Book Review
Words and Worlds
- Kemeny Babineau (Author)
After the 6ix O'Clock News. Book Thug/Literary Press Group of Canada (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Darrell Epp (Author)
Imaginary Maps. Signature Editions (purchase at Amazon.ca - Chris Hutchinson (Author)
Other People's Lives. Brick Books (purchase at Amazon.ca - Brian Campbell (Author)
Passenger Flight. Signature Editions (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Aaron Giovannone
The four books of poetry reviewed below negotiate relationships between personas and places, between physical and psychic environments, between mental and material realms. In unique ways, each explores boundaries, establishes connections, and makes its own space to dwell in and move through.
In Other People’s Lives, Chris Hutchinson’s dexterous prosody swoops, speeds along surfaces, tunnels into the quotidian, then re-emerges, a little besotted. These poems, in their incisive and quiet interrogations, suggest that reality is not prefabricated; rather, it is shaped by our questions, which are themselves resonant and meaningful. These poems, despite their vertiginous spiralling into thought and imagination, always come back to earth through vivid, original metaphors, such as when Hutchinson describes Vancouver’s English Bay: “The mountains on this coast are not Glenn Gould’s / hunched shoulders / though let’s say the city hums / in homage to his ghost.” In this book, sounds pervade cities, streets, and rooms; in a cafe the barista’s voice is “glittery as a polished spoon.” Sound billows over the boundary between the sensible and the insensible, the real and the imagined; tinklings and murmurings are messages from within the impenetrable materiality of things, “that world within a world.” In Other People’s Lives, Hutchinson has crafted a sprawling panoply of emotion, thought, reality, and possibility. It is a book in which the creative act has consequences for the “real” world, in which “the dream opens / [and] crackles like footsteps.”
In After the Six O’Clock News, Kemeny Babineau strives to compose a world-view out of disjunctive fragments. This book is a collage of forms and styles, a mixture of approaches to reconciling the word and the reality, perhaps suggesting that such a meeting is not possible. While the book begins in straightforward, signifying language, describing a First Nations figure running over “the trails . . . smooth as the sole of a foot,” this momentum quickly breaks down. Soon language is exploded and spatialized, scattered over the page in pieces of concrete poetry. Language, in other words, is treated as substance, shape, and weight, rather than as a transparent medium for communication. Words become like the “sucking stone in the mouth” which this running figure keeps under his tongue. In a number of places throughout this collection, Babineau riffs esoterically on a number of canonical poets, including Coleridge, cummings, Lampman, and Pratt, but overall, the book relies on a generalized experimental impulse to tether, sometimes precariously, these forays. As the exploded language begins to recompose itself into lyrical forms, Babineau strikes some melodic and melancholic notes: “The living are the tenders / of our early tinder sparks.”
Beginning with its title, Darrell Epp’s Imaginary Maps lays out on the table its investment in a psychic territory. These short lyrics create a personal space which takes shape between stints on the couch, drives in the car, and attempts at romance. Overall, however, the collection doesn’t make grandiose movements. Rather, like the train cars that Epp makes a living locking up for CN Rail, these poems shunt along their lines, linking big, unwieldy topics like “the end of the world” and “infinity plus a day” through telling details, such as the sound “of that mouse in [the] wall.” At its best, Imaginary Maps provides deft turns of phrase and thought: “when we run out of words / we realize that we don’t need / words.” Furthermore, through self-deprecation, Epp deflates the self-absorption which is sometimes a part of the lyrical format: “And the universe, which weighs more / than I can guess, fits quite comfortably / inside my brain.”
The title of the final book reviewed here, Passenger Flight by Brian Campbell, suggests movement without commitment to any particular place. The book’s epigraph is from Baudelaire’s Spleen of Paris, and Campbell’s work engages formally with Baudelaire’s famous sequence of prose poems. While Campbell’s poems tread through numerous territories, making passing reference to “teak stained tablemats” from Sri Lanka, an “ersatz cherry wood shelf” from Bengal, “dates from Iran,” and “mandarins from Morocco,” the collection does this while refusing to settle down. At times, one wishes for a more intimate engagement with the local, with the sensuous and specific that metaphorical, rhythmical language provides. Because of the numerous abstractions and the author’s cool, detached tone, one has the feeling of being far away, of hovering at some objective height above the world, “in such a wonderful flying machine.”
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MLA: Giovannone, Aaron. Words and Worlds. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 20 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #207 (Winter 2010), Mordecai Richler. (pg. 148 - 149)
***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.
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