Re: “Lukewarm lyrics,” by Jane Thompson, Books, June 12-18, 2008.

I’m not sure why Jane Thompson feels entitled to her contempt and condescension. However, her review of my book Chameleon Hours is so misleading that I feel entitled to a correction notice. Thompson writes, “At the risk of sounding like an insensitive ass, I am obliged to discuss the cancer suite [of poems].” She goes on to characterize my work in general as “present[ing] the reader with safe topics with predictable narratives — like flowers are nice, and it’s nice when flowers triumph against adversity and grow up from beneath the weeds.” There is exactly one poem in the collection that describes a flower in weeds, and its subject is a friend who did not “triumph against [sic] adversity,” as the epigraph to the poem makes clear — in fact, she died of cancer at 41. Readers of the review may want to consider whether Thompson’s deceptive synopsis might provide an index to her capacities for close reading, fair assessment and informed judgment. (Other poems in the collection deal with such “safe” topics as materialism, gender discrimination, child abuse, pollution and war.)

Elsewhere, Thompson chides me, in alarming turns of phrase, for not “trying to reinvent anything” and for “favour[ing]… an obvious rejection of her thesaurus.” I don’t use a thesaurus when writing, though I do recommend it for my nine-year-old students. Perhaps Thompson’s had gone missing when she was labouring over this review: in a sentence of putative praise, she echoes the language of the promotional copy on the back of the book. (Why not “reinvent” several words?) Thompson ends by saying that in future I “may want to challenge the reader and take some risks.” A reviewer who knows nothing about the life of the author and apparently so little about the genre in question might want in turn to refrain from giving such patronizing advice.

Elise Partridge,

Vancouver