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Poetry book fine travelling partner

The Book of Places

By Yvonne Blomer

Black Moss Press

2012, 95 pages.

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

Book of Places is a neat little square of a book that would fit into most back pockets, most backpacks, most travel bags going most places in the world. It’s a fit travel companion too, covering not only geographic space, but also psychic space. Adulthood, for instance. The Past. And Japan, Thailand, Wales, England, Rhodesia, Canada, Nevada. Exile. Sorrow.

But first, full disclosure: the author of The Book of Places, Yvonne Blomer, is a friend of mine. And while it is generally agreed that friends should not review the books of friends, in the case of Blomer, this becomes difficult. Blomer knows almost all the poets and writers in Victoria, maybe in BC, and many are her friends. She has served as representative for The Federation of BC Writers, continues to host of one of Canada’s most successful reading series, Planet Earth Poetry; and she teaches writing at Camosun College. She knows writers. Who possibly could review this book without sharing some writerly connection?

The Book of Places is Blomer’s second book of poetry. Her first, a broken mirror, fallen leaf was short-listed for The Gerald Lampert Award in 2007. Her third, As if a Raven, has just been released. She has published two chapbooks, has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and co-edited, along with Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, the recent Poems From Planet Earth, itself a stunning anthology.

Places is divided into three parts, with each section occupying a slightly different landscape. In the first section, for instance, Blomer offers the reader a range of physical places: a field with a woman in it; a desert with a man in it; a road with a boy on it. All beautifully rendered: in the desert, the “light is pixilated / feather-patterned through dust.” From “Woman in a Field:” The sun so bright, almost / bright enough to hold her there.”

And “Packing to Leave,” a travel poem, begins with the advice: “Take nothing. All this is someone else’s,” and ends with: “Take your toothbrush / Whisper into the hollows of the house / leave your name.” Poetic advice, and haunting, the advice of a poet who knows her craft and who has left home. Blomer is also an avid, no, make that a passionate cyclist. When she writes “Cycling home, Norwich,” she creates a cadence, a tone so true, so convincing, the reader is on the bicycle with her:

the way I let it soar and fall

around each aching corner. How

I barely look up at church, Medieval

stone buildings, the city hall

and falling down, dropping now toward taxi stand, market

I roll: body still, arched, ready

to spring loosely over bumps and bricks I know

are coming.

I must recommend this slim, squared volume, the perfect travel size. The perfect trip. And though Blomer has travelled much and far, about places, she admits, “I never knew/ how to leave/ and stay, all the same,” touching on one of the basic conundrums of life, whether in this place or that.

Arleen Pare is a Victoria poet and novelist.

Family conflict captures pain of past

The Widow Tree

Nicole Lundrigan

Harbour Publishing

312 pages; $22.95

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Nicole Lundrigan’s fifth novel, The Widow Tree, is a complex tale of hidden wrongs, of stillborn plans, of betrayal and fatal misunderstandings. Above all, it is about consequences and the long arm of the past. The author chooses a perfect setting for this unsettling story, abandoning the East Coast background of previous novels for a small village in 1950s Yugoslavia, a country which no longer exists, torn apart by festering ethnic and religious resentments after the death of Tito and the collapse of Communism.

The first chapter takes us far back to a military encampment in the Roman province of Pannonia. A centurion dreaming of home and retirement is uneasy, and acting on his premonition, he buries a pot filled with the legion’s pay: “You will be a man’s future, he thought.” The night brings a barbarian attack and the coins lie in their grave for almost two thousand years until they are dug up by three children half-heartedly participating in a student work day in the fields.

Such is the disarmingly simple beginning. The three children, Dorján, János and Nevena, are lifelong friends: the two boys plan to study engineering together; both admire Nevena, but János is determined to marry her some day. The discovery of the coins, though, immediately sets them at odds. Nevena wants to hand them in to the authorities; János wants to keep them. “We’re filthy rich,” he says. “Never again will we live under the frog’s ass.” The two boys decide to bury the coins in a tin containing a little money they have acquired.

The crack in their relationship caused by this dispute is the start of a relentless disintegration. János disappears, and so do the Roman coins. The mystery fosters jealousy and suspicion and terrible guilt. It unravels official brutality, old grudges, reprisals dating back to the war, a menacing litany of corruption and social inequality concealed behind the hierarchy and codes of the isolated village.

Lundrigan also shows us the other side of the coin. We see the fellowship of the women of the village, their strength in the face of adversity, through the relationship between the widow Gitta and Zsuzsi, Dorján’s grandmother. Tibor, a handicapped boy with good reason to hate János, is revealed as a kind neighbour. Even Komandant Dobrica, vile as he is, shines as a parent compared to his snobbish wife.

There are no winners in these conflicts and revelations, just survivors. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the irony of the scene where Gitta, János’ bereaved mother, unaware of the havoc he has wrought in her life, walks with the Komandant in the orchard at his ruined childhood home. Gitta thinks nothing will really change: “If they waited long enough, she was certain, everything would be back as it was before.” She is partly right; deception and betrayal have a very long half-life.

The author draws us through the labyrinth of village life, directing our attention to different characters in turn as their pasts collide with their present to mangle their future. The reader follows the dissection of these lives with a kind of fascinated horror—there is little comfort to be found—but the telling is so intense and the writing so compelling there can be no question of setting it aside before the end.

Margaret Thompson is a retired English teacher and past president of the Federation of BC Writers. Her seventh book, a novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be a Spring 2014 publication.

Novel posits bleak future

Debut novel Swarm

By Lauren Carter
Published by Brindle & Glass

288 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Capitalism has fallen. The government hardly exists except as whispers in condemned buildings. There are no jobs and everyone is poor. There is violence, rebellion. People have to quickly adapt to an older way of life—when living and surviving meant the same thing.

Lauren Carter’s first novel, Swarm, is narrated by Sandy, who lives in a previously abandoned house on a rural and isolated island with her partner, Marvin, and their elderly and dying friend, Thomson. Sandy and Marvin fish, hunt, farm and keep bees in order to survive.

“Things would never be what they were—brightly lit supermarkets with asparagus from Peru and frozen pasta in microwave-safe plastic bowls—”

“What are our battles? I could have asked, but didn’t. I thought I already knew. Survival, putting food on the table.”

When Sandy, never able to have children, finds the footprints of a small girl in her garden, it sparks a search and a yearning for something much larger than the child herself. The neighbour’s baby sleeps, sickly, in a blue recycling box—but Sandy still wants nothing more than a daughter of her own. She is preoccupied with what makes up a life, but is unable to differentiate between her fantasies and her reality.

Sandy addresses her story to the elusive child, whom she has named Melissa, as the book alternates from her past in the city to her present island life. It seems fitting that, in a time of so much isolation, Carter has her protagonist tell the story to someone who may not even exist.

“No matter what, I had to find you. You had to be real.”

The ambitious structure is effective in keeping up the pace of the novel, as well as in helping the reader understand how everything fell apart, and how all of those small collapses influence the characters’ present lives. This novel is terrifying because of how realistically Carter has built this dystopian world; it could very easily become our world in the near future. We are already seeing a lack of jobs and resources as the divide between rich and poor continues to grow larger in real life. Carter’s descriptions of this isolated island are easy to imagine—and it’s no doubt that the clear-eyed specificity comes from her upbringing in rural Blind River, Ontario.

I immediately identified with Sandy’s character, and I found myself asking the same questions she’s faced with: What do we risk for our ideals? How do you build a home from things you’ve never imagined or have never cared to? I found myself thinking about how I deal with my own unexpected realities. Though the naivety of Sandy’s character often annoyed me, it’s hard to judge her. When every day is a struggle to survive, it’s difficult to imagine that other stakes exist, but Carter corrects of this notion. Swarm is proof that, regardless of what our current world looks like, humans will always yearn for the same things: love, security, compassion, and companionship.

Carter’s debut reads like an elegy for an entire population, an entire planet. This somber world, paired with a wash of beauty in the prose, makes for a reading experience I can only compare to the blue hour of the day—something half-way between light and darkness.

“It was too late. Despite whatever I’d once wanted in a life, I had made my reality.”

Jenny Boychuk is British Columbia writer and reviewer

Family circle resists shaping

Every Happy Family

By Dede Crane

Coteau Books

247 pp., $18.95

Reviewed by Susan Braley.

Jill, mother, wife and “itinerant” scholar in Dede Crane’s third novel Every Happy Family, thinks “perfection is out there . . . if only she tries a little harder.” For the five years we know her, she devotes herself, lovingly and wearily, to rounding her husband Les and their three teenagers into a perfect circle. But Crane deftly disrupts her efforts with the cat’s-cradle complications, multiplicities and heart-stopping randomness of real family life.

Language and logic, once grounding for Jill, short-circuit repeatedly throughout the story: a quiet talk with son Quinn doesn’t settle the question of the hidden vodka bottle, and a lecture to enlighten her adopted daughter Pema about misogynist rap lyrics falls short. Her handsome son Beau suffers from a stutter; her kids are more at home with her “faucet mouth” sister-in-law Annie than with her; and her mother, suffering from dementia, can no longer advise her. The lost-language crisis of Langue d’Occ, the subject of her latest paper, is happening in her own home.

Another anxiety for this family circle is its blurring circumference. Already struggling with her mother’s decline, Jill is shaken when Pema’s biological mother asks Pema to meet her in Tibet. At the same time, Beau longs to set Pema outside his “blood” family, since he has secretly fallen in love with her. Pema questions the status of Quinn’s girlfriend Holly: “He brought a girl. Isn’t this a family event?” Yet Holly and her young son give Quinn the strength to dump a forbidden drink: “Feels like he’s pouring his own blood and thinks he might faint.”

Crane bends the definition of blood relations beyond the biological: her characters long to be truly seen and touched, to feel “the soothing vibration of a living creature.” Jill’s mother imagines a male roommate for herself after surviving a long, unhappy marriage; Les, too ill for love-making, misses Jill’s breasts. To capture the depth of this longing, Crane includes a tender scene where Satomi, a classmate, explores Beau’s face with her fingers, not her eyes, and then draws it. As her hands linger on his face, he feels known beyond his beauty.

The novel seems to posit that “outsiders” like Holly and Satomi amplify family, if only temporarily. When loved ones are overwhelmed, the characters tell their stories to people willing to listen: Annie to a seatmate on a plane, Pema (not trusting her seatmate) to us, Les to an open-hearted teenager in a tree. He observes: “Random encounters with strangers. Is family any different? He’d have to say that Pema, oddly enough, feels more knowable to him, more familiar, than either of his sons, whatever that’s about.”

Crane intimates the interconnectedness of family, in all of its iterations, with the headings she offers in “Parts,” her table of contents. She dedicates the primary chapter titles to family members (for instance, “Les”), and the secondary ones to a category of relative (“Sons”). In “Les,” Les jealously remembers Beau’s coach hugging Beau like a father; in the following section “Sons,” he pushes himself to reach out in a new way to “brainiac” son Quinn. These chapter titles animate the complexities of relationships in the story before and while we read.

Similarly, the time frames dropped in between these titles – Eight Months Later, Three Years Later – generate a lively pace overall. These leaps in time allow the psychic lives of the characters to unfold fluidly, unencumbered by the mechanics of events such as Quinn’s release from assault charges and Pema’s exit from the house.

It is startling, then, to find over one-third of the novel occurs in one long, final chapter, centred on Les’s “Living Wake.” Although the progress of the characters is enthralling on one level, this section lacks the agility of the previous pages, thus some of its poignancy is lost. Surprising, too, is the studied effort to “chase the circle closed,” when Jill admits at the wake that it is “impossibly sentimental” to imagine everyone under one roof again, to expect to “come full circle.” The evening’s ambiguous sun, “oddly like permanence . . . .[a]nd at the same time, as temporary as a breeze,” seems more in keeping with the wise and wistful vision of the novel.

Susan Braley (www.susanbraley.ca) is a writer living in Victoria.

Poet deploys wordplay and humour

Sit You Waiting

By Kim Clark

Caitlin Press

112 pages, $16.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Sit You Waiting is the first collection of Vancouver Island writer Kim Clark, whose poems reverberate between the mental processes we are all captured by and the world we inhabit. Topics include illness, love, desire, travel, and poetry, and Clark infuses several of the pages with bold wordplay and wry humour.

Clark uses square brackets, which can be a bit unnerving until it becomes evident that the recurring technique provides a sub-text. For example, in “A Woman Builds a Body, Post Tsunami,” the brackets help build the poem:

Sleep [stealthy] leaves

the makeshift bed, the woman

[a subduction].

Many poems use this technique, almost as a signature.

Clark handles a variety of length with ease. In “Lavender,” thirty-two words reveal the force of scent-driven memory. In “Three Days on a Train In and Out of Dreaming,” a longish poem of thirteen pages with fabulous use of white space, Clark delves into a train trip across Australia, a place of great space itself. Again the poet employs symbols, this time the number sign (#) and the equals sign (=) to organize the sections. The first is #= and the poem moves to #======= and then back to #= while maintaining more than half a page of space on each page as the traveller observes the landscape and contemplates the journey, both physical and mental. In the poem’s middle section, “A herd of stones gets up and walks away on wooly legs. / The treelines in motion are not stones or sheep but alphabetic arrangements. . . . “ These poems touch magic.

Even a short poem can tell a story, and “Wishing for a Colt” is a clever and funny look at people in a bar hoping for more than a drink. This poem is completely grounded in the concrete. The speaker tries to talk to a “failed cowboy, / dust-diving rodeo rider, / seven broken ribs with a mighty big / hat, and a real small / herd of hay burners / in the interior” while the bar waits for action. It comes.

I am drawn to poems about poetry, and Clark delivers. In “Primate Remuage,” the speaker advises readers to “Be the guerrilla / in the midst.” The corny pun works beautifully as the directions continue and focus on destabilizing the domestic environment until the final command: “Warm to this poem / deep in your pocket. / Leave crumbs / to find your way out.” Overall Clark’s poems appear to be about digging deep within the pockets of our minds, then pulling the treasures out into the light. How lovely.

Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College

Collection reveals largesse of Planet Earth

Poems from Planet Earth
Edited by Yvonne Blomer and Cynthia Woodman Kerkham
Leaf Press, 208 pages, $20

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

Planet Earth Poetry is a reading series at the Moka House in Victoria, and over the years many poets have offered their work to an appreciative audience. Editors Yvonne Blomer (who runs the reading series) and occasional host Cynthia Woodman Kerkham have assembled a diverse collection from over one hundred poets who have read, showcasing the richness of Planet Earth.

Patrick Lane, a star not only in the local poetry scene, but also in the poetry world at large, contributes both a poem and the introduction to the book. He explains the genesis of the series’ name, which is taken from P.K. Page’s poem “Planet Earth,” and notes that Page “is one of the masters, the progenitors of the poems that live among these pages.” Lane eloquently shows poetry’s importance: “We reside forever in this one precious moment. Life seethes around us. It lives, it dies, it lives again. A poem is at times our only stay against all that assails us.” Poems from Planet Earth presents an exuberant cacophony of voices examining uncountable facets of life.

Blomer and Kerkham had a monumental task in creating the volume; choosing how to organize the book must have been a challenge. The editors have opted for seven broad categories into which they have placed the poems, with a short introduction to each section: Life and Loss, Nature, Place, Love, Death and Hope, Music and Art, and Family. Obviously, many poems could be slotted into numerous categories. The volume also includes acknowledgements and biographies, so it’s a handy tool for further investigation. Curiously, the alphabetical contents at the beginning are by poet’s first name, rendering the list less helpful than it could be, but that is a minor quibble as the biographies are alphabetized by last name.

The voices contained include the well-known, such as Lane, Lorna Crozier, Jan Zwicky, Pamela Porter, Patrick Friesen, Patricia Young, and Sheri-D Wilson. But with so many contributors, most readers are sure to discover a new voice. And as over half of the poems are published for the first time in this volume, every reader will encounter something unfamiliar.

The forms vary enormously, with most being free verse, but closed forms such as the pantoum can be found (John Barton’s “Les beaux-arts, Montréal”) or the sestina (Tanis MacDonald’s “Sestina: Whiskey Canyon”). This volume does good job of showing the vastness of poetic approaches.

I’d recommend dipping into this book at random. It doesn’t matter if the poems are read in the order as presented. The content is a bit uneven, but with so much included, readers will get much of value. Kudos to Planet Earth Poetry for its continued celebration of poetry, and kudos to Blomer and Kerkham for creating this engaging and eclectic collection.

Candace Fertile is Coastal Spectator’s poetry editor.

Novella captures migrant’s dilemma

The Lebanese Dishwasher
By Sonia Saikaley
Published by Quattro Books, 146 pages, $14.94

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

Born and raised in Ottawa, Sonia Saikaley’s work stirringly represents her Middle Eastern heritage. In the past year, Saikaley has published both a book of poems (Turkish Delight: Montreal Winter, Tsar Publications) and The Lebanese Dishwasher, which was a co-winner of the Ken Klonsky novella contest.

Through its compression, The Lebanese Dishwasher captures the marginalized but intense life of a 30-year-old immigrant named Amir. The action alternates between his earlier youth in Beirut and his current life in Montreal, where streets are slick with ice and opportunities fall far below his expectations. Not only is Amir unhappy in his work, he is at odds with his very being. For his whole life, he has fought against his nature, attempting to deny his own homosexuality, a situation made more acute after he is violently raped by a male neighbour when he is 12. As he turns 30, Amir faces increased pressure to mimic the norm his family expects: he is constantly urged to “find a nice Middle Eastern girl,” and get on with raising a family.

For five years he has been trapped in a dead-end dishwashing job in a Middle Eastern restaurant, where his only offer of friendship comes from one of the cooks, Saleem. The tension within the contemporary narrative escalates when Saleem invites Amir to his home for dinner. Over the food-laden table, Amir meets Rami, who is Saleem’s nephew, recently arrived in Canada. As the pair’s sexual attraction blossoms, so does Saleem’s rage and disgust.

In addition, Amir has a casual sexual relationship with Denise, who loves him as an exotic and calls him her “Arabian prince,” but expects far more from him than he can deliver. Yes: complications.

Sonia Saikaley writes affectingly about immigrants who struggle to survive and to attain some modicum of the freedom and “good life” that impelled them to emigrate. And she captures with courage and clarity the patriarchal nature of many of her male characters who see women only as domestic slaves and the bearers of the children necessary to perpetuate the family line. In such men’s eyes, any hints of homosexuality are beyond abhorrent. Young men who do not flaunt their interest in women are suspect, little better than “dogs.”

Amir, like many migrants, thinks often of his former life, where the violence of his shrill mother is offset by the peace he experiences with his loving grandparents when he visits their farm and helps them pick olives and figs. The richness of Amir’s lost life contrasts strongly with the grime and drudgery of his Canadian existence.

The Lebanese Dishwasher showcases Saikaley’s talents well; I look forward to reading more of her work.

Zen of the street

Chase the Dragon
By Chris Walter
GFY Press, 247 pp, $15.98

Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh

Vancouver punk-band biographer and novelist Chris Walter’s latest book Chase the Dragon centres around Dragon, the protagonist, who earned his nickname for once being “dragged-in” through a doorway. The expression functions as a street metaphor for smoking heroin, “chasing” the smoke as you heat the drug on tinfoil. Throughout the course of the book, a death metal musician and a hit-man with OCD chase Dragon, literally. But Dragon is also being chased by his addictions and a past that’s gaining on him.

Walter’s matter of fact, straight-up style conspires with a darkly comic tone to offer us characters from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) in a manner reminiscent of Margaret Laurence’s strongest characters–they often ought to be despairing, but aren’t. No Pity Parties here.

This tightly plotted page turner is liberally dosed with a kind of Zen of the Street enlightenment. Yet Walter avoids the misstep of romanticising the skids. His gift is the ability to avoid judgement of the marginalised, showing us how circumstances may force people to live in the now. People make do because they must. Like Dragon, Walter has been around. Like Dragon, Walter understands the upshot to having no life is a potentially greater capacity for selflessness.

Walter pokes holes in the sugar-coated and sentimental rescue by a guardian angel of It’s a Wonderful Life when Dragon risks his life to save a drowning boy. It’s not a wonderful life but real life, and any sudden reversals of fortune are sure to remain cosmetic as Dragon is a man who can’t escape what he’s got coming.

Walter presents his characters stripped bare, standing in the cold. He glosses over nothing, giving us the ugliness of people. Like Dickens, he’s a chronicler of place and time, and his hard-earned realism conveys the freedom of having nothing left to lose.

I asked Walter if he thought his subject matter makes his work hard to read: “‘Gritty’ subject matter is what I do. I’m beginning to hate that adjective, but I rely on black humour to make hard subjects tolerable, enjoyable even. If readers are bombarded with too much ugliness they will lose interest and stop reading. I want them to laugh despite themselves, and they should then feel slightly guilty for having done so. I want to invite strangers into my head and show them all the rooms, even that creepy, unfinished attic. I don’t want to write about easy, feel-good subjects; I want the reader to think.”

To describe the residents of the DTES in a tragic, sentimental, or villifying light is, at the least, in bad artistic taste. At worst, it could be argued, such representations in popular culture are dangerous, perpetrating stereotypes that lead to dangerous stigmatisation and create the kind of climate from which nearly fifty women could be abducted from the DTES.

Walter’s trademark black humour is rapidly earning him cult hero status. A literary outlaw, he never preaches. “Outlaw literature goes against the grain of the established literary industry,” Walter says. “Outlaw literature does not rely on government funding or grants and springs from a desire to speak the truth without fear of offending anyone. Outlaw literature is not subtle. Outlaw literature exists separately from the mainstream. That being said, I never use that term to describe my work. I prefer to call my stuff street lit because it sounds less pretentious. I don’t swing a sword; I sit behind a desk.”

The writing occasionally stumbles, with lines such as, “Like the cop to the doughnut, junkies were drawn to addiction and madness.” But what he brings off makes pointing out such mistakes seem petty. Chase the Dragon is an accomplished feat of realism. Can Lit is lucky to have him.

Catch Chris Walter at one of his island book launches:

Nanaimo: The Cambie, July 5, 8 pm. Copies available for $10 (only at launch).

Esquimalt (Victoria): The Cambie, July 6, 9 pm, with music by The Capital City Stalkers and The Role Models, $10 at the door or $7 advance.

Yasuko Thanh’s short story collection, Floating Like the Dead, was recently nominated for a BC book prize.

Genetic sleuth tells engaging tale

The Jugglerʼs Children
By Carolyn Abraham
Random House, $32, 380 pages

Reviewed by Lynne Bowen

Carolyn Abraham is a prize-winning Canadian journalist and author whose impressive list of writing credits includes such subjects as crime, immigration, politics and medicine. Having written about topics as varied as Einsteinʼs brain and Dolly, the first mammalian clone, Abraham has earned praise in Canada, England and America for her ability to make difficult scientific topics understandable and engaging.

This ability is put to the test in her latest book, The Jugglerʼs Children, in which she describes her seven-year-long search for the origins of two of her great-grandfathers through the new discipline of genetic genealogy. Family lore had given these men–one a murderer and a juggler, the other a shipʼs captain–exotic origins but little other information.

Like a modern-day detective, Abraham submits cheek swabs from various of her male relatives for genetic testing of their Y chromosomes and travels to such far-flung places as the Nilgiri hills of southern India and a beach on Jamaicaʼs north shore. In both locations, she follows leads that may or may not turn into hard evidence, but each newly-proven connection is a triumph for both the writer and the reader.

The use of the present tense works well in Abrahamʼs description of her detective work, but when she explains the science behind genetic testing of Y chromosomes–the human chromosome capable of carrying information precise enough to follow a family back in time–she runs the risk of losing the interest of non-expert readers.

Making a technical process understandable to a layperson while still maintaining that personʼs interest is a challenge for a nonfiction writer, but a necessary one. In The Jugglerʼs Children, Abraham successfully maintains my interest as she explains matches and markers, surnames and generations in clear and metaphoric writing. But when she takes me into a complicated discussion of haplogroups, haplotypes and nucleotides, her prose bogs down. This happens regularly in the otherwise gripping account of her quest. The discovery, however, of an elderly auntʼs address book or a headstone hidden in the Jamaican undergrowth rejuvenates the prose.

An astounding number of people have sent cheek swabs for testing at one of several genetic labs in the hope of finding a connection to royalty or a trace of an indigenous ancestor. What the testing reveals is always a surprise, but not necessarily what they were hoping for. Rather, as Abraham discovered, we all have ancestors from both sides of the whip: ancestors who were slave-owners and ancestors who were slaves.

I found reassurance in the message that Abraham brings to her readers in the last pages of The Jugglerʼs Children. Given that we are all descended from the first organism identified as a human being, we all carry that personʼs genetic information. And as the population of the world continues to become more and more mobile, we are all inching ever closer to becoming a blend of all racial groups with little to distinguish one from another. We are all family.

Lynne Bowen lives in Nanaimo and is the author of Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia.

Collection’s stories are sharp and true

The Green and Purple Skin of the World
By paulo da costa
Freehand Books, 208 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh

Born in Angola, raised in Portugal, paulo da costa won the Commonwealth First Book Prize in 2003 for his collection The Scent of a Lie. In The Green and Purple Skin of the World, his first book of short fiction in 10 years, language and its power form a thread through many of the stories and words are highlighted in entertaining characters such as Dona Branca, who collects newspaper clippings of disasters and glues them in an old photo album.

In “Those Who Follow,” a tale of hunter and hunted, a cougar reminisces, “Perhaps my mother wrapped me in words of hope to help me tolerate the immense body of pain she understood was coming.”

Language acts as a kind of saviour. In the title story, da costa explores the world of love and loss through a tale told in letters. The epistolary device works because the letter writer never gets a reply and, as such, her longing is more keenly felt. The narrator, Shana, writes, “Home is any language I speak.” Yet as hope bleeds into disappointment, she also concedes, “There are sounds in my mother tongue your throat will never set free.”

The one-sided love affair is underscored by the recurring, transient image of a bubble blown from a bubble wand. The story unfolds through a thoughtful, poetic treatment (not surprisingly, since da costa is also a poet). Every sentence feels carefully controlled, aiming for its effect.

In “Not Written in Pencil,” my favourite story in the book, we learn about the dissolution of an auto mechanic’s 13-year marriage to a cheating wife. Her new-age justifications spur his anger. The narrator’s self-deprecating voice is tempered by a wry humour and a sarcasm he employs to shed light on his own tragic upbringing. The voice here is strong. Authentic. His heartbreak and raw shock is perfectly captured in blue-collar fashion as he tries to explain his current failure with his own dealings with his son. Voice carries this piece. This is the best story in the collection because it allows us to enter the narrator’s heart, in lieu of the omniscient perspective da costa favours in other stories.

In “Table,” a man does what needs to be done for his young family and is defined, as are other men in the collection, by those moments of quiet suffering. He chops off his own index finger to save himself from the draft. “He offered his finger to the officers, asking them if that ‘qualified as sufficient proof he could not pull the trigger or did they require his whole arm?’ ”

Da costa seems to imply that real heroes don’t die for others but live for others. My own heroes are those who sacrifice themselves quietly, without reward, day after day, heading to a crappy job, riding home on the bus, looking after loved ones. Da costa nicely blends both types of heroes in “Table.”

The stories are tightly written, sometimes with seeming thematic agendas. Imagine the beam of a flashlight shining onto a vast landscape. The focus is often so spot-on that many of the stories function almost as proverbs. The light might be perfect for some readers, though others may find the beam too singular. If you have a preference for stories that aim sharp and true, with few loose threads about them, then this collection might be for you.