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Reviewed here: Troubled, by R. M. Vaughan, Coach House, 80 pages, $16.95; During, by Karen Houle, Gaspereau, 112 pages, $19.95; Augustine in Carthage, by Allesandro Porco, ECW, 64 pages, $16.95; Blert, by Jordan Scott, Coach House, 72 pages, $16.95

As its title suggests, Karen Houle's During is filled with poems concerned with process, progress, change and becoming. To approximate a sensation of flux, Houle employs a disjointed, abstracted syntax. The effect is that many poems appear to be the result of a plant-like growth of language, rather than of strict human design, although the careful tending of the gardener is clearly in evidence. In Modesty: Lesson No. 2, which recounts the unfortunate clash of a doe with an automobile, Houle writes:

Tawny neck reclines like hot taffy
molasses eyes fix on him then rotate
shattering a windshield using nothing but brow.

This textual density can be thorny and inhospitable for the reader, but it is not without reward or academic precedent. In a vein similar to better-known poets like Jorie Graham and Daphne Marlatt, Houle writes poetry that is equally lyrical and cerebral. It employs the evocative, albeit often hard to parse, theory-driven linguistic free-play that has become the hallmark of many of Houle's poetic forebears. Sometimes her poems will gradually drift from apparent clarity toward a more confounding diction; it's like striking out from home only to find yourself in a strange land, unsure of how you got there. This book demands painstaking concentration from its readers, but once given over to it, a reader will discover a book steeped in the marvels of the natural world, where human thoughts seem to emanate from organic forms, and all is rendered in a poetry of jungle-like density where the chief pleasure is the texture of the language itself.

When Alessandro Porco published his first book, The Jill Kelly Poems, three years ago, the response was decidedly mixed. While some praised Porco for his humour and deft handling of traditional verse techniques, others felt that Porco's flippant approach to his pornographic subject matter was shallow and distasteful. As though raising a defiant middle finger to his detractors, Porco now gives us his second collection, Augustine in Carthage. Don't let the high-minded title fool you; he hasn't shied away from the sin and silliness that characterized his first book. If anything, he has upped the ante, not only in gleeful vulgarity, but also in skillful versification.

It is in the foggy gulch between high art and seedy subculture or preposterous kitsch where Porco, like painter John Currin and sculptor Jeff Koons, creates the aesthetic tension that drives his art. Stylistically, Porco is something of a metrical chameleon. The title poem of the book is a scatological, vice-riddled mock epic in the tradition of Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In the poem Hieronymus Tugnutt in Love, Porco's nonsense verse approaches the tenor of Lewis Carroll, while Bob Alan Deal is a series of Shakespearean sonnets chronicling the rise and fall (and rise?) of Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars. Here's a quatrain, just for a taste:

Pop some Seconal, chase it with a Sloe Gin,
Or Bellar - the drink I concocted to get cocked -
One part Kahlua, one part brandy, all rock;
Snort and ant, bum a tab of mescaline -

Only occasionally does Porco's light-heartedness feel too light for his abilities. It was inevitable that he would try his hand at the traditional limerick, and he ends this book with 21 of the squalid Irish ditties. While some of these are almost knee-slappers, most are (as limericks are wont to be) mere groaners, but I commend him for attempting to elevate this decidedly limited form.

In Blert, Jordon Scott gives us a kind of poetic abstraction of a completely different order than Karen Houle's. If abstraction is a disengagement from the familiar, then Houle's disengagement relies on the peculiarity of her syntax, so that we must ask ourselves what a word means given its position in a verse.

Scott's poetry, on the other hand, frequently ditches the notion of syntax altogether. Words don't need to mean anything when they can exist solely as physical matter, as literal building blocks, and for Scott, words are eminently physical, not only as ink printed on paper, but also as plosives, fricatives and taps, as a column of air shaped in his body and expelled from his mouth. Try saying this out loud: "Brontosaurus lambada boom box, crunk bumps: knick-knack paddy whack tonsil clamcrack." This physicality of language is especially significant to Scott's poetry because - like Lewis Carroll, Somerset Maugham and John Updike - Jordon Scott is a stutterer.

When a recognizable voice does emerge in Blert, it comes to tell us something about the often unreliable engine of the author's mouth: "If you brace a megaphone to my throat, you will hear a tiddlywink bleat, a lark rustle in the ripe corn, and my esophagus blunderbuss - exhaust in your glossary." The exuberance of this text is only enhanced by hearing Scott read from it aloud, when his own speech apparatus lingers and hesitates without warning, fondling random syllables as they struggle to become physical, audible, real, and then die in the air.

Admirably, Scott has taken his so-called impediment and from it crafted a poetry that is physically beautiful, conceptually rich, and relevant to the world outside the book that contains it.

Finally, we come to Troubled, by poet, novelist, playwright and visual artist R. M. Vaughan. Good lord, what a gorgeous and courageous book! I scarcely know where to begin, but here are the basics: Troubled is a memoir in poems; it chronicles the disastrous sexual relationship that Vaughan had with his actual (and unnamed) psychiatrist and the emotional, legal and professional fallout that ensued.

It is a story of lust and manipulation, of excitement and risk, and of a trust betrayed. It would be easy for any writer to let this kind of book sink into a morass of embittered diary entries and tawdry sentimentality, but Vaughan is too canny, too gifted for that.

What struck me most about this book, perhaps because of its appalling subject matter rather than in spite of it, is the equal measure of tenderness and disdain with which Vaughan conjures his own vulnerabilities and the exploitive tendencies of his abuser. He manages this very balanced feat precisely because he wields the tools of his poetry so well. The language is rich, involving, and evocative. The poems crackle with emotional and ethical efficacy. Recalling the moment the principal players acknowledge to each other that a line has indeed been crossed, Vaughan writes:

Here is where you cut my heart,
inserted snakes in the folds, blood holes - garters
not pythons, not eels
nothing monstrous or broad,
fanged or rattle-tipped - finger curls, not fists,
because you are so very clever, smart as salt.

Rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric, all the weapons in the poet's arsenal are strategically and expertly deployed here, and R. M. Vaughan, both as poet and as victim, achieves a final and decisive victory.

Paul Vermeersch is the author of three collections of poetry, with a fourth due in 2010. He lives in Toronto and teaches at Sheridan College.