts to reflect ambiguity sometimes lead to obfuscation, especially in his essays on privacy and tobacco, although his belief that small town America of years gone by offered the individual little privacy certainly rings true. Franzen can write with panache, as in this comment after he watched, without headphones, a TV show during a flight: “(It) became an expose of the hydraulics of insincere smiles.” A few of the shorter pieces here appear to be filler. But Franzen shines brightest when he gets edgy and a little angry, as in ‘The Reader in Exile’: “Instead of Manassas battlefield, a historical theme park. Instead of organizing narratives, a map of the world as complex as the world itself. Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.”

Book Review #32: House Inside the Waves by Richard Taylor

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.

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.

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.