March 30, 2014
In Love With Art by Jeet Heer
It’s funny that comics have an aura of exclusivity. They’re so of-the-people, pulpy, low-rent accessible. I grew up reading comics, but then these were Archie comics, which aren’t real comics, and so I’ve lost my footing in this world already. Legendary comics store The Beguiling is around the corner from my house, but I’ve never been there for many of the same reasons I’ve never walked into Prada, just a bit further east on Bloor. But then they opened a sister shop nearby, Little Island Comics for kids, and I have a kid, so we went there, and our family’s comics love has been growing ever since. Harriet and Stuart are currently reading Wonderland by Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew over and over, I read Jane, the Fox and Me last week, Harriet is obsessed with Wonder Woman and the DC Comics I Can Read books, she adores Binky, we got our first Silly Lilly book a long time ago, and bought Jack and the Box at Little Island just the other day (after this great recommendation by Michael Barclay). Parenthood has been my gateway to the world of comics, and I’m so grateful for that.
Silly Lilly and Jack and the Box are published by TOON Books, a series of stylish, smart, well-designed comics for kids packaged neatly as hardcover books. TOON Books was founded by Francoise Mouly, who is better known (as much as Francoise Mouly is considered “known” at all) as the partner of Art Spiegelman, of Maus fame. Using interviews and archival research, Jeet Heer has written a short biography of Mouly, In Love With Art, in an attempt to bring Mouly out from her husband’s shadow, though it’s actually Mouly of the two whom I know best, from her work as founder and Editorial Director of TOON Books and also by her long-time position as Art Editor of The New Yorker with its iconic covers. I may not have known Francoise Mouly’s name, but it turns out I’ve been paying attention to her work for a long time.
In Love With Art is part of Exploded Views, a new series of short books published by Coach House Books, books that in their immediacy read like extended magazine articles. Heer, with his signature mix of down to earth and erudite (and the world’s best vocabulary—who knew that “shanghai” was a verb?) has created a fascinating, absorbing book that made me grateful for the mild temperatures that allowed to me to continue reading (mitten-less) even after I got off the subway and was walking down the street. It’s a book that fit in my coat pocket and I read it in a day, but kept talking about it after with everyone I ran into. “Francoise Mouly. You think you don’t know her, but you do. You’ve got to read this book.”
It’s a fascinating story of a woman in a man’s world, of her childhood and formative years coming of age in France around 1968. She studied architecture, developing an design aesthetic that she’s applied to every project she’s done since, including low-grade jobs like “colourist”, overriding general consensus that jobs like this don’t matter. Not a comic writer herself, instead she’s a comics editor–who even knew there was such a thing? And part of the reason you’ve never heard of her is because her greatest impact has been in helping well-known artists to create their best work. With Spiegelman, she edited the RAW comics magazine for years, work from which is reproduced in In Love With Art in full colour, alone with her memorable New Yorker covers.
I was as surprised as anyone to discover that I, a woman who grew up reading Archie’s Pals and Gals, was this book’s ideal reader, but then it’s not so surprising after all. Women’s lives, women’s stories, women’s art, women for whom motherhood is a kind of answer—it’s been my thing all along. Consider my view exploded then. In the best way.
March 25, 2014
CanLit Companions: Prairie Ostrich and Jane The Fox and Me
As if Jane, The Fox, and Me needed another endorsement. Winner of a Governor-General’s Award for Illustration, included on many year-end Best Of lists, including The New York Times’. But I walked into Little Island Comics on Saturday to finally buy a copy, and when I asked for it at the counter, the other children in the store starting raving. “It’s the best book ever,” one of them told me, so if I’d ever had any doubt…
The star of this show is the illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault, which recall her gorgeous drawings from Virginia Wolf. The story, by Franny Britt and translated by Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou, is about a young girl, Helene, who seeks solace from her tormentors within the pages of a book: Jane Eyre. And here, Arnseault’s images are lush, defined and richly coloured. Whereas, in the panels of her life, lines are rough, darkly shaded, bare-treed and dull. Helene is on the outs with girls who’d once been her friends, as is ever the way, and both the text and images capture her sense of being totally alone. The bullying is unrelenting (an amazingly, so pointedly hurtful and careless and stupid at the exact same time), Helene powerless against it, even more so when she’s made to join her classmates on a trip to a wilderness camp. Things get worse before they get better, but a curious encounter with a fox shifts everything, and then Helene makes a real friends, colour slowly returning to her world.
I read it as I was reading Prairie Ostrich by Tamai Kobayashi, whose cover design is so stunning that the book does not seem so far apart from a graphic novel. (Full disclosure! Prairie Ostrich is published by Goose Lane, which also publishes The M Word.) Kobayashi’s Egg is younger than Helene–7 or 8-years-old–but just as alienated from her world. On their ostrich farm in the Alberta Badlands, Egg’s is the only Japanese family on the prairie in the 1970s, her parents’ painful pasts from WW2 refusing to stay buried. But the past has got nothing on the present, in which the family has been torn apart since elder brother Albert’s death under mysterious circumstances a few months before. Her father has taken to sleeping in the barn, her mother seeking solace in booze, and her sister Kathy’s close friendship with another girl is raising eyebrows in their small town. Egg doesn’t understand the disarray she’s witnessing and, like Helene, takes solace in books, though she prefers the dictionary and books of facts over fiction, because fiction is so slippery. She likes the illusion of order which the dictionary offers to the world, and she likes other illusions too, like the alternative ending to The Diary of Anne Frank, which her sister reads to her, in which Anne survives and travels to a new life in America.
Such a young protagonist in an adult novel is a tricky thing, which Kobayashi succeeds at by making Egg quite precocious (though she is very much the opposite in other essential ways, much to her social detriment). Egg is also provided with abundant material to filter through her point of view, small towns being good for such things. There were a few moments in which as a reader, I could glimpse the author above the story, busily pulling on strings, but in general, I was taken with this story, with its pop culture allusions and as a testament to how we bury ourselves in books (and escape recess by hiding in the library—who hasn’t been there?).
Both Prairie Ostrich and Jane, the Fox and Me are books whose appeal extends between age groups, and which offer thoughtful, emphatic perspectives on everybody’s favourite buzzword, bullying. They’re books about the books that save us, about the fictional worlds we so need when we’re young in which we’re free to dream ourselves.
March 23, 2014
The Age by Nancy Lee
My review of The Age by Nancy Lee appeared in The Globe and Mail this weekend:
It seems fitting, if sinister, to suggest that something in the air could be responsible for a strange tension emanating lately from the nation’s western edge. The Age – the long-awaited first novel by Nancy Lee, who won acclaim with the short-story collection Dead Girls– joins terrific recent fiction by Zsuzsi Gartner and Caroline Adderson to form a subgenre of Vancouver literature that puts the “domestic” in domestic terrorism. These works explore female characters’ relationships to extremism to complicate notions of home and family.
Lee’s title refers to two pivotal ages, her plot born of their intersection. The first is the age in which her story takes place, 1984, which, thanks to Orwell, was always going to be a storied year, even if Soviet warships hadn’t been gathering in the Atlantic with the Doomsday Clock ticking close to midnight. It would be a peculiar time in which – and here’s the second title reference – to come of age, seemingly on the brink of annihilation, as is the case for Gerry, Lee’s misfit protagonist.
Read the whole thing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2BviXN6yhk
March 17, 2014
After Alice by Karen Hofmann
What a pleasure is spending a weekend devouring a book, and for me this weekend, that book was After Alice by Karen Hofmann, which I absolutely adored. It was the most unCanLitty CanLit I’ve encountered in ages, the story instead calling to mind English novelists like Anita Brooker and Daphne DuMaurier, and then Wallace Stegner, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Didion in its evocation of place. This is a debut novel by Hofmann, whose previous poetry collection was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize in 2009, but she writes with a touch so rich and deft that there is nothing of the debut about it.
There’s a lot going on here: Sidonie Von Täler has retired from her academic job in Montreal designing computer models for psychology experiments. Sidonie herself is something of a cold-fish, so this seems a job to which she’d be unusually suited. We’re locked into her point of view, and it soon becomes apparent that something is just askew–she is a synesthete, displays some symptoms of Aspergers in her perception of the world. Which is not to say that Sidonie’s point of view is the point of this story, that this is a novel or that she’s a protagonist we’d ever refer to as “quirky” ala Come Thou Tortoise or the Dog in Nighttime, but just that she’s a bit peculiar. Her point of view is fascinating, and her voice is sharply defined.
She’s returned to the Okanagan Valley where she’d fled from years before. In her childhood, her family’s orchard had been one of the biggest in the area, their land defining every circumstance of their existence and their status in the community. Sidonie, ever awkward, had been raised in the shadow of her beautiful sister, Alice, whose tragic later circumstances we’re not made aware of until later in the book. Upon her return, Sidonie gets to know her sister’s sons and their own family’s. She’s also close to her niece, Cynthia, whom she’d raised after Alice’s death, and Cynthia’s son, Justin, though much goes unsaid between all of them, Sidonie choosing to believe that she prefers her independence to the complications and niceties of family ties.
And you can’t blame her–Sidonie is brilliant, accomplished and self-succificent, having left a life rich with culture and a couple of close, rewarding friendships back in Montreal. She’d married well–an architect who built Habitat 67 in Montreal, where they’d lived until their marriage ended. She looked upon her marriage not warmly, but as coolly as she did everything. Some might find her life lonely, but there is no sign that she does. But something has driven her to come home, to a past that refuses to stayed packed away in boxes.
After Alice has mystery at its core, and while its approach is most literary, Hofmann has combined that approach with well-tuned plot that makes this book a page-turner. It is also very much a book about place, though not sentimentally so–Sidonie doesn’t do that–but instead the details of the land and what grows there, what it means to work that land in terms of economics and physical labour. It’s a novel that might take a place on the shelf beside Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle or The Hundred Mile Diet in its consideration of the terroir, what the land does to its people. And what times does too, Hofmann weaving past and present together, Sidonie’s family home casting a spell that makes it difficult for her to tell where one of them finishes and the other begins, though it’s really that points like this just don’t happen.
Hofman’s prose is lyrical and effective, if a little in need of tautness. And her ending is a little bit too tidy and choreographed, though still with its surprises. But these are minor quibbles for a novel so ultimately satisfying, and so I welcome Hofmann’s refreshing voice with this wonderful book, one of the most interesting and exciting that I’ve encountered in ages.
March 11, 2014
Bark by Lorrie Moore
I’m still discovering Lorrie Moore, which is a pretty lucky place to be in as a reader. The first book I read of hers was Anagrams, and I just thought it was weird. I really liked The Gate at the Stairs, and then I read Birds of America but I mustn’t have been reading carefully because I don’t even remember it. So when I opened up her latest collection, Bark, I didn’t have the same expectations that her much more devoted readers might have had. I wouldn’t have been able to tell if it was a good Lorrie Moore or a middling Lorrie Moore. As I read it, all I could think was, “So, this is Lorrie Moore,” which was a pretty fantastic revelation.
The stories themselves are many-angled, surprising, full of perfectly articulating revelations. On divorce: “It’s like a trick. It’s like someone puts a rug over a trapdoor and says, ‘Stand here.’ And so you do. Then boom.” Or, “It was like being snowbound with someone’s demented uncle. Should marriage be like that? She wasn’t sure.” And, “A life could rhyme with a life—it could be a jostling close call that one mistook for the thing itself.”
No super-narrative tricks or sleights of hand are going on here. As short story shapes go, these ones are mostly standard, riddled with quirk, but then there is this extra-perspective at play in which characters call out surreality of their situations. “He had never been involved with the mentally ill before…” it is noted of a character in the first story, “Debarking,” a guy who’s dating the bizarre quirky kind of woman who turns up in many a short story, a manic pixie dream girl gone very very wrong. All of these are stories of a world gone askew, and its people definitely know it, however powerless they may be against its forces.
The surrealism and sense of askewness is unsurprising. These are stories of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the first story situated sometime in the months after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The final story begins the day after Michael Jackson died in 2009, and doesn’t offer much hope for the decade to come: “I tried to think positively. ‘Well, at least Whitney Houston didn’t die,’ I said to somebody on the phone.” Foreclosures, banks and big-box bookstores, both. War, fear and Abu Grahib are the backdrop to these smaller stories of domestic disappointment. It got to the point where I was underlining references to decapitation, and there were more than a few. I got the sense that this is a book haunted by the story of Daniel Pearl.
While many of these stories have been published elsewhere, they’ve been collected seamlessly into a curious, fascinating whole that is as much worth remarking on as the stories themselves. The stories are linked by weird decapitation references, and the word “bark” which comes up again and again in a variety of contexts. Trees for one, the bark their protection, as is the case with dogs (which also come up again and again). The question of whether bark is, in fact, worse than bite—just one of many things we’re told that’s patently not true. I wonder if Moore’s bark, our bark, is in fact humour—what saves us from this savage life.
March 9, 2014
For Sure by France Daigle, trans. Robert Majzels
For two weeks, I was reading For Sure by France Daigle, a 719 page novel that doesn’t have much of a plot. However plotless though, For Sure is more useful than most novels I encounter—with its help, I taught my daughter to swim. Seriously. And not just that, but for those two weeks as I lived with this book, a giant doorstop, and its people, strange connections were made between the happenings in their lives and the occurrences within my own. Which is precisely what France Daigle wants me to think. She has no truck with characters or their stories staying within the confines of their pages.
Not least of all because this is the fourth book in her series about a group of people who live and work in converted lofts in Moncton, New Brunswick. In its original French, Pour Sur won the Governor General’s Award for French Literatre in 2012. Though it wasn’t French exactly, but instead Chiac, an Acadian-French dialect mixed with English and Aboriginal influences, spoken by Acadian communities in southeast New Brunswick. Which has been translated into English by Majzels as French-accented English with a Newfoundland bent–“fer sure” for “for sure”, a lot of “dat dem dare.”
The novel is made up of twelve sections, each section broken into fragments, assigned a number code and category. A sense of progression comes from moving through the code rather than the fragments themselves, whose connections are often elusive. (I just mistyped that as “allusive” but I kind of mean that too.) There’s a lot about Scrabble, colours, the names of colours, the colour of letters, attempts to quantify the abstract, apply methodology to slippery things (like novels). An attempt to write the book of Chiac, to put the colloquial down on paper, articulate its rules and laws, but then language is as slippery as a novel after all. And life itself.
There are people here too. At its heart, this is a novel about Terry and Carmen and their small children Etienne and Marianne, and their friends at the lofts where they live, and where Terry works at a bookstore and Carmen co-owns a bar (called Babar). There are little plots, small mysteries, and even a murder (on the periphery). Terry worries about being a good father, they wonder whether their kids might grow up to be gay, they take a holiday, do crosswords, and define their language through acts of every day life. All the characters in the book ponder the mysteries of language and words, and search for meaning in their patterns. Just as the reader of For Sure seeks to put the pieces together in her own right, connect the dots, come up with a whole.
What is most compelling about these characters is their goodness, their aspirations toward such things. And yet that they’re compelling all the same—this is something. They’re flawed too enough to be real, so much so that when France Daigle herself (so we assume) sits down with these fictional people for a chat, and they discuss their place within her narrative and her control over their fates, the conversation is completely plausible, as is the fictional existence of Daigle herself.
More for plausibility: Terry teaches his son to swim by imploring him to try to drown. The boy tries, finds it’s impossible and begins having faith in his buoyancy after all. Which is the same trick I tried the next day after reading this passage, in the swimming pool with my daughter whose relationship to swimming lately has been of an adversarial nature. And it worked! 30 minutes later, she was swimming without clutching another human body for dear life, which is huge. And to think we owe it all to Terry Thibedeau.
It is worth nothing that in reading this translation, rendered in a made-up dialect, there is an enormous gap between what we’re reading and what Daigle and her novel intended. And yet, I think this gap only underlines the novel’s central thesis, which is that precision of language is something of a fallacy. That anything expressed in language is going to be a muddle, a translation. That in reaching toward precision, the reach instead of the precision is always going to be the point.
March 5, 2014
It Was Not What I Expected by Val Teal
We’ve had The Little Woman Wanted Noise out of the library, a picture book by Val Teal and illustrated by Robert Lawson, recently reissued by New York Review Books. Lawson is notable as the illustrator of The Story of Ferdinand and Mr. Popper’s Penguins, though it was Val Teal’s biography that most intrigued me. “In addition to her stories for children,” it reads, “Teal also wrote a memoir of motherhood, It Was Not What I Expected.”
It Was Not What I Expected is described in this 1948 review as “[s]teering away from sentimentality… a vivacious, gaily turned account of modern parenthood.” I liked the sound of that, as well as any parenting memoir by the author of The Women Wanted Noise, who in her dedication thanks her own three sons, “whose noise inspires the little woman.” The book isn’t easy to come by, long out of print and not held by local libraries, but used copies are available on Abebooks (though that I bought the cheapest I regret now, because it came without a dust jacket).
I had some ideas of what an account of modern parenthood published in 1948 might read like. I had these ideas because a long time ago I’d read Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford by Christina Hardyment, which is where I first encountered the idea of babies being aired from apartment buildings in cages. It is also where it was first made clear to me that childcare advice (and “parenting philosophies,” baby fads and gadgets, and dictums everyone from Ferber to Sears) is a complete load of bollocks, and that we ought to cleanse our minds of most of it, except for reasons involving amusement or historical interest. The more things change, the more they stay the same, which is both a cliche, and also Hardyment’s thesis and in this context, such a revelation.
For example, here is Val Teal on big strollers, which remain, of course, a contentious issue to this day:
“In those days buggies were built. None of your light canvas affairs. They had a solid steel framework and lots of it. They had a big wicker body and hood with a steel bottom with a diaper compartment large enough to hold a dozen or so. The baby-carriage manufacturers expected you to push the baby on really long trips. If you took the notion to walk to Chicago some afternoon to visit your aunt they would not stand in your way. They had prepared a perambulator with ample space for the baby’s and your luggage during your stay. They expected you to have a big baby and push him around until he was three or four years old and they had provided room for this, with enough left over to bring home the groceries, including a watermelon if you were so inclined. The buggy weighed several hundred pounds, several hundred and fifty pounds with the baby and his paraphernalia aboard. We did not have an extra garage to keep it in. It furnished our small dining room very nicely before we could afford a dining room set. While you pushed this young truck around like mad, your tongue hanging out the baby sat like a rosy king, taking in the world with his round eyes, the air with his pink nose.”
It is often said that nobody tells the truth about motherhood, though I think the reality is really that nobody ever listens. Because Val Teal was telling the truth in 1948, Betty Friedan in 1963 Erma Bombeck in the 1970s, Susan Swan in 1992, just to pick a handful of examples. Some early passages from It Was Not What I Expected were so similar to my own experiences, which had come as such a surprise to me when my first baby was born. Like this one, as Teal and her husband arrive at the hospital for their first baby’s arrival:
“Across the street a young couple were just getting home. They were laughing and talking softly as he found the key and put it in the door. We could have been just like that as well as not. We could have been just coming home from a party. Why had I been so eager? Maybe I’d die. Maybe we’d never come home from a party like that again together… We had been so happy. We’d had a good life. Why had I had to get ambitious? Darn it all, I didn’t want a baby. I just wanted to go home and go to parties.”
A few pages later, the baby is born, and mother and son are home:
“The Baby cried and cried. I had given up not feeding him at two in the morning long ago. Every time I fed him he went to sleep for half an hour. Then he cried again.
‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ I wept to Bill. ‘I wish I was back in the hospital.'”
Motherhood was less complicated for previous generations, Teal explains. She describes a trip when her first son was seven months old, the directions they’d had to send ahead, provisions required, their car ridiculously packed. Along they way, they stop for the baby’s sunbath (as dictated by both government pamphlets and the Women’s Home Companion). She writes, “I used to think about [my mother] being cleaned up every afternoon, baking cakes for visitors, sprinting off peppy as a kitten to coffee parties, pushing her baby-sled full of clean babies, and I wished I’d lived then when babies were less complicated…”
It Was Not What I Expected takes great joy in dissecting the naiveté of the new mother, insistent upon raising baby according to the book (what book? depends which decade, I suppose). How stupid we all were in those early days, and how determined we were that we would be the masters of motherhood rather than motherhood be the masters of us. Naturally, hilarity ensues.
Memorable scenes include Teal getting locked in the attic while her son sits outside the door eating beads, and the time she hires a simple-minded creature prone to seizures to babysit as she tries to better herself at a meeting of the American Association of University Women and it all goes wrong. (“I began gradually to give up the International Relations section because Hitler seemed to go right ahead doing impolite and smarty things, even though we met every week with luncheons too, instead of teas.)
And like any mother, she frets about play dates:
“I learned at the Child Study Group that children need companionship. If you child did not have others to play with you must do something about it. You must see that other children came to your house. It was a matter of life and death. Or anyway the difference between success and failure. You must drag in companionship. You must inveigle children to come. You must offer them food and toys, anything, to get them there. Companionship was the breath of life to the normal child.”
Teal’s second child just escapes being born in the Piggly Wiggly. “Now I knew all about babies,” she writes. “Peter would be easy to raise. I was experienced. There would be no foolishness about who was boss. I knew who was boss.” Instead of books to raise this baby, she decides, she’ll employ her own instinct. She will let the baby do what he likes.
More adventures in motherhood with boys: the necessary acquisition of a menagerie, dogs, ducks and rabbits. The obligatory paper-route. She helicopter parents, terrified of her boys riding their bicycles and therefore driving along behind them in the car on the way to their music lessons.
She addresses her determination that her boys shall play with dolls, much to the concern of everyone around her. To which she replies, pre-dating Charlotte Zolotow, “If more boys had been allowed to play with doll there’d be more intelligent fathers. Boys have been taught for too long a time that it is shameful for men to have anything to do with the care and bringing up of children. Men need tenderizing. I’m going to raise them to, first of all, be kind and loving fathers, and considerate husbands.” This chapter is wonderful, and ends with her son packing his doll (Uncle Pat Mulligan), along with a toy revolver on a trip:
“What have you got that for?” I asked. “Leave [the gun] at home. You’ve got enough to carry.”
“No, I gotta have it,” Peter grabbed for the gun.
“What for?” I asked, holding it back.
“If Pat Mulligan turns bad on this trip I’ll have to shoot him in the stomach,” Peter said.
I gave Peter the gun. You never could tell when Pat Mulligan might turn bad.
Teal’s picture book and her memoir are excellent companions. In the former, the little woman cannot rest without noise and goes out of her way to acquire more and more animals to liven up her farm and fill the air with sound. With that same lust for more, Teal writes in her memoir of her own yearning for a large family, a yearning augmented by a miscarriage and a stillbirth. “What no man, no doctor, no woman who has never lost a child can ever know about, is the consuming desire to replace that child that comes to the woman who has lost one.” The losses are not dwelt on here, but neither are they swept under a rug, instead acknowledged in practical terms as part of the vast motherhood experience.
Teal’s narrative is remarkable for its blend of wry humour and depth, of exasperation and joy. She so perfectly articulates motherhood as the curious mix that it is of the spiritual and earthly, the perfect and perfectly awful:
“Sometimes I’d look down and see these children around the house and feel very surprised and young and incapable… My goodness, where had they come from?… How in the world had this come about all of a sudden? They weren’t dolls, dream-figures. They were real, alive children, going-to-be men; dear Heaven, what had I done? I had made people! I had made people, Lord help me, people with emotions and plans and wishes and disappointments and longings. People. With souls. And when it would come over me, I’d stand very still and get very scared and helpless feeling. But they always brought me out of it.”
March 2, 2014
The Mystery Shopping Cart by Anita Lahey
It’s about once or twice a day when something happens that reminds me how much I’m going to miss Book City when it’s gone (which is not too long now–stock is down to 40% off and the shelves are bare). I’m going to miss having a shop just around the corner that I could quite sure would have a copy of The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Criticism by Anita Lahey in stock. In fact, they had two. To think I took this for granted for awhile, being served as a member of the public who just happened to require The Mystery Shopping Cart at a moment’s notice.
And the reason that I required the book was because I was developing this fantasy in which I published a series of books of literary essays and reviews by Canadian women critics (including myself, naturally). I find that women writers in particular tend to be a bit all over the shop in terms of oeuvre, and I think that something magical might happen when you curate their non-fiction into a book, and some kind of overarching narrative emerges, their preoccupations become apparent, the approach that was always always there, but it’s just that she didn’t feel the need to state it in boldface over and over again.
This fantasy came about because I kept noticing the way in which male critics tend to get their work collected into books in numbers which, compared to female critics, reflects how much more of their criticism is published in the first place. And then I discovered The Mystery Shopping Cart, the book of my dreams. To Book City I ventured then in order to hold that dream in my hand.
Last week I stated (on twitter, no less) that The Mystery Shopping Cart was a perfect antidote to February, as well as to bookstore closures and general dissatisfaction with the state of the world. Because here is a book that testifies that words, books and ideas matter. Here is a smart and generous voice that takes the reader into its fold. The book begins with friendship, Lahey’s with poet Diana Brebner, and I didn’t manage to get through the first piece about Brebner (and how a mysterious shopping cart had once found its way, overturned, onto Anita Lahey’s lawn) before putting one of Brebner’s books on hold at the library–the one with her Mary Pratt poems.
This is that kind of book, the kind that takes you places. The kind with essays about poetry that I read anyway, though I am not a poet myself, or a confident reader of them. These are essays about poets I’ve never heard of, poets that I’ve never read, and I read these essays anyway. They presume that I should care about these things, invite me to do so, and I do. I am welcomed into the conversation, rather than alienated from it (by jargon, theory, grudges and biases I’m not privy to). Last week, for the first time I reviewed a poetry collection and felt confident about what I’d written, certainly not least of all because I was writing under Lahey’s influence. From The Mystery Shopping Cart, I’m learning that poetry might be mine to think about and write about, that I don’t necessarily need to learn a whole other language in order to do so, and just because poetry sometimes leaves me puzzled doesn’t mean I’m reading wrong, and that puzzlement (and a willingness to be made so vulnerable) is sometimes the very point.
Much of this book was familiar to me from Lahey’s associations with The New Quarterly. It was a pleasure to once again encounter her interview with Sharon McCartney and Kerry Ryan about poetry and boxing/wrestling/kickboxing, as well as her conversation with Kim Jernigan and Alice Munro. I’d also read some of her reflections from Arc Poetry Magazine in the wonderful Quarc Issue (which I adored and wrote about in 2011).
I enjoyed her essays about poets familiar to me (PK Page and Gwendolyn MacEwen, and how she takes issue with the former for inspiring a generation of Canadian poets to write terrible glosssas, and with the rest of us with conflating the self and work of the latter) and others–Dorothy Roberts, exiled Canadian and niece of Charles G.D.–who knew? I also appreciated her conversation with poets Stephanie Bolster and John Barton about the lure of ekphrasis. And how Lahey’s critic work is complemented by the personal essay included at the end.
The whole book was so good that it makes me fantasize about my female critics series more than ever. Sometimes I fear that in spending so much time lamenting the voices that are missing that we’re neglecting to pay attention to the few that are there. Kudos for Palimpsest Press for making this reader pay attention.
February 28, 2014
Review in The National Post: Know the Night
I reviewed Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours by Maria Mutch in the National Post, and writing the piece was like building something out of materials which are more exquisite than anything I’ve ever worked with. The book is weird, wonderful and enthralling, and to call it a memoir about parenting or autism is to reduce the book to something finite, which it isn’t. The book is bigger than all of that–it’s about books, jazz, lists, loneliness, the whole world, and it’s a love story too.
‘”There is nothing quite like caring for a child alone, while the rest of the world is sleeping. In the dark, reality loses its shape, time slows as the clock ticks towards sunrise. It is easy to become unhinged. In her first book, Know the Night, Maria Mutch documents her own experiences during what she calls “the small hours.” For two years her oldest son, Gabriel, slept very little. She was either up caring for him, or, anticipating he would soon awaken, be unable to sleep herself. It was an arrangement Mutch calls a product of “parenting’s alchemical gist: the love for the child … mitigates everything else; what would seem anathema to others becomes … the status quo.'”
February 24, 2014
How the Gods Pour Tea by Lynn Davies
I think I’ve finally got the hang of how to read a poetry collection, or at least one which is not structured around an overarching narrative. And the way to read such a collection, I’m learning, goes a lot like the advice of the late Mavis Gallant on reading short stories: “Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”
So I’ve been reading poems from Lynn Davies’ How the Gods Pour Tea over the past couple of months, shutting the book, coming back later. It’s a thin book too, one I’ve been tucking into my coat pocket to read while I’m watching Harriet’s swimming lessons, or waiting for her in the playground after school. Its a beautiful book, printed in Toronto at Coach House, but in its travels with me the edges of the cover have become worn, the baby has chewed on it once or twice. I was reading in the park on Friday when snowflakes started falling, and they left tiny prints on the page, and this was so absolutely perfect for this book in which the line between books and nature seem to have been obliterated: “The squirrels have pulled apart my diaries for their enormous nest…” from “In the Bookstore.”
Though in a way, there is an overarching theme to this collection, which is a sense of sadness and being bereft, there being an absence which has shifted things and made the narrator pay close attention to things she hasn’t noticed for awhile. Nature as something almost monstrous, certainly wondrous. When I started to read the book, I was reading the poems in order, deciphering each one for a central message, a sign. I almost managed to catch “On Mercy” in a net, and I loved the poem for my accomplishment. I was besotted with “On My Knees at the Strawberry U-Pick,” this poem about scattered pieces of conversation eavesdropped on, Davies’ lines like, “How the boys lay down/ to ponder infinity, how the idea of fruit flies/ spurs me on.” The way these poems manage to so perfectly and curiously mingle the ethereal and down-to-earth, moving from one place to another with such ease.
But then I put the book down because to decipher each poem was too much. I was starting to realize that these weren’t poems that would ever make perfect sense, no matter how much I broke down line-by-line. And when that was finally understood, it all was easier, and I would pick up the book and flip randomly for a page that seemed to call me, and these callings were alway so perfectly timed.
Reading “Ice Storm” just before Christmas: “We’re blinded/ by the extra light/ knotted in trees,/ our feet pulled/ out from under/ us again.” “Power Poles” which poses questions about a pole with the same reverence we’d give a tree, its wild cousin, who is not “bristly with staples and bits of old post.” The end of “Alone”: “I leave books open/ in every room/ of our house.” Reading “The Golden Roofs” this past week, about images of Kiev. Reading “How Much?”, which wonders if equations can be posed for anything, which is the same conceit as France Daigle’s For Sure, which I’m reading right now.
“Fireworks” is like “On Mercy”, which is that I can’t quite pin it down, but I understand precisely what it’s grasping at—the closest these poems get to clarity: “Could be the rowdy city/ cousins of aurora borealis. /How the Gods pour tea.” And ending with. “A parachute/ for all the nights ahead of us.” (I think that with these poems I’m also finally beginning to understand “sublime.”) There is a poem about cheese, about the space between blue cheese and cheddar, a daughter’s perspective of a father “who so rarely pretended or played at anything.”
Reading “Footins” in the park the other day,” Three-headed February and freezing rain/ coats the road. I’m reading Chekhov and Gilbert/ and cookbooks.” Which becomes a trip through the dictionary: “What sea did f cross to get here,/ that failing grade…”
I don’t know what a “footin” is, or why February has three heads. Who is Gilbert? Why the squirrels are in the bookstore either. I haven’t read all the poems in How the Gods Pour Tea, but I’ve realized I don’t have to, or at least not in order. This is not a book that will be caught in a net, but instead, I’ve let it live alongside me, carried it in my pocket. These are poems that will cast spells in their own sweet time. Indeed, these are poems that can wait.
