Despite the inclusion of excellent pieces by Joe Blades and Cliff Burns, I can’t help feeling that the Backwater review is mired in the antedulvian precepts of nostalgic Can-con prose. Stories like Leonard Cohen on a Windy Night don’t help much, and the poems of Edith Van Beek – winsome elegies to a time that never was – seem to seal in the sense that what is supposed to happen here is that time honored, and very boring, traditional confluence of time and memory into truth. L. Brent writes in the intro to this issue: “Sometimes we find one another, for a moment, in a book.” Give me a break. (HN)
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