| Frontenac House is launching their Quartet 2006 at the Memorial Park Library tonight, Thursday, April 20 at 7 p.m. These reviews look at half of the new Quartet – reviews of Tear Down by Ali Riley and The Lightness Which is Our World, Seen From Afar by Ven Begamudré will appear in the next issue.
Because the public groups together the different tiers of "the media," there is confusion between those that relay the detritus of the lives of celebrity takedowns, marketing and the news. Journalism often doesn’t deserve the malignant responses it gets – the name of the game is space and time, "agenda" largely tied up with personal taste.
Which was why, when 9/11 occurred, it was poised to be the return of journalistic integrity. Which in many ways it was – writers have barely begun to respond to it, in many ways due to the presence of the press’s golden hour (i.e., Ian McEwan’s Saturday).
Then, things began to fall apart. Daniel Pearl was butchered, reporters were kidnapped, shot, too scared to be sacrificed for the sake of a good story. Which is the most frightening thing, and one of the best pieces of evidence as to the nature of the Iraq war – the best journalists are mercenary and they wouldn’t do it anymore.
These are the circumstances that make Lisa Pasold’s new collection of poetry, A Bad Year for Journalists, so compelling. She creates a beautiful journey and perception of the roving life, often disjointed and seeking to escape. And one very human, too:
"she takes
photographs through the plane’s open door, lock flung back for take-off
amidst gun-toting children. As if they
risk poachers, are a specific protected species. She tests
this out in French: not funny."
And the willed ignorance of moral flexibility:
"didn’t learn anything useful
in medical school
he could only recognize
tools – shrapnel, not the surface skin had been made into."
Pasold sneaks in mind’s-eye metaphors and images, the poems carefully structured and solid, belying their driving narrative. Which is thrilling – she weaves disjointed memories, from rusty jeeps to lust to typewriter. A thrilling, amazing work.
Pearl Miller was Calgary’s most famous prostitute, although you wouldn’t know it. Nancy Jo Cullen’s Pearl may appear at cursory glance to be a paean to the madame’s fading memory, but its construction is akin to a collection of epigrams, stories and fragments that expand smaller maxims into organic arguments.
Little is known of Miller’s life, a fate dealt to those living on the margins of society that often carries with it a taste of malice, which is the most fascinating juxtaposition Cullen poses:
"I have been described as: squat and homely given to outlandish
rouge and makeup; the most famous woman in the history of
Cowtown (the horse-smellingest city in the west); a keeper of a
Common bawdy-house; vagrant; itinerant
All this from a town that claims to love enterprise"
That truth is echoed throughout the imagined biography, given a delicate and brutal hand, as the didactic realities of prostitution are explained, along with Miller’s turn towards religion in her later years.
"Speaking to the Lord
And the angels
Heart unbuttoned and down around her ankles
Before fingers
Before
For that moment
Enduring on the wings of heaven
She believed
She was born to sing"
Pearl spirals down to a series of epithets on the pillars of Miller’s life, much as it must have done years ago. Here, "whore" is tragic, solipsistic, business. Cullen has crafted a naked work and requiem of uncommon truth. |
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