Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Ordinary Hours sings with quiet wisdom

Ordinary Hours

Karen Enns

Brick Books

71 pages, $20

Reviewed by Carla Funk

The opening line of “Prelude,” the first poem in Karen Enns’ second collection, states: “Nothing is happening.” Yes, “Rachmaninoff plays in the other room / but there is nothing here.” What pours forth beyond the “nothing” is a litany of negative images within the white walls of this room: “no burning cities,” “no communists in sight, high priests / or seers,” “no dark horses / taking to the hills,” and even “no moon.” What’s not present, the poet names as “absence, not emptiness/ and something close to echo.”

The act of casting back into memory, of calling back the absent underscores the poems in Ordinary Hours, and tints the language with loss. But what moves the elegiac bent of this poetry into a more dynamic music is Enns’ attention to beauty within the commonplace. Sometimes, this beauty arrives as stillness, the pacing of the lines slowing down the hectic mind within time’s rush. In “There Are Words Carved in Wood,” the poet catalogues the human life, childhood to deathbed, but uses the sentence rhythms, fragments and caesura to arrest and intensify the fleeting and the temporal:

“There is desire. Lingering desire. Lingering. White trillium and fern.
Dry heat in the poplars. Solitude.

There are voices in the wind. Small stone bowls filled with water
underneath the dripping tap. Bird nests. Clay.”

Throughout these poems, beauty also arrives through the alchemy of metaphor. A rooster ia “featherweight evangelist.” Grief possesses a “stone-white tone that [holds] its pitch.” An old man stands smoking in the evening, “the tip of his cigarette a firefly above the lawn.” Enns’ imagination is alert and deft as it exalts life’s small details.

Ordinary Hours is divided into three numbered sections whose ideas and images overlap and repeat like variations on major themes. Wind, trees, shadows, whiteness, flowers, sky, mothers, fathers and music echo in the poems. Childhood, rural farm life, family, the poet’s Mennonite ancestry, spirituality, devotion, beauty, loss — these subjects and concerns recur throughout, but each iteration strives to bring something new to the page. At times, some of the poems’ endings echo too cleanly, with light relied on heavily as a final image. Still, the larger effect of these repetitions is one of unity, stitching the collection into a longer musical score.

For me, the major delight of Ordinary Hours is the quiet wisdom with which it sings. Enns’ poems do not challenge in form and style, do not push the boundaries of convention and language. Her diction is precise. Her images arrive via a sharp, intuitive mind. But she writes poetry embering with essential truth. Even a “Suite for Tools” becomes a meditation on physical work that gives rise to transcendence. Even when writing about chimney repairs, bus stops and crows, the poet’s eye practices the art of deep seeing, lifting up from the humble context a high thought. In the opening lines of “What I Was Told to Do with My Soul,” Enns writes:

“Leave it in the hands of someone who knows best
what to do with its dark folds and mystery,
someone who can see its possibilities
without bias, even from a distance,
and shape it into something leaner
with a purpose, who can take it from you easily
as if it were a simple loaf of bread you’d offered
or a song.
Let it go.”

To read Karen Enns’ Ordinary Hours is to wake up to the extraordinary within the ordinary hours of daily living, to open the door to a room of music that’s quiet, spare, honest. In the hectic barrage of this world’s noise, these poems counter with their stillness and clarity, illuminating what beauty breaks out when the mind pays attention, the eye finally sees and the ear leans in to listen.

Carla Funk’s most recent book of poetry is Apologetic, published by Turnstone Press.

Mother-talk diverse and challenging

The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood

Edited by Kerry Clare

Goose Lane Editions,

314 Pages, $22.95

Reviewed by Janet Ralph

The thoughtful, honest and sometimes humorous voices in this anthology speak from a wide array of perspectives. Featured writers range from a woman who presents her rational argument for why she chose to say “no” to babies to the woman who followed her instinct and produced four children with no regrets.

Readers will learn about the agonizing decision of whether to continue an unexpected pregnancy and the disappointing lack of results from months of treatment at a fertility clinic. Other essays report on twins, miscarriage, grieving the death of babies, step­parenting and the contemporary development of single and gay women choosing to have children with the aid of a sperm-donor clinic.

Some voices are as warm as a “heart to heart” with a close friend; others carry an undercurrent of anger or defensiveness because their choices are still criticized by some segments of society. One story feels aloof, another sad; one is sarcastic, another funny. Editor Kerry Clare’s compilation fittingly ends with a story written by a grandmother.

One of my favorite essays, because of its creativity and journalling of personal growth, is 
“Junior” by Maria Meindl. She tells a story about illness, daughterhood, self­knowledge and Junior, who is a unique kind of baby. I also admired Heather Birrell’s “Truth, Dare, Double­Dare” because of its superb style and ruthless honestly. Birrell eloquently clarifies the essence of the struggle in deciding to continue or end a pregnancy: “We found ourselves grappling with this perhaps most fundamental and mysterious intersection of biology, emotion, instinct and great complicated need.”

In “Dog Days,” Diana Fitzgerald Bryden beautifully sums up the experience of caring for babies when she writes of the “early days of constant interruption and blinding love, visceral engagement with the life of an infant as well as the attendant boredom, frustration and fatigue.”

Two additional perspectives I would have liked to see included in this conversation: those from an infertile couple (or single) who desperately wants a child but can’t afford the expense of adopting a baby from another country; and a woman who chooses to continue a pregnancy and give the baby to a person who wants but cannot produce a child.

The adoption choice is briefly touched on by Clare in her story “Doubleness Clarifies.” She uses the words of a young protagonist in Lynn Coady’s novel Strange Heaven to dismiss the option:  “Yes, but real human beings shouldn’t have to go through that.”
 In Clare’s story of choosing abortion to end her pregnancy, she defends her choice on an intellectual level but doesn’t give readers insight into the emotional aspects of her experience. Modern motherhood is complex in ways our grandmothers could never have imagined, yet the deeper elements of the experience remain the same.

The M Word is a book I would have benefited from reading when I was a young mother more than 30 years ago. I have recommended it to my daughters now as they ponder their motherhood choices.

Janet Ralph is a Victoria reader and writing student. 

Collection’s energy, depth springs from B.C. history

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This

By Matt Rader

Published by Nightwood Editions

256 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Erin Anderson

After three books of poetry, Matt Rader has unveiled his first fiction collection, the title of which conveys the sense of purpose behind each work in this enthralling assortment of stories.

Rader’s stories inhabit a land dominated both by natural beauty and industry. Despite events being set 100 years apart in some cases, what binds the stories is a shared – if altered – landscape. Rader populates his vision of western North America with characters who seem estranged not only from the people closest to them but from their own selves. Yet, they question unrelentingly their own place in the world and their ultimate legacy.

His protagonists, mostly male, are miners, truck drivers, activists. Living often simple existences, these men doubt their own goodness, their motivations, even their most basic identity. Rader reports on them with a distant, objective eye that never aspires to omniscience. When he does explore a female’s experience, he does with acuity: “First Women’s Battalion of Death” is enlivened by a well-crafted character who connects Russian history to her sister’s determination – while sitting in a beauty salon.

As the collection’s stories vary in length (from three to 43 pages), they range also in depth; some consist of a single scene in a girl’s life while others traverse the first and last years of romantic and familial pairings.

Toying with time itself and the fallibility of our own perceptions, Rader touches a few of his stories with a sort of magic realism, leaving the possibility that his characters see beyond the immediate and physical world. “Wejack,” one of the most complex stories, is an example of Rader’s ability to construct a narrative in murky circumstances. Rader displays a rare gift for teasing out the contradictory and incomplete aspects of the human mind and spirit.

Although dotted with descriptions of places and people that showcase a poet’s precision and imagination, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This demonstrates starkness and straightforwardness in its language. No detail feels extraneous and no phrase is there for beauty alone (however beautiful some may be).

Without shortchanging Rader’s style or sense of story, the most distinguishing feature of this collection may be its historical dimension. Apparently a ruthless researcher, Rader covers union uprisings and mining disasters through the lens of real people he found in B.C. archives, even going so far as to give the file name of photos he describes.

Such stories of early North America are linked only incrementally, yet their tiny overlaps convey the scope of movements that are summarized in a textbook paragraph. Historical events continue to intrigue readers due to the uncertainty surrounding characters and our own uncertainty of the events of 100 years ago.

“There is nothing inevitable about the future except that it’s coming,” says one of Rader’s characters. While his stories show that little in life is certain, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This demonstrates that Rader’s future ought to include a long career in literature.

Matt Rader will read from his new short story collection, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, on Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. at Bolen Books in Victoria, Oct. 18 at the Comox Valley Art Gallery and Oct. 19 at Nightwood Editions Vancouver Book Launch at The Grande Luxe Hall. Check Harbour Publishing for more information.

Erin Anderson is a Victoria freelancer and reviewer.

Thomas brings colonial mystery to life

Audrey Thomas’s latest novel is in the running for the City of Victoria Butler Prize. Thomas, who lives in Victoria and on Galiano Island, recently talked with Lynne Van Luven about Local Customs (published by Dundurn), which is based on four historical figures: Letitia Landon, George Maclean, Brodie Cruikshank and Thomas Birch Freeman.

The author describes the research that went into this new novel as  “exciting, but also dangerous, unless you exercise some self control.  It’s a bit like sitting next to a big bowl of peanuts; can you limit yourself to one or two?” Although Thomas first learned about Landon in the 1960s, she says, “it took me almost 40 years to get back to her.” Proof that no fact or experience is ever wasted on a writer.

It’s fair to say that no aspect of colonialism in Ghana goes unremarked in Local Customs, so I am guessing your family’s residence there in the mid-1960s left an indelible mark on your memory.  Was there a particular catalyst that impelled you to take up this terrain again, so many years later?

I do think those two years in Ghana had a profound effect on all of us, and once I saw Letty’s grave, in the courtyard of Cape Coast Castle, I knew that someday I would write about her.  In the end, she became part of what I like to think of as a trilogy: Isobel Gunn, Tattycoram and now Local Customs.  I would like to get the rights back to all three and present them as a set: Three Women.

It’s interesting, to me, that Virago Press turned this novel down; I think it would have done well in Britain.  All that Colonial stuff, plus Scotland, women writers etc.

Another interesting thing: I was on what I hoped would be my final draft, when there was an article in The London Review of Books about a young scholar who had discovered Letitia did have a child by her publisher; there had been rumours about this, but nothing had ever been proven.  This woman found the birth certificate.  This was too good to pass up, so back I went to the drawing board.

I have read Local Customs twice and I have a confession to make:  I did not entirely like Letitia Landon Maclean as a character. I admired her feisty nature, and her ability to support herself and her family, but I also reacted to something closed and smug in her nature. (I am actually rather disappointed in myself; after all, she is a feminist of her era.) Can you talk a little about the challenge of recreating characters from history?

First of all, you are not meant to like Letitia Landon. I think you can admire her, without liking her. Like many of her class, she is a snob, and her attitude to Mr. Freeman isn’t at all nice. I don’t think of Letitia as a feminist, rather as an eccentric, with a modicum of talent. She knew what her public, mostly women, wanted and she gave it to them. Her letters, on the other hand, are brilliant.

I love the ending of your novel, the way the “mystery” of  Letitia’s demise is left cloudy. Did you have to fight an urge to “solve” the story or was the uncertainty more interesting to you as a writer?

I think I left Letty’s death as a mystery, so that the reader could ponder it. I have my own theory, but I’ve never tried to articulate it to anyone else. She DID take drops, but George insisted she was always very careful to measure them out exactly into a glass of water. It’s interesting that in one of her novels, Ethel Churchill, the heroine poisons herself. And I think it was with Prussic acid. (My notes on that book are over on Galiano, so I can’t say for sure). I can say that I am interested in fear, in what makes people afraid. One reviewer of the novel suggested that Letty might have had yellow fever, which she said can cause hallucinations. I don’t think she had yellow fever; there is no mention anywhere of her looking as though she had it. It is curious that both her own physician and the chemist who made up her medicine chest insisted they had never prescribed Prussic acid or made up a suspension of Prussic acid, yet that was the official verdict, that she accidentally took an overdose of her drops, which were Prussic acid. There was no autopsy, just a hastily assembled inquest.  Her death will always remain a mystery.

The Methodist preacher, Mr. Freeman, seems a particular thorn in Letty’s side once she arrives at Cape Coast Castle. In theory, he sounds like an admirable character: a free black man whose father was a slave, made something of himself and set his son on an educated path.  Why does Letty so heartily dislike him?

I’m surprised you like Freeman. As a character in this novel, he sets himself above the people he has come to “save,” and sees no real connection between himself and the natives of Cape Coast. Letitia is quite right to call him on his Noah and Mrs. Noah figures; in a way, they represent how he feels about himself, a metaphor? The real Thomas Birch Freeman was no doubt all the things you say, but not the Freeman in my book. The real one did get George in a lot of trouble when he sent his monthly newsletter after Letty’s death, saying she had seemed perfectly well the night before at the dinner party. His papers are in the archives at the University of London, and the correspondence between him and George Maclean is there. (Freeman’s remarks led to the rumours in London that George had poisoned Letty.)

Overall, you set yourself a task, I think:  to write Local Customs within the strictures of 1836-38, and that means avoiding anachronisms, maintaining the diction and attitudes of the era. Was that particularly difficult?

I did not think it was difficult to maintain the diction of the times. I had a book called Maclean of the Gold Coast, plus Brodie Cruickshank’s Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast, plus the Freeman archives. Plus Letitia’s letters. And I have lived in both England and Scotland. I had lots of stuff to look at.

I had lots of fun with Mrs. Bailey and wondered exactly who was the original for her, not the real woman who accompanied Letitia  — there wasn’t enough to go on  — and then it came to me. In my early twenties I taught school in Birmingham, England, in what would now be called an “inner city” school. There were a couple of women teachers there, and one in particular was a lot like Mrs. Bailey, except for the knitting! She was very forthright and could handle the children a lot better than I could. I think that’s who Mrs. B. is modelled on, along with other intrepid Englishwomen I have met. (Women who could “cope.”)

The Butler awards will be presented Oct. 15 at the Union Club. Other books nominated are Michael Layland’  book of non-fiction, The Land of Heart’s Delight, Catherine Greenwood’s book of poetry,  The Lost Letters, and fiction by Dede Crane (Every Happy Family) and M.A.C. Farrant (The World Afloat). Nominees for the Children’s Book Prize are Day of the Cyclone by Penny Draper, Petrosaur Trouble by Daniel Loxton and W.W. Smith and Whatever by Ann Walsh.

Haida Manga is evocative and deeply human

Red: A Haida Manga

Story and art by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Douglas & Mcintyre

108 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Senica Maltese

Hand-painted by artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga is the stunning retelling of a tragic Haida legend, in which an orphan boy named Red grows up vengeful after raiders capture his sister from their coastal village. The evocative artwork, reminiscent not only of tribal Haida art, but also of Japanese watercolours, gives Red’s harrowing and fantastical story a deeply human quality. Yahgulanaas illuminates the story’s complicated commentary on the cycle of greed, fear, destruction and rebirth.

As a graphic novel novice, I didn’t know what to expect from this mysterious “Haida manga” form. At first, I found the jumps in setting unnecessarily jarring; however, on a second reading, they proved an artful way to enact how violence, nurtured by a rising sense of capitalism among the coastal villages, ruptures Red’s spiritual awakening and leads him down a path of self-destruction. The surrealist distortion of the illustrations, particularly during the raid scene, makes Red’s terror and trauma palatable on a bodily level, thereby proving the graphic novel form is an excellent complement to traditional oral narrative.

Without a doubt, Red is the kind of story that is enriched by multiple readings. I understood and appreciated this story in Yahgulanaas’s graphic novel form much more when I read it a second time. The story’s commentary on the relationship between greed, fear, destruction and rebirth remains complicated and resists a simple reduction, even given multiple readings. However, it becomes ever more purposeful in its execution.

On my first reading, the narrative’s point of gravity felt muddled. I wasn’t sure what point the story, or the author, was trying to make. I had a vague sense of anti-capitalist sentiment, but I couldn’t reconcile it with the rest of the story. My second reading, although it did not give me a hard answer to the “point” of the story, felt successful in its complexity rather than ill-conceived.

Even the artwork grew on me with re-reading. I could immediately see the skill and expertise in Yahgulanaas’s paintings, but they just weren’t to my personal taste. Looking at these paintings now, I appreciate them wholeheartedly and wish that the paperback format had made use of the fact that this entire story forms a single piece of art when the pages are placed side by side. I think it would be extremely successful as an accordion book that could be unfolded into the original poster sized piece of art (but that would cost a small fortune, I suspect).

If you want to expand your reading into literary graphic literature, but don’t know what to pluck from the shelves of superhero comics at your bookstore, pick up Red. It’s a rough gem with a shining centre if you take the time to look for it.

Senica Maltese is a writing and English literature undergrad at the University of Victoria. 

Orca launches new series, The Seven Sequels

Orca’s The Seven Sequels

Sleeper by Eric Walters; Broken Arrow by John Wilson; Coda by Ted Staunton;

The Wolf and Me by Richard Scrimger; From the Dead by Norah McClintock;

Tin Soldier by Sigmund Brouwer; Double You by Shane Peacock

Orca Book Publishers

By Margaret Thompson

When Orca published the original Seven series in 2012, few could have anticipated just how successful it would be.

The concept, “spawned in my hot tub” according to author Eric Walters, was unusual: seven loosely connected books by seven different authors about seven grandsons fulfilling tasks dictated by their grandfather’s will, the reading of which provides the starting point for seven simultaneous adventures.

Publisher Andrew Wooldridge admits it was a risky venture, but the gamble paid off. To Orca’s somewhat panicked surprise, the first run sold out in two weeks, 100,000 copies have sold in North America since then, and foreign rights have been sold in Brazil, India and South Korea, as well as world French rights.

That is the stage set for the The Seven Sequels, which officially launched Oct. 1.

The publication of any book is a collaborative effort. Obviously, producing seven books at one go calls for a remarkable degree of cooperation from three entities with very different concerns and priorities: the publisher, the editor, and the group of writers.

Wooldridge sees the series filling a need for books aimed specifically at boys, notoriously reluctant readers. Not surprisingly, the story idea came from a writer who has long concentrated on exactly that particular audience, and Walters enlisted a team of similar authors well-known for their skill both in storytelling and in presenting their material in schools. Orca added two of the final seven writers.

Armed with Walters’ anchor scene, the authors were free to write their own stories. Richard Scrimger, author of The Wolf and Me, saw the strength of the plan.

“Writing is a solitary business,” he says. “You, the keyboard and the cup of coffee.”

Yet he found it easy to sit down with friend and fellow writer Ted Staunton over “a drink or six and figure out plots that would work for each of our characters.” Scrimger sums up the essence of this kind of approach: “Because our stories are still very separate, we have that sense of control that writers like – and yet we can borrow from each other as needed.”

Shane Peacock’s experience was somewhat different. His character is an odd man out in the series – an American, infrequently in touch with his cousins. Apart from  avoiding contradictions, Shane had little contact with the other authors or need to compromise. He found this changed with the sequels, starting with the plans for the second anchor scene.

“We talked at some length about how the opening scene would work and made sure it made sense for all of us. We even asked for certain things and objects to appear in the opening sequence.”

In Shane’s case, that was a Walther PPK pistol. Knowing more about the characters made him search for more ways to connect the second time round, but he was cautious: “I had to make sure I didn’t overthink the connection to the others.”

Given the complexity of the project, it’s hardly surprising everyone concerned pays tribute to the editor, Sarah Harvey. Asked what it was like to be single-handedly responsible for editing seven linked stories for simultaneous publication, she was pithy and to the point:

“Short version: logistically challenging, time-consuming, terrifying (at times), satisfying (when the books finally arrived in the warehouse!)”

“Terrifying” stands out, of course, and Wooldridge echoed the sentiment: “A nightmare, at times,” he allowed. Dealing with seven different authors at the same time sounds akin to wrangling a herd of cats; Sarah Harvey wrote an entertaining piece for Publishers’ Weekly (2012.08.27) about the experience which outlines her fear of not being able to “keep all the balls in the air,” and illustrates better than anything else what collaboration can involve, including “way too many text messages.”

Practice makes perfect, though.

The sequels were less terrifying all round. Still risky, because a series like this swallows the resources for a season. But the lessons learned with Seven have resulted in advances and innovations for Orca: investment in a shrink wrap machine to do their own bundling; production of audio tapes for all the books; digital versions; teacher guides (with the help of real teachers!); an access of confidence in large projects.

There were similar spin-off benefits for everyone involved. Sarah Harvey does her work much as she has always done, but apart from the “street cred” she claims, tongue in cheek (though it’s real enough), she welcomes “the knowledge that I’m capable of undertaking a large project and doing a good job.”

The writers enjoyed the collaboration, and valued the novel experience of joint presentations. John Wilson said, “We still present individually in schools, but we often do evening presentations for entire school districts, which involve all seven of us on stage at the one time, a very exciting and energizing experience for us and the audience.”

At the end of her article, Sarah Harvey asks a question: “Would I do another series like Seven?” And answers it: “Probably. If Andrew asked nicely. And gave me danger pay. And a week in Maui afterwards.”

Andrew must have asked nicely. Here we are, two years later, with the launch of The Seven Sequels.

This time the anchor scene involves five of the boys discovering a cache of money, a gun, forged passports in different names all with the photo of their grandfather, a coded notebook and a menacing accusation. Free of adults for a week, they scatter to discover whether their grandfather was a spy or not.

The stories are fast-paced and action-packed. Accordingly, the boys’ progress is as punctuated by gunshots, murder, kidnapping, betrayal, codebreaking, pursuit and pretty girls who may or may not be trustworthy, as any Bond movie. The settings range far and wide—the boys have all that hidden money, after all—from Uruguay to Spain, from Bermuda to England, from Toronto to the Southern States, from Jamaica to New York, with a divertingly original crossing of the US-Canada border complete with magic realism for good measure.

The stories benefit from the varying expertise and interests of their authors. Sigmund Brouwer’s Tin Soldier explores the Vietnam War and the American military; John Wilson uses the downing of an American plane carrying nuclear bombs over Palomares, Spain, in 1966 as the catalyst for his plot in Broken Arrow; Norah McClintock’s From the Dead investigates the secret world of Nazi war criminals in a wonderfully realized decaying Detroit; Eric Walters’ Sleeper involves the treachery of the Cambridge Five.

Subversively informative the novels are, but they are fun, too. Shane Peacock’s Adam in Double You is obsessed by all things Bond, and the search for Bunny in Ted Staunton’s Coda is enlivened by the frequent allusions to movies, not to mention an unexpected alligator guarding a grow-op. Richard Scrimger’s Bunny is perhaps the most endearing character; sweet, naif, literal, appalling speller, he gives the reader a glimpse, as the author says, “into an ‘other’ kind of mind,” one that will find it perfectly reasonable to play a game of shinny with his kidnappers.

The real genius of this series lies in the simultaneous action of the individual books. It is a series without sequence. You can read them in any order, and they make sense. You can choose to read only the ones that interest you without losing the thread or missing something vital. It is, in fact, the big family saga as smorgasbord, the separate dishes all served at once, take whatever you want, and make a satisfying meal.

And will Seven spawn sequels like Rocky? Will there be granddaughters? No and no. But Sarah is at work on a new series called The Secrets with female protagonists, to be published Fall 2015.

“Different challenges,” she says, “but a nice change from all that testosterone!”

Love of language shines in poet’s fifth collection

House Made of Rain

By Pamela Porter

Ronsdale Press

98 pages, $15.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

House Made of Rain is Pamela Porter’s fifth collection of poetry for adults in five years, and the subject and style of most of the book will be familiar to her readers. Pervaded by religious imagery, these poems grapple with abandonment and absence. Sadness and emptiness are hallmarks of Porter’s works, and I was often overwhelmed by the sense of disconnect the speaker has in many of the poems about human relationships.

In Late Moon (2013), Porter, a Vancouver Island resident, dealt with the mystery of her father. In this new collection, that concern continues, and perhaps gets a bit repetitive. One can understand why Porter focuses on her paternity, but it’s not a concern most readers will share.

This latest collection has three parts: the first is a long sequence of 29 numbered poems under the title “Atonement.” These poems are replete with guilt and a religious fervour. The imagery is largely Christian, and Porter ties the question of a father with that of The Father. Readers with a strong connection to Christianity will find rewards although at times the language is forced: “when the angels cried their coyote cries,” for example, leaps off the page but not in a good way. The other imagery is typical of Porter’s work: animals, plants, and light. And while Porter is committed to the lyric, she breaks that approach with the twentieth piece, a prose narrative about a girl whose father abandons her. The switch in approach is disruptive; this piece may have been better placed at the beginning or the end of “Atonement.”

The second section of the book is comprised of 17 titled poems of a length between one and three pages. Sometimes the page breaks separate the poems into distinct parts although the white space at the bottom of the page often fooled me into thinking I was at the end of the poem; once I turned the page, I discovered the poem continued, a somewhat destabilizing experience. And the topic of fathers continues. “The Name I Carried,” for example, ends powerfully:

and God continued to pursue me
though I never saw him,
and I remain fatherless.

I was most engaged by the third part of the book, titled “The Book of Astonishment.” It’s an abcedarian poem that plays beautifully with the form. Porter moves through the alphabet and creates lists, and within the lists are shorter italicised lists beginning with the particular letter. The first mini-list is “annulet, anthem, antiphonal, aurora.” The poet’s sheer joy of words forms the basis of this long poem, along with the splendid images and the alliteration. Porter has a gift for imagery, and her intense appreciation of the natural world comes through on every page.

When Porter lets herself go, as she does in this final segment, wonderful things happen. There are gems in the rest of the book (“We’ll speak of the way we held/ forgiveness in our pockets”), but this third part absolutely creates astonishment.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College. 

Sharp and quizzical look at human experience

The Pull of the Moon

by Julie Paul

Brindle & Glass, 2014

$19.95; 184 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

If fiction serves to map what makes us human, the short story may represent those small regions, shown in contrasting colour to demonstrate their position vis à vis the larger country or continent, and magnified to reveal their complexities in more detail. In her second collection of short stories, Julie Paul surveys the minutiae of human relationships with a sharp and quizzical eye.

Her characters are what would be called ordinary people: married couples and single parents, friends and colleagues, family members and complete strangers. We observe them in their separate landscapes, coping with separation and parenting duties, going on holiday, irritated by their neighbours and apartment living, resentful of family demands—all very much the stuff of daily life until we hear the details. Then we see the old secret behind the cottage holiday that has frozen a family in denial and guilt in “The King is Dead,” the psychic distortion caused by the accidental killing of a baby rescued from a car wreck in “Damage,” the grief and loneliness of a brother and sister, “each with a country to themselves,” in “Crossing Over.”

Many of the characters yearn for love and connection, but there is not a single straightforward path for any of them. In “Flip,” the main character seems at first to be a caricature of a librarian: Claudia is timid, socially awkward and has a talent for self-deprecation. She has also had very few sexual experiences apart from an early collision with fellatio and a short-lived relationship with Clark which ended with a text to say he’d gone to Alberta.

Rodger’s courtship transforms Claudia, who “feels like another person has entered her body,” and she finds herself whisked off to Cuba, where she sees, “Women with gigantic cigars in their mouths, looking like they’re enjoying themselves immensely.” This is sex as fun, but Andrew’s experience in “Weeping Camperdown” is alarmingly different. He is a single parent dipping his toe in the dating pool once again. He seems to find a soulmate in Joni. Lying under the Weeping Camperdown in the Ross Bay cemetery is idyllic, but subsequent events quickly bring far more than he bargains for, Joni’s ideas of love being as freakish a mutation as the tree.

Guilt and responsibility for others run like underground rivers in many of the stories. The narrator in “Adios” struggles with her part in Fred Poole’s death, having ignored her neighbour, the victim of a stroke, when she saw him wandering down the street. Even this guilt has its complications, for the Pooles resist medical intervention for religious reasons, and there is a delicious irony in the end to the narrator going to Mrs Poole’s rescue when she has a fall, and becoming “the answer to a prayer.” Angela in “Her Full Name was Beatrice” frets over her role in the tragedy of her friend Erica murdering her child, Beany, tormenting herself with “what ifs,” dreaming of alternative scenarios, addressing herself as “You.”

This is not to say that the tone is unrelievedly serious. There is a delightful sense of humour at work here, and even the most serious stories are leavened by wit, by captivating throwaway lines, by hilarious, incongruous detail. It is a reminder that we are dealing with humans and human behaviour seen up close: funny, sad, inadequate, tragic, venal, conflicted, desperate, sometimes even noble. This particular cartography is often entertaining, frequently disturbing, and always illuminating.

Julie Paul will launch The Pull of the Moon on Sept. 28 at 7.30 p.m. at Munro’s Books in Victoria.

Margaret Thompson’s new novel is The Cuckoo’s Child.

How to flunk out of gender into something better

Gender Failure

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon

Arsenal Pulp Press

265 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Julian Gunn

And what a gorgeous failure it is.

Gender Failure is the new book by performers, authors and musicians Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon. Under its wry title, it succeeds on any terms you care to apply: as a work of art, a collection of autobiographical essays, the record of a stage show, and a gentle but firm declaration that if we do not honour each other’s authentic, struggling, and contradictory relationships to gender, then we fail each other.

Is this a brave book? Sure it is, but I don’t like using that word brave. We mean something good by it, but we also sometimes mean, “Brave, not like me.” We use it to create a little bit of distance between the brave person and our ordinary selves. When people called me “brave” after my own transition, I thought, “That’s not what it felt like at all.” Instead, I want to say that this is a powerfully vulnerable book, and that the more vulnerable the book gets, the more powerful it becomes, because it invites readers to take the same risk.

Fittingly, Gender Failure is a book that can’t be reduced to simple categories. It is based on the collaborators’ live show, and incorporates photos, illustrations, and song lyrics. There are no simple, fixed narratives of gender identity here. There are stories about gender transitions, yes, in the sense of transitions in how each author felt and thought about living gender. Yet Gender Failure is about transition in all kinds of other senses, too. A big part of Rae Spoon’s story is their transition from folk/country to electronic/indie musician, and beyond. Ivan Coyote transitions out of writing a long-term newspaper column. The authors describe physical and social transformations, transformations of wardrobes and pronouns, but ultimately the transition that matters is the one towards self-determination and self-celebration. It’s not a complete journey. How could it be, especially while gendered norms are violently enforced, even in spaces where we expect better? Spoon writes wrenchingly of finding that “the freedom that is part of the rhetoric about indie music . . .  is reserved only for certain people.”

In a section entitled “Do I Still Call Myself a Butch?” Coyote writes, simply: “Yes. Of course I still do.” It’s a reminder that these words—Butch, trans*, Spoon’s playful-yet-serious coining “gender-retired” – are supposed to make space in the world for people to live as their whole selves, not create new ways to exclude and shame each other’s difference. Part of what’s inspiring about this book is the way these two, as collaborators and friends, make loving mirrors of themselves for each other.

Here’s what I hope most of all: that Gender Failure marks the beginning of a new wave of declarations from gender dropouts and gender retirees, gender inventors and gender artists. May we all fail at everything that is wounding and constricting us. May we fail together into something better.

Reviewer’s Note: As good as Gender Failure is, it’s not the same as a live show with Spoon and Coyote. If you get a chance to see one or both of them, go. Meanwhile, clips are available on YouTube.

Julian Gunn is a Victoria poet and essayist.  

Axiatrix can’t escape genre

Blackbirds, 225 pages, $19.95

Blackbirds Two, 226 pages, $19.95

By Garry Ryan

NeWest Press

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

Garry Ryan has eight novels to his name, a following for his Detective Lane series, a Lambda award and a great premise in Blackbirds and Blackbirds Two. In these first two of the trilogy he draws attention to women pilots in the Second World War, and unearths little known historical facts such as the eleven black POWs who were tortured and murdered by the SS in Wereth, Belgium.

Sharon Lacey, a young Canadian who goes to England in 1940 to fly for the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), is also looking for her estranged father and soon becomes entangled in sordid family dynamics. Much happens to her in the first book, including brawls with Messerschmitts and discovering she has a half brother. Blackbird Two follows her through war, where she evolves into a hard-nosed senior commander with a passion for social justice. Like all fictional war heroes, she kills, suffers moral conflict, and amidst the carnage performs good deeds. Sharon is a woman tucked squarely into the war story canon. The ATA, not typically engaged in combat, served without fighting– a dichotomy that might be explored in a more literary book. However, such story telling would require a nuance that is not demonstrated in these books.

Not hours before reading myself into the cockpit of a spitfire with Sharon, I raced across the Nevada salt flats with a female motorcyclist in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. Though both books involve women engaged in high-speed atypical behavior, the irresistible comparison settles more on genre than gender. Ryan’s books are about an aviatrix while Kushner’s is not about a female motorcyclist, though on that bike, you get how “nothing mattered except the milliseconds of life at that speed.” There are no lines so fine in the Blackbird trilogy, and this makes The Flamethrowers a work of literary fiction while the two Blackbirds are fair to middling plot-gobblers.

Graduate school teaches that it matters less what a book is about than how it is written. The formula is simple: there is good writing and bad writing, and plot-driven writing is bad. Furthermore, one should avoid the “expected.” I see little in Blackbirds that is unexpected other than gender and a sprinkling of historical facts.

When I think of the genre wars I want to lie down, and though I’m over MFA school, I grow even more weary when, while happily fantasizing myself into the character of a Second World War pilot, I encounter yet another head of  “slicked back” hair, or I’m meant to feel the character’s “tingling thrill.” This ejects me out of my fictional dream.

And yet, there were brief moments while reading Ryan’s books when I was able to slide into the cockpit of a spitfire face to face with the firmament and nothing stopping me, neither gender nor Nazi plane. Maybe at the end of the genre wars there’s only this, the simple pleasure of an image.

Judy LeBlanc is a writer who lives in Fanny Bay and organizes the Fat Oyster Reading Series.