| Book Reviews
OPTICS
by Bob Stallworthy
Frontenac House, 75 pp.
WEAVE
by Lisa Pasold
Frontenac House, 85 pp.
ANGEL BLOOD: THE TESS POEMS
by Kevin Irie
Frontenac House, 74 pp.
DEATH DAY ERECTION
by J. Fisher
Frontenac House, 86 pp.
Every year since 2001, Calgary publisher Frontenac House has released the Quartet series, featuring four new books of Canadian poetry. This year’s foursome includes J. Fisher’s Death Day Erection, Kevin Irie’s Angel Blood: The Tess Poems, Lisa Pasold’s Weave and Calgary poet Bob Stallworthy’s Optics.
Stallworthy’s book, with poems such as "Cancer Flowers," "Shelf Life" and "Flawed Glass," uses metaphors to tie everything nicely and sadly together. Optics explores what is reflected through the glass of a window. In his title poem, he writes that "somewhere there must be eyes/that allow light to crinkle/spill remembered laughter from their corners." This is Stallworthy’s work at its best, an example of mixing the ordinary with an attempt at something reminiscent of magic realism. Stallworthy speaks of "windows that laugh," dreams "that got away," and blends these images with references to the prosaic likes of La-Z-Boy, Safeway and Dr. Phil.
Stallworthy’s narrative speaks in a distant, passive voice, leaving one yearning for more humour and description. But this is a pleasant book, and while it presents nothing experimental or challenging, neither is it overly sentimental or representational. Instead, Optics presents a play on colour and meaning, a commentary and reflection on life, and a strong first-person narrator who holds the poems together.
The same can be said of Pasold’s Weave, in which the protagonist is a woman from Prague. Pasold, a former Montrealer now living in Paris, speaks of travel, history and a woman’s search for her identity. Titles such as "there is no explanation suitable for a girl of 13 burdened by intellect," "the reason I didn’t get a balcony" and "it was in Paris I bought Josephine Baker’s old shoes" adorn Weave’s delicious, at times cryptic narrative of a woman tracing her past. The dubious but humorous descriptions in the poems are gripping, as in "iron cross," where the narrator states: "the best way around a gun is to edge your way/to the other side of it." This book addresses the complexities of war, nationality and national identity in the simple but clever accounts from a woman’s memory.
Toronto poet Irie’s Angel Blood: The Tess Poems follows the narrative of another fictional character, this time a famous one – the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The narrative is interesting on a number of levels: because it is written in Tess’s voice, because it is reflective (we hear from Tess as a spirit), because it is a commentary on the way women were treated at the time of Hardy’s novel and because this is a male poet writing from a woman’s perspective.
Irie succeeds in creating a strong narrative and his lines seduce readers into Tess’s world. "He can enter my silence/at his own peril," she says of the parson. And, in regard to the English class system of the time, she refers simply to "The poor:/a species to be viewed on tour." In "Address to the President of the Immortals," Tess compares taking communion in church to giving head. In "Tess Recalls Returning Home After Visiting Alec," Irie uses flower stems tearing through Tess’s hands as a metaphor for losing her virginity. "I was what happened when daughters go bad," she states later, both vulnerable and defiant. Irie presents Tess to modern-day readers in an original way, without patronizing or trivializing her character.
J. Fisher’s Death Day Erection, on the other hand, presents nothing original on the subjects of drugs and art. Fisher’s poetry is reminiscent of the teenage-angst genre mixed in with random attempts at shock. As the poet states in "Elvis:" "Don’t they know it’s my creed that I’m enslaved to,/not some finite moral banquet/laid out for all in uncertain degrees?" The cliché poems here include "binge philosophy," "the truth has become dangerous," "evil wins" and "terrible weirdness," in which Fisher declares "panty-sniffing only gets a man so hard./Go ahead/fuck this life like you mean it."
One can’t help but wonder if this "hard-living creature of habit" stuff hasn’t gotten tired and Fisher’s brand of angst shouldn’t have died out after Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. But then again, if you liked Mike Myers’s poetry in So I Married an Axe Murderer, you might enjoy this book.
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