Through language that refuses to repress the mind or accept any moment of passivity, Christakos slaps the face of the uninspired in all of us with shuddering consequence. Sometimes poetry lies flat with a crappy backdrop of nature canoes and leaf-draped paddles. Well, that’s nice . . . if you’re dead. Sooner confronts us all to sharpen ourselves and bring passion to the cavity of mental neglect. Sooner (or later) language will be back on top of the free world, or at least that’s my hope. And when it does, and stagnation melts, let us all pray Christakos is shouting and spraying the streets with these poems and replacing the dearth of intelligent language that endures in our daily lives. Anywhere you start in this collection you are privy to examples of the beautiful mind and the subverting potential we all have within us to express and conquer conflict, to interpret and relate, trivialize, romanticize and empower ourselves through thought and poetic seed. We can do this with, as the poet states in Explaining Landscape Painting To The Activist, “a certain prefect panorama/ of surrender, of bleached-thin civilians/ with political limbs axed, hung to dessicate in the sun/for billy clubs, question mark.” In a section called “Retreat Diary” the poet serves up a lucid orgasm for the world to shake to-“it hips like that despite all verdant evidence of violence/chugging at the pass suckling knotholes except waiting waiting Waiting.” All for only $16.95. Just call the number on your screen. Now! (Nathaniel G. Moore)
by Margaret Christakos, Coach House Books, 401 Huron St. on bpNichol Lane, Toronto, ON, M5S 2G5, $16.95, 136 pgs, chbooks.com