Book Reviews

Figures of Memories and Cities

Anne Compton (Author)
asking questions indoors and out. Fitzhenry & Whiteside
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Carmine Starmino (Author)
This Way Out. Gaspereau Press
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Reviewed by David C. Waddell

Carmine Starnino’s This Way Out reads like an Atlas for city streets carved from grit. Its honesty reeks with the details of life stripped down past its bare beauty, not necessarily finding its core, but positing, knowing where to start looking. What is refreshing about the book is that the reader is never freed from a reminder of what makes up a day in urbanity: the gore and detail of the prophetic, down trodden, artistic act is made real by keeping “great conclusions at bay” and sticking “with small answers”. He constructs his poems with sensitivity to a conversational cadence and the problems these poems highlight: the boldness of getting by. He carries his “spondee of rev and roar” as a way of retaliating against the fears of survivability, and his audience is a friend or anyone in a paper-thin apartment. As you can guess, this is not a quiet book.

Starnino’s poetry pushes for a greater awareness of economic strata, but most interestingly he does so by taking stock of extremely local details to explore the generalities of the larger world. Personal details and histories in his poems trump the economic systems that cause them. This Way Out is more of a series of shout-outs for hope mingled with apprehensions about the future, rather than an obsessive retelling of where these problems came from.

Similarly, Starnino acknowledges literary history without letting it take center stage. Where the pastoral of Wordsworth left us behind (or we it) Starnino instead limns a wilderness of personally known street corners, tight apartment walls, and families. Tender (or maybe sore) paternal relationships are yoked and discussed against the backdrop of lives worn weary by consumer culture.  The frenetic energy of the “founding Flarfists, late into the night, hitting send”, alongside the frozen moments before startling a duck in the park, brings us to a poetic urban that is unapologetic, nude, and aware that you cannot stop staring.

Taking a different approach to imagining the everyday is Anne Compton’s third book of poetry asking questions indoors and out. Compton employs a very meditative approach to understanding the interpersonal spaces between families, gardens, and the words within those spaces. Compton provides a refreshing refinement of both diction and timing by mining the speech of ancestors on grand literary and small rural scale to contextualize her exploration of the private and public spheres. Compton uses “the Fisherman’s habit of non sequiturs” and other quotations from personal and communal pasts to trace memory as analeptical yet never removed from present moments and conversations. A fine example is her use of epigram to invoke Tennyson while deploying the language of personal memories born from the histories and gardens of Atlantic Canada.

No one reading her book can help but consider her use of sections to frame the poems that arise from her specific situation as woman, daughter, and writer. Sections begin with a quotation that hints at open-ended questions about religion and desire figured through memory. The quotes are truly questions rather than statements for Compton.  This book lurks with allusions to trauma, these questions, but what makes it stand out is her calm and understated voice that describes said trauma. Compton paradoxically figures peace and fear in the same breath.

For Compton the public and domestic come to terms in a language not wholly her father’s, not wholly her own, but completely strident, compelling, and intimate. It is a joy to trip with Compton over girlhoods, wakes and their accompanying waking, and the language of confluence and convergence, memory and community. As she reminds us: “we will gather, gather at the river”.

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This review has not yet appeared in Canadian Literature.

MLA: Waddell, David C.. Figures of Memories and Cities. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, n.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2010.

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.