Condensation

• The theme of Open Letter, twelfth series, no. 4 (Fall 2004), guest-edited by derek beaulieu & Jason Christie, is the Canadian small press. At only 100 pages or so & with many notable presses left out it’s a bit thin, but still worthwhile if you’re a fan of literary microhistory & the pleasures of xerox & hot-metal type. Favourites: a dialogue between Jay MillAr and Daniel f. Bradley & Kyle Schlesinger’s piece on Slug Press. $8 (three-issue sub $21); write: 102 Oak St., Strathroy, ON, N7G 3K3.

• Redell Olsen’s Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 109pp, £7.50, 1-874400-29-6) contains four sequences: “Corrupted by Showgirls” and “The Minimaus Poems” (centred on the English Gloucester, parodying/reworking Maximus) are fitfully interesting; “Spill-Kit” offers spindly columns of linguistic debris; while “Era of Heroes / Heroes of Error” is hamfisted satire – or maybe just verbal wallpaper?

• Glenn Storhaug’s long poem For Silver See Blue (West House/Five Seasons, 64pp, £7.95, 1-904052-09-6/0-947960-15-5) takes its title from the ancient Minoan practice of using unpolished silver for blue pigment, & elaborates this into a witty transhistorical seafaring meditation, a lyric/epic of the materials of art & writing. It’s a poem strikingly parallelling current trends towards popular microhistory (histories of tea, salt, cod, tobacco – not to mention Victoria Finlay’s recent Color: A Natural History of the Palette), but there’s also a condensed beauty to the writing which reminds you it was Storhaug who typeset Richard Caddel’s last books: “Marina sings Pericles out of silence, / shocks him from perpetual present / curled night and day like a cat on the deck / into memory of all the words required: / transponders hum like wind in the rigging.” § In Caddel’s posthumously published Writing in the Dark (West House, 61pp, £8.95, 1-904052-12-6) colour is again important: a palette often reduced to nighttime lights and darks, but putting monochrome in the service of a rich, death-haunted synaesthesia: “The deep throb of cello. Water / becomes us all, our / starry selves. . . . 43% is pure / belief, clarinets below the / surface of our breathing – in, and out. Memory will // drop from us but never / completely. Snuff this / dark varnish liquid, life. We / love it. Let it go.” Two 9/11-releated sequences don’t quite come off, but the rest is superb. Reading these poems, I remembered the dictum of Bunting’s gravestone carver: “Take a chisel to write.” Rest in peace, Ric.

• Steve Benson has published infrequently since the 1980s, so the appearance of Open Clothes (Atelos, 130pp, $12.95 US, 1-891190-21-0) is something of an event. As with Mac Low, much of the pleasure is in Benson’s openness about the how-it’s-done: at the centre of Open Clothes is a project unpacked with the meticulousness of a DVD-with-extras: a simple idea (poems made out of linked questions) whose development you can trace across an author’s note, 40-odd notebook entries testing it out, three prose pieces, transcriptions of two performances, and a q&a after one of the performances. There are all kinds of questions here – funny, uncertain, philosophical, mundane, prying, aggressive, rhetorical . . . – but the effect here is closest to the uncanny: as my seven-year-old daughter asked when I read it aloud, “Does that book know what we’re thinking?”

• Naomi K. Long’s Radiant Field (Tinfish, 36pp, $9 US) is a prose narrative of sorts: an unnamed female speaker peregrinates through a desolate (South American?) landscape, yielding for a time to a wary relationship with a troubled Indian man but then going on her way – though such summary does little justice to the delicacy of the writing. As usual with Tinfish the book design is as striking as the text: each paragraph hovers above an inky smudge, like the sky over a desert horizon.

• Two from Salt: A blurb for Robert Sheppard’s Tin Pan Arcadia (136pp, £9.99, 1-876857-89-7) promises “pure pleasure,” but like much of his Twentieth Century Blues project this is pretty bleak and disturbing stuff. In his more programmatic moments Sheppard hints at a last-ditch utopianism: “a refusal to mean this world.” But the effect is closer to dystopia: history as a war zone presided over by a succession of dictators from Stalin to Thatcher, in fulfillment of 1984’s venomous prophecy: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” There’s a similarly dark take on interpersonal & sexual relations – as if each part of the human body were either a weapon or a weak point in one’s armour. Sometimes the persistent luridness & grimness come to seem something of an end in themselves, but the book also includes a few of 20CB’s better poems, notably a prose-piece i.m. William Burroughs & the weirdly scrambled “Dialogues.” § If Storhaug is microhistory, John Matthias’s New Selected Poems (387pp, £17.99, 1-844710-40-8) is history of a more recognizable type, brimming with (sometimes cluttered with) names, dates, places, biographies, linguistic curios, quotations & allusions to histories familiar & unfamiliar – touchstones that sometimes become playful tonguetwisters: “In Sancellemoz they read the Philokalia while / in the rue St. Honoré his moderato alla breve coughed / not once for Nicodemus on Mount Athos or / Makarius of Corinth even if the resurrection were Docetic / and the tonic a familiar C” (opening of a poem on Stravinsky). What links these otherwise diverse poems is an emphasis is on the interaction of history, biography & landscape, especially through travel, pilgrimage & exile.

• The 40 poems of Peter Dent’s Adversaria (Stride, 48pp, £5.95, 1-900152-97-5) are 12-line rectangles meticulously aerated by stanza breaks & cesuras, like perfectly balanced abstract paintings, but the contents are more like tree structures: thoughts and images intertwining, branching off, self-interrupting. The title means “commonplace book” but the poems aren’t cumulative jottings: they work by both accretion and deletion within limited storage-space. Human short-term memory only holds seven items, I’m told, & in these poems it’s as if the author has to decide as each new impulse arises whether to hold onto it (& thus make a decision about which other element to get rid of) or leave it behind. Dent’s been writing & publishing since the 1960s (he runs Interim Press, which has published small but useful collections of writing on John Riley & George Oppen), without attracting much critical attention: Adversaria is an excellent place to sample his work (as is his other Stride book, Unrestricted Moment). He also has a new book out with Shearsman, which I’ve not yet seen.

• Catherine Wagner’s Macular Hole (Fence, 64pp, $12 US, 0-9740909-1-3) often put me in mind not so much of her last book Miss America (also from Fence) as Philip Jenks’s On the Cave You Live In – for its insistent, sometimes violent intimations of the divine combined with a sense of how permeable, erasable & extensible the (physical & mental) boundaries of the self are: “I’m total I’m all I’m absorbed in this meatcake . . . Like fingers of a hand we all act as one.” The “self” here is that of a mother, taking the outside in & then turning itself inside out (a “purse,” a “full skin flask,” a “bag,” a mailbox) during sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding. Ultimately the book seems to be trying to think about “need” in all its shapes and forms (spiritual, sexual, emotional, animal, economic – even God & the baby “buy” & “sell” & “own”).

• Tom Leonard’s Access to the Silence (Etruscan, 136pp, £9.50, 1-901538-47-8, www.e-truscan.co.uk) is a collection of poetry & visuals (the subtitle is “Poems and Posters 1984–2004”), without the prose polemics & essays that were a major element of Intimate Voices & Reports from the Present. A “proem” here begins “who are we . . .” & while the sentence continues onwards, that three-word question is as good a summary of the book as any: its polemics zero in on cant uses of the collective pronoun (“We have decided to make Scotland secure. / This is strategically essential.”; “By ‘we’ they pretended to mean the whole human race. . . .”), while Leonard instead tries to write “for those of us who have to live outside the narrative.” In the finest sequence here, “nora’s place,” Leonard gives Nora these words: “I’m just a human being / totally representative / as anyone is / outside the self // (and in it)” – generalizing “we” to all of humanity, then splitting off the “self,” then bringing the two together again. As “proem” concludes: “together // or separate in our own being / but never wholly separate, only a part / of the time we live in, and with others occupy.”

Nate Dorward

Published in The Gig 18