Finished reading titles by lately: Bragg, Truhlar, Fraticelli, Brockwell, Abel, Reiss, Berg and an issue of illeratature but the last 3 are for another day of blogging.

137. Winter Music by Mary Lee Bragg Tree Press, 2013). You can hear her read excerpts at her launch. If you are a reader who’d rather read words than do a video route, here’s one she read that I’m rather fond of for the way it intercuts time and generations. p. 29
     

     My Mother’s Birds
     I snipped the tail feathers
     off my grandmother’s canary.
     My mother’s memory reaches
     across the century,
     to the flu epidemic,
     a small child sent away to a safer place.
     She finds the flower room, quilt blocks,
     sewing scissors too close to the cage
     and tail feathers between the bars.
     That darn bird didn’t sing
     until they grew back, and
     Grandma was mad at me
     the whole time.
     I remember other birds,
     ducks piled iridescent and
     smooth in our porch,
     cold and soft-necked,
     passive to pet.
     My mother plucked the feathers
     snowstorms of down around her feet.
     She drew their guts into a pail –
     corrugated blue gizards, purple livers,
     intestines like earthworms –
     her hand red nearly to the elbow.
     We ate rost duck and spat
     buckshot onto our plates.

138. Utensile Paradise by Richard Truhlar (Aya Press, 1987)
     Now this is hard to summarize or pull representative bits because it varies so much. There’s bits that are meditations around loops of words in time in an existential kind of way. There are poems sitting in a cafe and shooting the breeze which give a sort of villanelle feel with the repetitions that change in their context over several pages. And then there’s spec fiction from a point of view of a species that furtively implants yellow seeds in scrotums in subways and buses. The operation is done to the unawares, until the dots hatch.
     There’s a play in and out of meaning, and then something pop like in p. 22, “luxury is always plural” or p. 20 “the tongue’s/slippered introversion”. Something he does is to take a female narrator. The poems and short stories are trippy and musical. Here’s a sense of a 9 page poem, Vehicle of the Parasite, p. 40 and p. 42

     the farm confirms the existence of the country
     so
     she leaves the city every weekend
     she dislikes insects
     you are the man in the Other café
     the tubular furniture falls against the flagstones
     you remember
     the head is a suspect site
     unlike a farm
     you can almost hear
     the helicopters of the intellect.

     and later along p. 42

     there is no revolution
     the helicopter of the intellect
     do not attack tautologies.
     the eat is on
     when you leave the Other café
     perhaps the graphite gesture
     guarantees
     the value of the farm
     confirms the existence of the country

139. Drifting by Marco Fraticelli (Catkin Press, 2013)
     This book I liked in concept for taking diary entries from 1905 to 1916 and typesetting them as is. There’s a selection from among the entries but each stands as it was originally. Many entries have the intervention of a companion senryu by Fraticelli. The entries accumulate in an interesting way from the time Celesta comes to be a housekeeper/nanny to Henry’s kid to her becoming the breadwinner for the household while he can’t find work to the next stage of their relationship.
     Because it is from a diary, not everything is spelled out in the text, leaving gaps that sometimes get filled in the way a novel would turn with later information. It is not a happy book as the Celesta Taylor is in regularly in some frantic distress, but it is a fascinating book as she navigates and describes her exterior and interior world.

     Aug 16, 1916
     It has rained for four days. Pond is very high. I sorted letters from the desk all day emptying it for the Laurentian Company to have. Opening graves of past memories and viewing corpses all day. I am nearly too ill to sit up.
     I could not sleep until past midnight thinking, thinking, thinking. Got another evasive letter from Chameleon. He sat up until nearly midnight writing such a homesick letter to me. How much I am appreciated and how he carries as many as two of my letters in his jacket all the time.

     To say what the last chapter is would be a spoiler but after the accumulation of story it has some impact. This sort of salvaging of an everyday person’s story and bringing that forward with out history of Canada is a good work. I think of the past as having different constraints but a century ago could have been, largely, written today. I’m talking with the writer Dec 5th on Literary Landscape.

140. Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books by Stephen Brockwell (Mansfield Press, 2013)
     Do you ever refuse to finish a book because you don’t want it to end yet? At some point you’d lose the effect of the wholeness and the energy if you put it off.
     Still, this was a good one. Where to start? In the voice? Here is his reading from the chapter Epistemological Conclusions from Forensic Research.
     Metonymies: Poems of Personal Items Owned by Illustrious People, where there is a poem from the point of view of the robe Mahatma Gandhi was wearing when assassinated. I have read of Gandhi since mid-primary school, did projects on him though primary and secondary. I spent weeks immersed in microfiche reading every report I could from when he first appeared in newspapers then when the headline came of his death, I took it as if it happened in real time. My 1988 was 1948.
     Poems from the Archives of the Ministry of Spiritual Ascendance are supplications and applications that spin moving to a better world, from wrenching poverty people who apply to become god. Here’s a middle third from
     olio 987-3A, March 11, 2035

     The applicant must demonstrate a life
     of service to community and state.
     Muriel Abernathy at the Mission
     will vouch that my soups warmed a thousand hearts
     for twenty years — and lately soup
     is little more than water roots and fat.
     Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I walked
     to the Ministry Church to pray before
     stopping by the the Mission to work soup miracles.
     The applicant must demonstrate a net
     benefit for the state from acceptance.
     I can’t even make soup. I can’t even make myself
     a mustard sandwich. I can barely help others
     and need church assistance to barely preserve
     my dignity before I sleep or wake.

     What it says about the red tape one goes through for dignity, about wanting a better life after death, not wanting death but control of godhead of one could prove worthy of randomly assigned life of squalor, the randomness of equity…a deep think of the systems we keep in place as a society. How much are soup kitchens mentioned in poetry? The poor when they appear are often in soft focus pity and as generic collective to dismiss or Other.
     There is something of the self being brought to accountable with the collective society. The poet doesn’t hold himself apart safely. The reader eye is directed to ocean pollution or what happens to our digital wastes but not with a lecturing tone.
     The 11 chapters each take different focus, but there’s also the binding continuity of Karikura poems running through and responding as another voice to the “main poems”. Many of the poems are dark, such as the ones set in post-apocoplytic, or post-economic meltdown. But then there is the exquisite beauty of Sunrise Starlings p. 42 where the minimalist lines and sketch of murmuration. Or the tender or gentle fondness in the voice of Karikura that act as counter balancing.

141. the place of scraps by Jordan Abel (Talon, 2013)
     I started with some reservation about the book. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m pagist and 260 pages surely must have either writer flab or typesetting indulgences. Nope. Life Drifting, it somehow conveys a novel-like momentum. Jordan Abel raises the bar for what effect you can get from erasure text. And visual poems pulled into the narrative. Each stand by themselves and in context equally well. It progresses and builds to my surprise even when the page erased all text and left only commas. It plays cleverly with and against itself. The text uses archival material of describing the moving of the Totem pole from its carving site village to being “protected” in a Toronto museum. It puts on equal footing the poet’s journey to discover family, his own history in a way comparable to Mark Goldstein’s Form of Forms (BookThug, 2012). But Abel takes his own diary accounts and makes them a document that loses its own integrity and interrogates his own memory. The letters clustered on archived photos of the village become a sort of noise growing and disappearing, suggesting birds or culture.