On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Alberta poetry publisher Frontenac House has upped its annual output from four titles to 10. Having enlisted the services of judges Alice Major, bill bissett and George Elliott Clarke, the press held itself a little competition and arrived at 10 new books from a varied crop of underdogs and veterans. They include sports journalist Laurie MacFayden's debut collection, White Shirt, as well as a mid-career work from Edmonton's Jannie Edwards ( Falling Blues). Both are competent titles, at home in the canon of Canadian lyricism.
Among the more ambitious efforts, Edmonton poet Jocko Benoit's Standoff Terrain is a book of cheeky love poems inspired by Sun Tzu's The Art of War, while William Nichols calls his mild dyslexia "his muse" in the notes to his Fallacies of Motion, thus giving a name to the wonky, occasionally sublime, poetics that trademark his civic-minded observations. Lori Cayer's Attenuations of Force does fun things with both typography and science.
Meanwhile, Adebe D.A.'s ex nihilo is a book dominated by poetic acts of self-identification (along generational, aesthetic and ethnographic lines). It's ironic, then, that ex nihilo's most memorable poem, I Am Not Cleopatra, is a mid-length piece that's less about the poet than it is about the folklore of femininity. Neighbouring ex nihilo is S. McDonald's transgendered coming-of-age narrative, Confessions of an Empty Purse. Breezy, casual and occasionally charming, McDonald's contribution to the project reads as a quirkier, light-verse version of ex nihilo. Both are essentially pieces of identification, the kind of idiosyncratic me-story that has become Canadian poetry's three-leaf clover: common, dismissible but often dramatic in their own strange ways.
This brings us to the central problem of the project. The Dektet is the love child of democracy and romanticism. It is contained in the idea that if a publisher were to throw as much at the wall as possible, then somewhere out there each book would find its spiritual completion in the arms of a perfect reader. The get-it-out-there ethic is the civil religion of every small press, every money-rupturing independent bookstore and every local reading series located in the backmost room of some bar.
Like most beautiful ideas, though, it falls upon the world and is immediately corroded. The Deket's corrosive agents include chain bookstores, with their preferential shelving and poetry sections the width of a child's play seat, though there are other factors beyond this. Put simply, there is not enough time to find a love for everything, and a reader must harvest his or her own favourites. Who knows if the cultural impact of Frontenac's Dektet is equal to its noble ambitions? Like any press, large or small, they succeed if they regularly publish notable books. These next three, to my ear, are their successes:
[sic]/i> is the first book from Nikki Reimer, who might be best known to poetry fans as a sort of cub reporter for the popular poetry blog Lemon Hound. At its best, [sic]/i> is a giddy, whimsical and expertly timed series of fake-outs and sucker punches. Corporatism, sexism and intellectual sloth all get brought out for questioning in a series of wild, gesticulating poems.
Reimer's scattershot style is haunted by a difficult problem. Officious begins by nodding to the book's musicality with "all these lines secretly want to be lyrics stick around" but loses its momentum when it settles on a specific target for its effusiveness with the somewhat awkward "abandon sexual politics its all scripted commercialism." To put it another way, Reimer's wit is sometimes like a pestering mosquito. It may be unpredictable in the air, but when it settles on a place from which to draw its blood, it can more easily be flicked aside, or worse.
Regardless, Reimer's voice is both dexterous and savvy. Poems this fleet and extroverted tend to be tonally repetitive, but multiplicity is among [sic]/i>'s many charms. There's the central mash-up of punk aesthetic and third-wave feminist counterargument (imagine the repertoire of a bar band called Judith Butler and the Stooges and you'll get the gist of it) but also some very brainy experimentalism, and a lot of simpler anecdotal stuff. On the whole, [sic]/i> is a gutsy, exceptional thing, as chippy and imperfect as this selection, from clinical diagnosis, suggests: "pursue arms and a right to happiness. pass this virus around. shoulder maxi pads the resume. not a pretty girl. outgrow." Reimer may eventually outgrow [sic]/i>, and that's fine. She'll leave behind a stirring document of a poet defining herself through politics and music.
In Children of Ararat, veteran writer Keith Garebian speaks of the Armenian genocide as both global and familial history. His father was a young survivor of the atrocity, and Garebian packs his story with the pure, corporeal horror that only a child can experience. As anticipated with this sort of material, the threat of descending into a changeless "pornography of grief" is ever present, and Garebian communicates his rage better through physical objects (tendons, blood, bodies, mould) than abstractions (hope, will, shame, regret), but there's so much precise detail in the book that the tangible always wins out.
Witness this eerie selection from the self-explanatory list poem, Items Retrieved From My Father's Room: "Armenian pamphlets … Magnifying glass, medical prescriptions, a list of grievances in block letters." Garebian is speaking for a historical event that, in some parts of the world, is refused acknowledgment as a historical event. His greatest political weapon, then, is his steadfast sense of accounting. As he writes in the book's postscript: "Even the words Catastrophe, Calamity, and Tragedy can be forgeries, because they are used like cheap imitations of the real events." Children of Ararat locates both its history, and its poetry, within the cruel specificity of those events.
Last, the spirit of a grateful polymath is laced throughout Learning to Count, the 14th book by former Governor-General's Award nominee Douglas Burnet Smith. Composed mostly of travel poems set in Europe, the book is a wise and ably structured collection of personal memoirs bolstered by a scaffolding of history, philosophy and art. The book's natural ambassador is the rollicking eight-page Terrace and Dome, which begins at Rome's Piazza Navona before setting off on an adventure through subjects as disparate as winter, computing, middle-class guilt, time, rivers, religion, masturbation, tides, divorce and painting. It's the kind of unchecked poetic universalism that a younger writer might use for some dull stream-of-consciousness diatribe, but Smith turns it into a variety show, in touch with the necessities of drama and pace. His storyteller's sense keeps the poem moving despite the increasing weight of its materials.
The Dektet has done well to find this poet a home, and he has rewarded them with a work that adores the world, but understands that poetry is an intimate thing, and that a marriage of the two needs a thoughtful, patient hand. Smith's speakers know, as well as anybody, that there's no need to throw everything at the wall all at once.
Jacob McArthur Mooney's second collection, Folk, arrives in spring, 2011.