>>FEATURE
FRONTENAC HOUSE QUARTET LAUNCH
Thursday, April 12
Memorial Park Library
Each year, Calgary-based publisher Frontenac House invites poets from across the country to submit manuscripts for the prestigious Quartet series.
The 2007 Quartet series indeed covers a wide range of poets. Two have been included in previous Quartet series – David Bateman, a teacher and performance artist currently living in Kamloops and Patria Rivera, a Toronto-based poet and editor. Two others, Dymphny Dronyk and Alexis Kienlen, both based in Grande Prairie, are seeing their first books published.
Impersonating Flowers is a sequel of sorts to David Bateman’s 2005 book, Invisible Foreground. Like Foreground, this new work is largely autobiographical and includes many poems adapted for the page from longer performance pieces. Bateman says it’s also an acknowledgement of reaching middle age and draws from experiences over the past 40 years of his life to explore themes of parental guidance (the collection is rated "PG," he says) and family relationships, quite often with his mother.
The poems in the book straddle the line between prose and poetry, but Bateman’s paragraphs of free verse have an easy, engaging rhythm, and longer pieces are interspersed throughout the book with short, fun pieces. Bateman says poems are more introspective than performance, but different genres inform each other, and this is reflected in his work. His performance style translates well to the page, his tone is still wry, witty and cutting, but it is also more emotive.
Patria Rivera delivers her second Quartet book, following 2005’s award-winning Puti-White with The Bride Anthology, a collection that invites the reader to "catch this poet as she runs after the fickleness of love and longing."
Framing moments with her vivid and opulent language, White follows the "convoluted paths of love" through the stories of people who have loved and lost in disparate ways, brides and grooms, mothers and mothers-in-law, aunts and many others.
Alexis Kienlen’s She Dreams in Red is broken into geographic sections reflecting her travels – China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Tibet – and a section at the end called "Love/Lust," with poems about, well, love and lust. Kienlen’s poetry is often simple, spare and elegant and deals with issues in a strong and straightforward style.
Kienlen explores diverse themes – being a foreigner in her home country and abroad, family histories and relationships, love and lust. The ubiquitous motif of red, which she uses to symbolize a variety of ideas, comes to a climax in the title poem, spewing forth a cascade of images and themes, passion and fire, blood and loss, love and secrets, fear and exhilaration, cherries, apples, roses, lipstick and fire engines.
While Kienlen writes about fiery issues, her poems have a detached quality. This is not to say she is not present in the collection, but rather that she is able to set herself slightly apart from her experiences and become a keen, insightful and eloquent observer, a quality that can be expected from someone with a journalistic background and one that contributes to the success of the collection.
The last book of the Quartet is Contrary Infatuations by Dympnhy Dronyk. A beautiful collection of pieces about "blue sky and hope," Infatuations includes an exquisite and powerful poem/section called "Astrocytoma," about the death of her husband when she was 27, as well as poetry about work, "a narrow genre," she admits, "but most of us spend most of our time at work, so why wouldn’t I write about it?"
It’s a good question, and her atypical work life provides ample material to draw from. She has worked as, among other things, a writer, editor, tree planting camp cook, mediator and photographer. Her poems are superlative examples of the possibilities of this genre. "In the Oil Patch/ there are ‘men’ and ‘girls’/ women don’t exist here/ unless the naked ones/ on the rig shack walls/ are thought of/ as women./ It isn’t an intentional snub/just their awkward way/ of making it safe./ It’s tough for them/ to have to work with/ a girl in/ a tough world/ of testosterone codes."
About being a part of the Quartet, Dronyk says she likes the way the books in the Quartet "complement each other," and can see a common theme of "making sense of this great big word called love, probing the depths of it in a variety of instances – the love of a parent, the love of lovers, the love of the world."
The collection does hold together as a group and have common themes – family love, relationships – but each poet explores them in distinctive ways. |
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