two new reviews

of Monty Reid's Disappointment Island and Anne Le Dressay's Old Winter online at The Goose;

a review of Anne Le Dressay's Old Winter in the Prairie Fire Review of Books;

Old Winter
by Anne Le Dressay
Ottawa: Chaudiere Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9783428-0-7, 115 pp., $18 paper.

I last heard Anne Le Dressay read her poetry in the mid-nineties, at the Hellenic Hall in Edmonton. It was a gala night, the culmination of an annual festival of readings organized by the Edmonton Stroll of Poets Society. More than 200 listeners trained their eyes on the slight, black-clad poet on the stage, whose calm tone belied the shadowy intensity of her words. One could hear the proverbial pin drop. Considering that many of those present had never before attended a poetry reading, it was no small feat. Le Dressay's poems poked at unhealed wounds and teased old scars; they explored fear and hate, love and identity with both an admirable precision and lack of melodrama. Many of them appear in her first collection, Sleep Is a Country, published in 1997.

In Old Winter, Le Dressay's second collection, the poet still rummages in the shadows, but her voice is softer. In the introductory poem she calls herself "the laureate of small moments" (9), then plunges the reader into a myriad of such moments in the life of a girl born to a French-speaking family in Manitoba.

In a larger context, the life is quiet and unimportant, yet those "small moments" are as dramatic as any that occur in the world. The girl is born in the back seat of a car driven by her father in dense fog. The same father, and a neighour, carry school children on their backs across a swollen creek:

I could feel the tug of water against him, his resistance
a shudder through all his bones. In that shudder
I felt the water telling me what it would do
if I tried to cross alone: how it would take me
in a hundred hands, toss me from one to another
like a twig; how it would pull me down and under
slip its liquid fingers into my clothes, my boots, my lungs . . . (15)

A four-year-old child is killed when her eight-year-old brother overturns a tractor. A dangerous dog must be shot. A storm demolishes the farm and our girl and family move to an urban setting, outsiders from now on.

The fog is not so thick that light cannot penetrate it. A horse that belongs to a city family living in the village is not required to do anything but provide beauty during an annual parade. A new boy in school, temporary refugee from a spring flood, "dazzled, like the water world in sunlight" (28). During the Pan-American Games in Winnipeg, in 1967, a car with South American licence plates brings smiles of wonder to the faces of locals.

How does the girl process all this? Alone, she tells us in "First Blood" (27). "Nobody to tell and no desire to tell. / Just another secret to absorb into the tangle / of secrets I held close, as if secrets meant / safety." This aloneness, which hovers on the edge of depression yet is not, becomes the book's theme. "(Grey with an e is not the same / colour as gray with an a. . . )" (30) we are told in a poignant poem about a much younger brother who has dropped away from the family.

The poems in this collection do not rely on linguistic fireworks, yet they have the ability to work themselves under the skin. Not much happens in "A small thing" (35). In the middle of a beautiful, empty countryside, mud clogs a girl's bicycle miles from home and she can neither ride it nor abandon it. She sees a car appear on the wooden bridge. Gripped by sudden fear, she imagines

a bad guy who wants to get you
under the bridge, and what do
you do? Only the fields and no houses.
Only the bush and the deep ditch
and the long grass and the mud.
Only the lonely spot on a lonely day
and you can't get home.

This particular man turns out to be a friendly neighbour and this particular girl gets home unscathed a few hours later, but I had to reread the poem a few times just to make sure.
I do have some complaints. The collection works as a whole, but the theme of loneliness, of living "in the margin of stories / more vividly coloured" (43) sometimes feels overemphasized. The poet also over-explains at times, the old "just in case you didn't get it" syndrome. The few poems where language tips from restraint into plain flatness: "To his mind, he is / opening my eyes to exciting / possibilities." (69) could have been left out of the book. Still, when Le Dressay is at her best, she is very good, and I wish I could once again hear her voice, and experience that attentive hush in a roomful of listeners savouring "Northern morning meditation," for example, a poem which lifts a winter bus ride to work to quietly pleasing heights.

Anna Mioduchowska is a poet, an author of translations, stories, essays and book reviews. Her work has appeared in anthologies, literary journals, in newspapers, on buses, and has been aired on the CBC Radio. In-Between Season, a poetry collection, was published by Rowan Books. Eyeing the Magpie is a collection of poetry and art, published last year in collaboration with 4 fellow poets.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

reprinted with permission;
original link;

Diane Tucker, Emily Falvey & Gwendolyn Guth at the Carleton Tavern

a rare Ottawa reading by three exceptional writers;

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan, the small press action network - ottawa (span-o) & Chaudiere Books

readings & launches by:

Diane Tucker, Vancouver
Emily Falvey, Ottawa
+ Gwendolyn Guth, Ottawa

Friday, October 3, 2008
doors at 7pm, readings at 7:30
at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale), Ottawa

Diane Tucker was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she got a B.F.A. from the University of B.C. in 1987. Her first book, God on His Haunches (Nightwood Editions, 1996) was shortlisted for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second poetry book, Bright Scarves of Hours, was published by Palimpsest Press in September 2007. Her work appears regularly in journals in Canada and abroad and her first novel is due in 2009 from Thistledown Press. Diane lives in Burnaby, BC with her understanding husband, two scandalously beautiful teenagers and Doxa the spotty dog. She will be launching her second poetry collection, Bright Scarves of Colour (Palimpsest Press).

www.dianetucker.info
http://www.palimpsestpress.ca/bright-scarves-hours-p-297.html

Originally from Nova Scotia, Emily Falvey is currently an Ottawa-based independent curator, art critic, and fiction writer. Her poetry and prose have appeared previously in Descant, decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Chaudiere Books, 2007), and Departures (above/ground press, 2008). She has written essays for public galleries across Canada, and in 2006 she received the Contemporary Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. She was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Ottawa Art Gallery from 2004-2008.

http://www.chaudierebooks.com/books/decalogueII.html

Gwendolyn Guth is an Ottawa-based poet and mother of three boys. Her chapbook, A Flash of Longing, appeared in 2000 by Friday Circle, and she has published in Bywords.ca, ottawater.com and as an above/ground press broadside.

info: rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or az421@freenet.carleton.ca

rob mclennan poetry reading at The Ottawa Art Gallery

a poetry reading by rob mclennan, as part of the exhibit "Evidence: The Ottawa City Project," curated by Emily Falvey

Thursday, September 25, 2008, doors 7pm ,reading 7:30pm
The Ottawa Art Gallery, Arts Court, 2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa
info: 613 233 8699 or info@ottawaartgallery.ca

with works by David Barbour, Claude-Philippe Benoit, Marlene Creates, Pat Durr, Tony Fouhse, Lorraine Gilbert, Vera Greenwood, Colwyn Griffith, Greg Hill, Kenneth Lockhead, Deborah Margo, Uta Riccius, Michael Schreier, Carl Stewart, Jeff Thomas, Eric Walker and Justin Wonnacott. 5 September to 16 November, 2008;

so the poem is not a description
so the city is not
-- rob mclennan, ottawa poems (blue notes), 24

Ottawa is sometimes mislabelled a boring city. In truth it is one of the most paradoxical places in Canada—a perplexing mix of wealth and poverty, summer heat and winter cold, nationalist and regionalist, poor arts funding and rich cultural heritage. While the relationship between these elements may at times be maddening, it is rarely dull.

The word "desire" comes from the Latin de sidere, which means "from the stars." The idea that Ottawa is missing something—that it is desirous—is an inevitable part of its constellation of paradoxes. Such feelings generally arise anywhere there is conflict or contradiction. It is possible to misconstrue this sensation as a dearth of excitement, thus accepting the banality that some feel is Ottawa's fate. Like anything paradoxical, however, it is equally possible to experience desire as a call to adventure, to the quest to discover the missing "thing," which may be merely hidden. From this braver, more creative perspective, Ottawa is a complex riddle that demands to be solved.

In 2007, local poet rob mclennan published The Ottawa City Project (Chaudiere Books), a book of poetry whose playfully bureaucratic title belies a poignant engagement with a hidden Ottawa. The artists involved in Evidence, like many working in our city, have undertaken similar "Ottawa City Projects," charting the fragmentary proof of an alternative Ottawa, a living city that is constantly changing. Through their work, we are invited to explore its margins, those overlooked regions where chance wears its provisional path through the urban landscape, a disturbing and beautiful phenomena that landscape architects refer to as "desire lines."

— Emily Falvey, Curator of Contemporary Art

http://www.ottawaartgallery.ca/exhibits/2008/evidence/index-en.php

a review of rob mclennan's The Ottawa City Project

on the Northern Poetry Review;

two poems by Anne Le Dressay

A while ago, I posted a link to two poems by Chaudiere Books author Anne Le Dressay, written as part of her duties as Unofficial Poet Laureate of the Public Service Commission. Since the two poems have since been removed from their website, I'm posting them here, in both original English and translated French. As Le Dressay writes,

I work for Executive Counselling Services, which is part of the Public Service commission. I was invited to write a poem for the Centenary of the PSC, which is 2008. Just how this came about is too long a story to tell. I had drafts for two different poems, which I sent to the people on the Centenary Committee, asking which one they wanted me to finish. They liked both, so I ended up writing two. The poems are on the PSC intranet site. They were also on display in the lobby of 300 Laurier Ave West during Public Service Week (June 23-27) and will be used again before the Centenary celebrations are over.

It’s un-Canadian, but let’s brag
(on the Centenary of the Public Service Commission)

We’re not given to self-congratulation—as if
we’d swallowed whole the Catholic (or Calvinist or
whatever) conviction that God loves the humble, God
loves the meek, God loves the loser.

The stereotype says we don’t even like success,
that we’d rather step back when we see it coming,
let somebody else build on our work and claim
the applause. We prize our reputation for courtesy and
compromise, moderation and modesty, for the subdued
and unglamorous virtues, the low-key ones.

Remember the movie Canadian Bacon? Canadians jostled
in a crowd respond with a chorus of apologies—Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Remember the joke about how to get a crowd of noisy Canadians
out of the swimming pool? Ask them quietly and politely.

That’s us. But sometimes we do the Canadian thing so well
it becomes its seeming opposite. It dazzles.

We’re celebrating 100 years at the PSC. We’ve been around as long as
the Boy Scouts, the FBI, Mother’s Day, Anne of Green Gables.
For that long, we’ve worked at fair hiring. We do our best
to transcend the tribal instinct that rewards those near to us
by blood and friendship (regardless of competence); to find
alternatives to bribery and patronage, favoritism and bias;
to develop ways to identify and reward real competence.

We’re known around the world for the quality of our public
service. Others recognize the achievement—not just the attempt,
the achievement. We do these things well: fairness, dialogue,
and fairness again. (Not perfectly—we would never claim
perfection.) And we do well at passing them along
because fairness and dialogue walk closely with compromise
and the recognition that any model must adapt to its context.

Others come to us for help and advice, and we don’t tell South Africa
(or China or Brazil or anyone): This is how it MUST be done.
We tell them, This is how we do it, and this is why. Then we say,
What do you think? Could it work for you? And we talk,
and we let them take what suits them and leave the rest. We let them
do it their way. Adjust. Adapt.

We don’t like to take too much credit, or even all the credit
we earn. It’s modesty. It’s a national virtue, and sometimes
a national curse. Sometimes we need to celebrate what we achieve,
even when the lacklustre virtues are the foundation.

They have their down side, their dark side, their failures.
But they can dazzle too, in the right light. Why not find that light
and avoid the usual, Oh, it’s nothing.

Let’s acknowledge the dazzle. Let’s brag. It’s un-Canadian,
but let’s brag.

Spring 2008

Ce n’est pas très canadien, mais vantons-nous un peu
(À l’occasion du centenaire de la Commission de la fonction publique)


Nous n’avons pas tendance à nous exalter,
comme imprégnés de la conviction (catholique, calviniste
ou autre) que Dieu est du côté des humbles,
des faibles et des perdants.

À en croire la légende, le succès nous déplairait,
et nous préférerions nous retirer lorsqu’il se pointe,
laisser les autres tirer gloire de notre travail et recevoir
toutes les ovations. Sans tambour ni trompette,
nous défendons notre réputation de courtoisie,
de compromis, de modération et de modestie,
vertus ô combien discrètes et obscures.

Dans un film américain, Canadian Bacon, un groupe de Canadiens
bousculés dans une foule, entame un concert d’excuses, pardon, pardon.
Et cette blague circule, sur la meilleure façon de chasser d’une piscine
une troupe de Canadiens tapageurs : demander calmement et poliment.

Nous sommes ainsi faits. Mais nous agissons parfois si bien en Canadiens
que nous produisons l’effet contraire. Nous brillons.

À la CFP, nous célébrons un centenaire. Nous avons l’âge
des scouts, du FBI, de la fête des Mères et d’Anne aux pignons verts.
Depuis un siècle, nous protégeons l’embauche équitable, dans un effort constant
pour transcender l’instinct tribal qui nous verrait favoriser nos proches,
liens de sang, liens d’amitié, sans égard aux compétences; pour apporter
des alternatives aux pots-de-vin et au patronage, au favoritisme et aux préjugés;
pour déterminer des façons de cerner et de gratifier la vraie compétence.

Le monde entier le proclame : notre fonction publique est exceptionnelle.
Et d’autres sont là qui reconnaissent le succès – pas seulement l’effort,
mais le succès. Nous sommes doués pour l’équité, le dialogue,
et l’équité encore et encore (sans prétendre à la perfection , nous n’oserions jamais!)
Et nous sommes doués pour transmettre ces valeurs,
car équité et dialogue vont de pair avec le compromis
et l’acceptation que tout modèle doit s’adapter à son contexte.

Et quand on vient d’ailleurs nous demander aide et conseil, nous ne disons pas
à l’Afrique du Sud, à la Chine, au Brésil : « C’est comme ça qu’il faut faire. »
Nous leur disons « Ici, on fait comme ça, et voilà pourquoi. » Nous leur demandons
« Qu’en pensez-vous? Ça marcherait chez vous? » Nous leur parlons et les laissons
choisir ce qui leur plaît, sans plus. Agir à leur guise. S’ajuster. S’adapter.
Nous n’aimons pas accepter les louanges, pas même celles
que nous méritons. Par modestie, cette vertu nationale et parfois
ce fléau national. Mais il est parfois important de célébrer nos réussites
même quand des vertus sans éclat en sont le fondement.

Elles ont leurs zones d’ombre, leur face obscure, leurs échecs,
mais, sous un bon éclairage, elles peuvent aussi briller. Alors, trouvons-le,
cet éclairage, et taisons un moment notre traditionnel « Oh, ce n’est rien… »

Admettons notre éclat et vantons-nous un peu. Ce n’est pas très canadien,
mais vantons-nous quand même.


Printemps 2008

Shortcut, doorway, way in or Me and the PSC
(Canada Place, Edmonton)

I first heard of Canada Place from my carpenter brother,
for whom the building of it provided a long-term project in Alberta
bust times, a bit of security after too many short-term projects,
too many intervals on EI.

When I moved to Edmonton, the red brick building
was first a stage in my walk to work from my home on the south side
to my job on the north side. I avoided the busy streets as much as possible,
took the bike paths along the steep river bank, the escalators in the Conference
Centre that rode the shape of the north slope, the pedway under Jasper Avenue,
and then Canada Place.

Canada Place was a shortcut: through bad weather, out of the traffic,
to the LRT[1]. The walk through its spacious atrium was a reminder
of institutions I didn’t think about much, so that when I needed EI,
I knew where to find it.

From a shortcut, it became a destination, and then more precise
destinations of which the centre was the Public Service Commission.
I got there by a circuitous route that took me from the EI office,
to a job club, to a job line, to the PSC lobby for posters, and finally
to various rooms inside the PSC for tests.

Out of work, I thought, I’m free. Where do I want to spend
the rest of my life? Ottawa, where I had been a student and
forged the strongest bonds in my life. Out of work, I saw the PSC
as a possible way into the federal government and thus
an easier return to Ottawa. And it happened.

First, though, the tests that were the tool of triage, each test
in a different room within the PSC. Tests for jobs I did not get,
like the in-basket test that confirmed what I knew—that I am not
management material. That one in a pleasant room with a window
onto the atrium.

And tests for the entry-level bilingual job I did get. First,
the Reading and Writing French test in a room with many others—
the pleasure of focusing on the details of language (an easy exemption).

Later, to a smaller room for the oral French test: a table, a couple of
chairs, a phone, and somebody in Ottawa asking my views on
the French-schools question in Alberta—me irritated, trying to explain
that I didn’t follow the question: I have no children and am not given
to causes. No exemption there, though close. Too many anglicisms,
too little opportunity to speak French in Alberta.

Though when I took the oral test again—in person this time—
after five years of much more French in Ottawa than in Alberta,
I got the exemption.

The PSC helped me get back to Ottawa, and in Ottawa, I wrote
other tests, including the one that got me into the PSC, to
the other side of the counter, arranging language tests by phone
for people in Edmonton or Winnipeg or Vancouver.

And again, tests for jobs I did not get: the Situational Judgment
Test—baffling, though I passed my thought for almost every
question on the test, Well, that depends; I need more detail.
The Language Proficiency Test, an easy pass, and again
the delight in the precision of words. The TACCO—a near-pass,
despite my discomfort with role-playing.

I’m back in Ottawa, where I wanted to be. I got here by way
of Canada Place, Edmonton—the red brick building
overlooking the valley, the building my brother helped build
and that was for me a shortcut, then a destination, and finally
a way in.

Spring 2008

[1] Light Rapid Transit

Raccourci, portail, voie d’entrée ou La CFP et moi
(Place du Canada, Edmonton)


Mon frère le charpentier m’en a d’abord parlé. Il travaillait à bâtir
la Place du Canada, un projet de longue durée en Alberta,
qui représentait un brin de prospérité après trop de vaches maigres,
un peu de sécurité après trop d’emplois à temps partiel et de périodes en chômage.

Quand je suis allée vivre à Edmonton, cet édifice de brique rouge
a marqué une étape de mon itinéraire à pied de la maison, dans le quartier sud,
au travail, dans le quartier nord. Je m’arrangeais pour éviter les rues achalandées,
suivant les pistes cyclables le long de la rivière, les escaliers mobiles
du Centre des conférences, qui épousaient la pente nord,
le tunnel piétonnier sous l’avenue Jasper, pour aboutir
à la Place du Canada.

La Place du Canada, c’était mon raccourci, beau temps mauvais temps,
sous les embouteillages, jusqu’au train léger rapide. Traverser le vaste hall me rappelait
ces institutions auxquelles je ne pensais pas souvent, et quand j’ai eu besoin
d’assurance-emploi, j’ai su tout de suite où aller.

De raccourci, la Place est devenue destination, et plus précisément
des destinations qui gravitaient vers la Commission de la fonction publique.
J’y suis parvenue par un détour : du bureau de l’assurance-emploi, j’ai eu recours
à un club de recherche d’emploi, au télé emploi, aux panneaux d’affichage
du hall de la CFP, puis à divers locaux de la CFP – pour les tests.

Quand j’étais au chômage, je me suis dit : « Tu es libre. Où voudrais-tu passer
le reste de tes jours? » Et le nom d’Ottawa m’est venu, ville de mes études,
ville où j’ai forgé mes plus belles amitiés. Au chômage, j’ai vu dans la CFP
une voie d’accès possible à l’administration fédérale et, de là,
mon billet de retour à Ottawa. Et j’ai vu juste.

Mais d’abord, il y a eu les épreuves de triage, chacune
dans un local différent de la CFP. Des tests pour des emplois
que je n’ai pas eus, celui du «in-basket» par exemple,
dans une pièce agréable,ouverte sur l’atrium,
qui a confirmé ce que déjà je savais :
je n’ai pas l’âme de la gestionnaire.

Puis le test du poste bilingue de premier échelon, que j’ai décroché. D’abord,
le test de lecture et d’écriture en français, dans une pièce avec plusieurs autres, un moment agréable où je me suis plongée dans les subtilités linguistiques – une exemption facile.

Puis, dans une plus petite pièce, le test de français oral : une table, quelques chaises, un téléphone, et un type à Ottawa qui me demandait mon avis sur
le dossier des écoles françaises en Alberta – et moi, irritée, contrainte d’expliquer
que je n’ai pas suivi ce débat, que je n’ai pas d’enfant et que je reste à l’écart
des grandes causes. Pas d’exemption ici, mais bel effort. Trop d’anglicismes,
pas assez d’occasions de parler français en Alberta.

Mais quand j’ai passé le test oral à nouveau, en personne cette fois-là,
après cinq ans de français, bien plus intensif à Ottawa qu’en Alberta,
j’ai obtenu l’exemption.

La CFP m’a aidée à retourner à Ottawa, où j’ai pu passer
d’autres tests, dont celui qui m’a ouvert les portes de la Commission,
vers un emploi de l’autre côté du guichet, à organiser par téléphone les tests de langue
des gens de Winnipeg, d’Edmonton ou de Vancouver.

Et tant d’autres tests pour des emplois que je n’ai pas eus : test situationnel
sur le jugement – déroutant et pourtant réussi, bien qu’il m’ait semblé répondre
à chaque question : « Eh bien, ça dépend, il me faudrait plus de détails. »
Le Test de compétence linguistique, pas de problème, et encore
ce plaisir de la précision des mots. Et le CAMECO, presque réussi,
malgré mon inconfort par rapport aux jeux de rôles.

Je suis de retour à Ottawa, où je voulais vivre. J’y suis revenue en passant
par la Place du Canada, à Edmonton – un édifice de brique rouge
qui domine la vallée, l’édifice que mon frère a aidé à construire,
et qui m’aura servi de raccourci, de destination et, en bout de ligne,
de voie d’entrée.

Printemps 2008

an interview with chaudiere books author joe blades

newly posted as part of the '12 or 20 questions' series.

review of Clare Latremouille's The Desmond Road Book of the Dead

by Laurie Anne Fuhr
(originally published in filling Station)

The Desmond Road Book of the Dead
By Clare Latremouille

What if you decide to write a book, your first book, about several generations of women in your family at different stages of their lives so they won’t be so easily forgotten? To be true to this idea you will have to include yourself, at least sometimes. Okay.

You will go back and forth in time and between speakers, give dates where there are shifts, but confuse the reader slightly as they notice similarities between the voices of each generation because they are related and made of one another, forward and back in time, while horses get wheels or cars grow legs around them.

You will describe the most beautiful and most painful moments of each life from the perspective of each life, choosing the moments how memory chooses – some obviously significant, others significant to memory in a way less known to the mind.

Children will describe in a sparse, childlike, poetic prose and grandmothers will describe in sparse, childlike, but omniscient prose and adults will be allowed to achieve narrative when they are self-conscious. Because it’s likely more like how minds work.

And you say hey, why not see if I can’t just keep it real despite the fact that every now and then I will see about dropping in some lines of poetry that could just rival some of the best lyric poets writing?

You will be as honest as possible, no matter how painful the details; when someone cries out with the pain of dying, child or old woman, their voices will be heard in this book, and when someone laughs, no matter the reason, their laughter will also be heard.

As you write, you don’t care what anyone thinks of your subject matter, or what the current writing trends are, because this is a book you have to write, and you’re just going to have to write your heart out, because you got that heart from the people you’re writing about.

When you’re finished, there’s a good bet you have written The Desmond Road Book of the Dead, a first novel by Clare Latremouille and the first offering from Ottawa’s Chaudiere Books.

John Newlove documentary screening & book launch, SaltSpring Island

Hosted by Brian Brett, with readings/talk by Brian Brett, poet/critic Jay Ruzesky and poet Joe Rosenblatt;

Wednesday, April 16, 2008; 8pm
ArtSpring, 100 Jackson Avenue, SaltSpring Island

John Newlove Documentary Screening / Book Launch on Salt Spring Island

Filmmaker/editor Robert McTavish in attendance.
Garry Oaks Winery Wine Tasting 7pm
Co-sponsored by ArtSpring.

Come celebrate the life and work of poet John Newlove with a screening of the documentary What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove, and the Salt Spring launch of Chaudiere Books' A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove.

About What to make of it all? The life and poetry of JohnNewlove: ' Robert McTavish provides a deeply textured portrait of the great Canadian poet of the sixties. Sometimes as sparse yet dense as Newlove's poetry, the film uses floating text, family photos, conversations with fellow poets, friends and family as well as late-life interviews with Newlove to capture the complex soul tormented by depression and alcoholism, yet still able to write with, as George Bowering says, a 'confidence and sufficiency that is so beautiful.'' -- Globe and Mail

About A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove: "A Long Continual Argument, the first comprehensive edition of Newlove's poems to be published since his death in 2003, is a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration." -- Globe and Mail

A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove has been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in thewords of Phyllis Webb, 'doesn't struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking.'

John Newlove (1938-2003) was born and raised in Saskatchewan. He began publishing while working various jobs in Vancouver in the 1960s. His many honours included the 1972 Governor General's Award for his book Lies, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Founders Award. His works have been internationally published and translated.

'Newlove was the best of us, the great line, the hidden agenda, tough as nails and yet somehow with his heart on his sleeve. There was always a double-take involved when reading his work. His lyrics, such as 'The Weather' were faultless. I devoured and loved his work. --Michael Ondaatje

To call him 'the voice of prairie poetry' misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton 'the voice of Cromwell's London.' This was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetry delivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. It will be see again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place. --Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove: Essays on His Works, forthcoming)

For information on the Salt Spring event, contact Robert McTavish at rmctavish@hotmail.com
or check out www.artspring.ca

For information on the book, contact the publisher, rob mclennan, at az421@freenet.carleton.ca

Ordering information on the book here:http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2007/09/long-continual-argument-selected-poems.html

an interview with Michael Bryson (12 or 20 questions),

soon-Chaudiere Books author (2009);

an interview with Robert McTavish,

editor of A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, up at The Danforth Review.

John Newlove reviewed in The Globe and Mail

by Toronto poet/editor Paul Vermeersch;

[...] John Newlove was a major poet whose life's work has long deserved such careful attention, and thanks to editor Robert McTavish, it has finally received it. A Long Continual Argument, the first comprehensive edition of Newlove's poems to be published since his death in 2003, is a fitting monument to the poet's consummate craftsmanship, and a cause for national celebration.
In its time, not long ago, Newlove's poetry was among the most commanding work being written in Canada. It is stark, brutally honest and deceptively complex. As such, it is a lot like the man who created it. In his introduction, McTavish describes his first impression of that man: "I found him self-deprecating and sly, his low tone punctuated with cigarette pauses." The same could be said for a great many of Newlove's poems, like the fretful Blue Cow Phrases: "If I'm disgusted with my life I'm disgusted with yours too./ All we do is invent blue cow phrases dripping thin vapid milk."

Newlove never attempted to hide his disappointment with the world, at least not in his poetry. He often expressed an antipathy that many people feel but lack the nerve to express themselves. He was the pinch-hitter for our secret bitterness, the darker and more forthright part of our conscience. His raw material was the ugly truth; from it he forged poems that demonstrate the intrinsic beauty of all human emotions, not just the comfortable ones, and he understood, as Aristotle and Shakespeare did, that the grandest of them all, the most poetic, is our melancholy. Few have given voice to human sadness as eloquently as Newlove did, as he demonstrates in his poem She:

She starts to grow tears, chemical beast

shut in a dark room with the walls closing

behind her eyelids, all touches hateful,

the white sweep of clean snow death to her,

the grey naked trees death to her. [...]

some Chaudiere Books author activity

Max Middle + John Lavery read as the Max Middle Sound Project at the Factory Reading Series (Ottawa) on Thursday, February 28; Stephen Brockwell reads March 2 at the Dusty Owl Reading Series (Ottawa); rob mclennan launches Ottawa: The Unknown City on March 15 at Nicholas Hoare Books (Ottawa);

two new links;

an interview with Monty Reid, and a note on John Newlove by Zach Wells;

some new visual poems by Max Middle

Some new visual poems by Max Middle (decalogue: ten Ottawa poets) now up at Other Cl/utter;

a review of John Newlove

in Vancouver's Georgia Straight; in the Simon Fraser University student paper, The Peak;

Emily Falvey on CHUO

Tune in to Click here Wednesday at 5 pm, on CHUO-FM89, for an interview and live reading with writers Emily Falvey (decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers) and Jay MillAr [see his 12 or 20 questions here], reading in Ottawa this week. Also, Montreal band Kid Sentiment.

Click here is a one hour interview-based programme broadcast on CHUO-FM89 (and at http://www.chuo.fm/) Wednesdays at 5 pm. It deals with the arts, socio-political issues, and community events.

You can find out more about Click here by checking out our web site at: http://web.ncf.ca/fk055
Mitchell Caplan
Producer/host
Click here

John Newlove article

in the Vancouver Sun;

Nicholas Lea + Anne Le Dressay open for Edmonton author Alice Major (U of A Press);

Chaudiere Books presents:
a reading/launch by Edmonton poet Alice Major
launching her newest poetry collection, The Office Tower Tales (University of Alberta Press)

with opening readings by Chaudiere Books' authors Nicholas Lea + Anne Le Dressay

Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 2pm; free
at mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside), Ottawa (link to map)
info: 613 730 2346

Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter in British Columbia. She has published eight poetry collections and a novel for young readers. She is a previous winner of the Malahat Review's long poem contest and Broken Jaw Publishing's manuscript contest, "The Poets' Corner Award", as well as runner-up for awards such as the Pat Lowther award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Stephan G. Stephanson Award (Writers Guild of Alberta). Her work has appeared widely in Canadian periodicals and she has read across Canada as well as in the U.K. and Australia.

Alice has been active in the writing community for two decades. She is past president of the Writers Guild of Alberta and of the League of Canadian Poets. She was the second chair of the Edmonton Arts Council and was appointed to a two-year term as the city's first Poet Laureate in June, 2005.

The Office Tower Tales takes as its starting point The Canterbury Tales, but transforms it to a northern city in the final year of the second millennium. Instead of being told by pilgrims en route to Canterbury, the tale-telling takes place in a contemporary office tower, by women on their lunch and coffee breaks. Through the lighthearted interplay of Chaucer, the 1001 Nights and other literary touchstones, readers meet receptionist Aphrodite, Pandora (expectant grandmother from accounting) and Sheherazad, the girl from public relations. The stories that come as pilgrims to Sheherazad range over genres and centuries, from office gossip and urban legend to wildlife documentaries and historical narratives. They explore the intricate relations between men and women, power and love, individual and society.

some upcoming chaudiere author activity;

Ian Roy (decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers) [see his 12 or 20 questions here] is the featured reader at the TREE Reading Series, Ottawa, on Tuesday, February 12; Emily Falvey (decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers) and Monty Reid (Disappointment Island) read with Toronto poet Jay MillAr [see his 12 or 20 questions here] as part of Ottawa's AB Reading Series #5, Feburary 15; Chaudiere author/publisher rob mclennan (The Ottawa City Project) reads at the University of Calgary on Monday, February 11, with his "return to Ottawa" reading already scheduled for June 8 at the Dusty Owl Reading Series; Chaudiere Books friend Amanda Earl (an above/ground press author) reads as part of "Ottawa International Development Week" along with Ray Deonandan, Lise Careau, Betty Warrington-Kearsley and Cyril Dabydeen on February 4 at 4pm in Room 509, Arts Bldg., 70 Laurier Ave. East,University of Ottawa (ph. 613-230-7854); the Vancouver launch/documentary screening of John Newlove's A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove happens February 8th;

Edmonton Journal article

on the John Newlove book launch/documentary screening by Todd Babiak.

a new review of the John Newlove selected by Douglas Barbour, Edmonton Journal

here.

some Chaudiere Books author activity

not only do we have the Vancouver and Edmonton John Newlove screenings/launches, but decalogue: ten Ottawa poets author Michelle Desbarats is reading at the Dusty Owl Reading Series in Ottawa on January 20th, and various others are involved in the ottawater fourth issue launch at the Ottawa Art Gallery on January 24th; will we see you at one of these?

a review of John Newlove's A Long Continual Argument

A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove. Ed. Robert McTavish, afterword Jeff Derksen. Chaudiere Books, 2007. 251pp, pbk. ISBN 978-0-9781601-9-7.

Kane X. Faucher

Chaudiere Books has released a new selection of poems by John Newlove which includes all of the poems appearing in the 1993 Porcupine’s Quill edition (Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962-1992) with 37 additional poems to better give the reader a more compelling and intimate portrait of a frank observer and modest poetic innovator. What is particularly striking about this collection is the nearly palpable trajectory of development, closely indexed to the fragmented events of his life. Beyond following the same chronology as the 1993 collection, the Chaudiere Books edition appends a handful of other poems during that period as well as Newlove’s post-1993 work.

He presents a raw, uncooked version of the Canadian landscape by way of particular instances that demonstrate his aversion to the stereotypical poetic fare, staging a quiet rebellion. The candour and honesty comes to the fore in such moments as when he admits the revolution’s failure in how the energy to prevail was confused with hypocritical self-aggrandizement and brazen disregard: “It was too late. My eyes/were closed. Freedom, summer,/never seemed to be what we wanted.” (The Cities We Longed For) – In this way, there is a connotative cut between dissatisfaction with the buoyancy of the ideal and the grim outcome of the real. But to label Newlove a poetic realist is to commit a treasonous blunder – rather, he could more appropriately called a clever lyricist with strong realist tendencies.

Despite his occasional lapses into incendiary and anguished subjects that border upon polemic, Newlove’s remarkable gift is in the scrupulous generousity he brings to bear in his playfully punning lines, stripped of the overbearing sentimentality and rigid structures of poetic form. Behind his playfully mendacious cynic’s sneer there is the burbling undertow of a fleeting litany (pronounced in “Notes From and Among the Wars”) that runs through his more vitriolic asides, but his primary target for attack does not spare the poet himself, and it is the involved rather than the high voice that does not posture as the objective outsider looking in. The modesty in his approach would decline any claim to his poems standing as generational anthems, but are instead carefully elusive in not being fixed as being the rallying cry of any group or ideologically myopic plan.

Newlove’s work is an implied testament against vertiginous utopian strategies and the overbearing largesse of poetry manifestoism. It is not so much that he is averse to theory or disinclined to take an ideological stance, but that it can too easily interfere with and impede upon allowing the work to speak itself, such a practice being the domain proper of the documentation- and process-obsessed conceptualists. In place of nesting such conceptual prejudices within the works themselves, Newlove presents us with a kind of desordre d’etabli replete with teasing margins, loose ends, vignettes, and cul de sacs. There is an uncanny kinship here with bpNichol’s epistolary fragments insofar as Newlove illuminates all the personal effects of candour into verse-form, veering from the 60s poetic predilection of couching concrete vision in impenetrable obscurity. Perhaps Newlove would even shy away from such a lofty term like “vision” since that would suggest a unified project, limited in its particulars by the demands of an inflexible form from which all is to be derived.

Newlove has but traces of a poetic inheritance, and what makes the work still so relevant and fresh today is that there seems to be no firm historical precedent installed that would otherwise lead to the etiolation and reduction of his work to crude literary canonization. These traces may betray his reading influences, but never do they actually come to dominate his work and make him culpable as an emulator by any stretch. However, neither do his poetic innovations have the flashy, visceral pizzazz of his contemporaries that tried to reflect the social turbulence of their times through shocking phonetic or overtly concrete visual matrices. Instead, Newlove opted for a marked subtlety in his inventions, making modest appeals to how the poem can be re-envisioned and disseminated. He handles the ageless Canadian leitmotifs with a deft, playful, and unique manner, not relying on the stale tropes of his poetic forbearers. There are moments of lubricious potency in his imagery, but this trades blows with an earthy realism with all the blemishes.

Just a step behind the imagery resides the paradox of Newlove and his “doubles”. There is crouching behind each poem the high-stakes interplay between product-persona and person-producer, but this carries off well in a kind of self-deprecatory way that nuances the poems with a jesting similitude, giving them the characteristic raw beat with a snap to its tempo readers of Newlove have come to recognize and admire. The collection is quite aptly named “A Long Continual Argument”, for although an informative editor’s preface by Robert McTavish and an afterword by Jeff Derksen bracket the works, even then the fisticuffs of Newlove’s solo argument breaks out of these confines to be renewed again in their sanguineous strife. With a sort of Borgesian flourish, he makes even of his own life an inset fiction, blurring the line between work and life, highlighting the absurdity of uniting the bios and the graphein with complicity: “I can remember very little of my life. What I do remember I am suspicious of. I may have invented it” (Being Caught, Author’s Preface to Apology for Absence). Newlove shared the keen insight through his many capsule “autobiographies” that a life is always double or more, eternally irreducible with an infinite remainder. Although we may all be a “sack of wet shit” (Death of the Hired Man), in the end we “make the world” (The Cat). It is these stark contradictions of misery and joy, lies and half-truths, that populate the terrain of the poet and the person, and these are the contentious issues of Newlove’s continual argument with himself.

For those discovering Newlove’s poetry for the first time, readers will delight in his trademark parting shot nested in the pithy last line and the unapologetic poetic reportage, as in “The Fat Man”, that does not hide behind a wall of whimsy or false sympathies. Stylistically, Newlove’s poetry has always remained approachable and never prohibitive or exclusive.

originally appeared in ottawater #4, January 2008; see in the same issue, interviews with Chaudiere authors Nicholas Lea + Anne Le Dressay...

a new piece on John Newlove in Jacket (AUS)

The first review of the John Newlove selected, by John Cunningham in Australia's Jacket magazine; a nice addition to the Newlove stuff in the previous issue...

John Newlove documentary screening & book launch, Vancouver

John Newlove Documentary Screening / Book Launch
Hosted by Jamie Reid, with readings/talk by Jamie Reid and Jeff Derksen [read Derksen's afterword to the book here].
Filmmaker/editor Robert McTavish in attendance.

8pm, Friday, February 8th
The Western Front (303 East 8th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia)
$5 admission, $3 students and unemployed. cash bar.

Come celebrate the life and work of poet John Newlove with a screening of the documentary What to make of it all? The life and poetry of John Newlove, and the Vancouver launch of Chaudiere Books' A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove, edited by Robert McTavish.

About A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove:

A Long Continual Argument is the comprehensive statement of an acknowledged poetic master craftsman. It includes all the poems John Newlove chose for his previous selected poems with substantial additions from all his major collections. All of his later poetry has been included, as well as integral, critically-acclaimed works such as the long poem "Notes From And Among the Wars," and many of the cynically lyric poems that established his early reputation. From his first chapbook in 1961 to his final epigrammatic poems of the late 1990s, Newlove has been a quiet poetry dealing with unquiet themes. A poetry that, in the words of Phyllis Webb, "doesn't struggle for meaning. It emerges out of his thinking."

John Newlove (1938-2003) was born and raised in Saskatchewan. He began publishing while working various jobs in Vancouver in the 1960s. His many honours included the 1972 Governor General's Award for his book Lies, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Founders Award. His works have been internationally published and translated.

"Newlove was the best of us, the great line, the hidden agenda, tough as nails and yet somehow with his heart on his sleeve. There was always a double-take involved when reading his work. His lyrics, such as "The Weather" were faultless. I devoured and loved his work. --Michael Ondaatje

To call him "the voice of prairie poetry" misses the target by as broad a margin as if you called John Milton "the voice of Cromwell's London." This was the voice of a man who knew what it was like to almost drown, to gasp for air, to almost drown again. His poetry delivered a blow to the head then, and it does now. It will be seen again for what it was, and is: major in its time and place. --Margaret Atwood (from John Newlove: Essays on His Works, forthcoming)

For information on the event, contact Jamie Reid at dadababy@shaw.ca
For information on the book, or anything else, contact the publisher, rob mclennan, at az421@freenet.carleton.ca
Ordering information on the book here; information on the Edmonton launch here;

John Newlove and Max Middle

I wouldn't have necessarily put them in the same phrase, but Chaudiere authors John Newlove and Max Middle (as well as a few other Canadian poets) were recently referenced on the British reviews blog Intercapillary Space.