Ken Norris wants “to close the book” on the long poem. It began in 1799, he writes, with Wordsworth’s “Preludes,” then was “driven on through Whitman / and his song of the American self” and now Norris plans to end the tradition once and for all. This book completes a long poem cycle he began in 1977.
This installment is a political work focused on Iraq’s rich history and the American intervention therein. It’s heavy stuff: “this is the end of the twentieth century / they’re selling dead meat on the streets”. Book 16 ends with: “Babylon / deconstructed and reconstructed / the dream of a poem, of an empire / over.” Serious poetry-who knows, maybe even the final volume of a classic-but what has been with me over the past week as I watch the leaves fall and the grey clouds cap our city is “Boulevard Saint Laurent,” Book 19, which tells the story of a love affair.
The poem begins: “It isn’t just happenstance / that I stroll out of a lighted Notre Dame / and stumble into you. These are the early hours of Easter, / all is dark, everything is expectation, / and soon we will be in your bed, passionately devouring one another.” A poem so sensual that you can feel the cool of the “still-freezing Saint Lawrence River” and feel like a peeping Tom: “I will open the five buttons of your blouse / and plant a delicate kiss open every sense, using my tongue to speak”.
It could be that this gem shines all the brighter due to its dark and brooding surroundings, or is it that I am a sucker for a tough-guy love poem? In all, this is a weighty and worthwhile book. (Vincent Ponka)
by Ken Norris, $19.95, 240 pgs, The Muses’ Company, P.O. Box 86, RPO Corydon Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R3M 3S3