> POETRY BARB CAREY
Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real By Moez Surani Book*hug Press, 103 pages, $18
There’s an urgency and immediacy to Moez Surani’s fourth collection of poems, in which he grapples with the relationship of poetry and its abstractions to reality. As he puts it in the wonderful title poem, “Do they (the rivers) originate from specific hills,/flow to cities, fields of cotton…Are they situated in countries? Endowed with culture and value?” He goes on to poke fun at poetic intent, asking, “Are the rivers in your poems props for insight or elevated discourse?” The Toronto poet acknowledges (and deftly uses) the power of metaphor and figurative expression but he also playfully subverts conventional forms of discourse on subjects such as love and mortality. He’s particularly concerned with the poet’s responsibility in a world of inequality and injustice; in the final poem “Day,” Surani describes poets as “documenters of sleights” and calls on them to “leave aside what’s rhetorical/and metaphoric/and settle for nothing/until the vectors of power are even.”
Year of the Metal Rabbit By Tammy Armstrong Gaspereau Press, 114 pages, $21.95
Reading Tammy Armstrong’s fifth collection is like stepping into a shimmering landscape of greenery alive with the darting presence of wild creatures. There’s also a tang of salt air, since she lives in southwestern Nova Scotia. A profound engagement with place, and particularly the birds and animals that inhabit it, animates these poems. Armstrong mythologizes the landscape of “this province’s dark roads and deep pines” with her lyricism; there are lavish, striking descriptions of flora and fauna, such as the “toothy nettle alive inside its greeny purrs” and “the dawn flit of the blackbird’s ruby wick.” The flip side to this Edenic vision is a troubled attentiveness to human (and especially industrial) encroachment. Armstrong hints at climate change in a poem about a nor’easter that “ransacks trees, pushing birds around like flyaway aster and straw” and of “half-caught signals” of cellphone reception that drown out “a bird/singing to that over-handled air.”
AVery Special Episode By Nathan Dueck Wolsak & Wynn, 110 pages, $20
Nathan Dueck’s third book of poetry is a zany — and brainy — fusion of nerdy 1980s pop culture and traditional poetic forms. Television is a particular focus; even the notes on the poems are delivered in the style of TV Guide channel listings. The Cranbrook, B.C., poet takes the form and syntactic pattern of well-known poems by writers such as Yeats, Auden and Dickinson, and mischievously adapts them to subjects ranging from game shows to sci-fi series. For instance, Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for
Death,” becomes a poem about an animation series featuring “She-Ra: Princess of Power.” Dueck’s recycling of pop culture trivia in formalist guise is entertaining, but it’s also part social comment. In the poem about She-Ra, he writes, “Now pause to watch advertisements/for Mattel ™ merchandise” and throughout the book, he uses trademark and copyright symbols — in effect, ironically emphasizing how popular adventure shows and characters are big business.
Deboning a Dragon By Julie Hartley Mansfield Press, 124 pages, $17
“Deboning a dragon is not like deboning a fish,” Julie Hartley writes in her debut collection. It’s a reminder that imaginary beasts inhabit a different realm than earthly creatures; yet the real and the fantastical often intersect appealingly in her work. The Toronto poet grew up in Britain, and many poems reference real places and are grounded in details that seem authentic, as in “Home Address,” a narrative looking back at childhood, where the speaker describes “the fat-crackle of Mabel’s fish ’n’ chips” and eating “Marmite thick-spread on baps.” Hartley’s best poems spark with evocative imagery and carry an emotional charge, whether describing travels, the joy and trepidation of motherhood, or a mysterious nighttime journey from a young child’s perspective, and there’s her observations are often disarmingly whimsical.