| Quartet 2002 shows Alberta poetry wells run deep
Working at the frontier, exploring, taking risks: these are the kind of gutsy images Alberta-boosters like to attach to businesses like oil and gas. But it's poets and poetry publishers who should really be seen in these terms.
The Alberta poetry "patch" is a rich one, but it still takes a big investment of imagination and courage to get the books written, published and in the pipeline to readers. Calgary publisher Frontenac House takes those risks every year with a foursome of new poetry books. So far, publisher Rose Scollard's instincts are paying off. Quartet 2001 drew a Writer's Guild of Alberta nomination for Arran Fisher's Static Mantis, in the best poetry book category. And this year Weyman Chan, who makes up one-fourth of Quartet 2002, was nominated for a National Magazine Award for work published in B.C.'s Capilano Review.
Chan's book, Before a Blue Sky Moon, reveals a poet who specializes in evoking the ungraspable. Whether it's the "you" addressed in many of the poems, or even "the world," Chan often writes with longing of things just out of reach. Other poems speak of domestic anger and fear, or of an ambivalent heritage of both conflict and community. "See my mouth?" he writes: "I'm telling you/ with blood/ whose wires always lead/ back to the heart."
The Calgary playgrounds of Chan's memory contain children "who aren't Chinese/ but aren't separate either." Yvonne Trainer's playgrounds were on the Alberta prairie, south of Manyberries. Her book, Tom Three Persons, offers a "multimedia poetry sequence" (her term) or a "documentary poem" (Dennis Cooley's term). In poems, photographs, letters and newspaper clippings, Trainer re-imagines a rodeo rider from the Blood Reserve who became champion at the first Calgary Stampede in 1912. Laconic and reflective, Trainer's writing seems to rein in a lyricism that bursts through in poems like "The Mind I The Place."
Red Deer poet Lesley Greentree has the laconic diction down pat, too. Her work in Guys Named Bill presents itself as plain-spoken and observational. Greentree can catch a mood, such as simmering anger in the poem "A New Bed," while keeping an ironic distance. She has an appealing, sometimes self-mocking voice, and a characteristic form – many of the poems cover about one-half to two-thirds of the page. Apparently modest and self-contained, they also bite – like reality, in the poem "Whyte Avenue," where a warm summer daydream about an intriguing stranger goes sour.
Calgary poet and playwright Nancy Jo Cullen can also speak plainly, but the term "plain-spoken" doesn't really apply to her stylistic adventures with juxtapositions, footnotes and techniques ranging from short lyrics to prose poems in her book, Science Fiction Saint. There's a questing and multidimensional mind at work as the poems explore a real mix of subjects, from surviving girlhood to working in the small-town tourism industry to seduction.
Chan, Cullen, Greentree and Trainer hint at the diversity that lurks among the writers at work just down the street or highway from where you live. Without small publishers like Frontenac to take a chance on them, you wouldn't be reading about them now, or reading their work in years to come – so keep your eye on these annual quartets of authors. |
