W – where have you been all my life? W – what’s in a name? That draws from the ever-enchanting ideas of Mallarmé. The poetry in this collection is hugely absurd, dadaist and neo-surrealist. It is also relevant, both socially and politically. Each voice is distinct, starting with Susan Holbrook’s 5 More Trans Poems To Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poema Del Cante Jondo. Her jazzy punctuation and language is sure to put a smile on your face. Louis Cabri follows with an beautifully sustained long poem A Remumblery: each stanza is a dream that grows to a lovely pitch. Clint Burnham’s Di Da Di, without stanzas or much syntax, makes each word a painful and distinct effort to read until you are reduced to looking for phonetic repetition instead of textual meaning. This effect carries into An October by Brian Carpenter, except that the write is evoking a seasonal atmosphere. Maxine Gadd’s small play, A Vision, provides the benefit of location and setting for a truly clever conversation (performed brilliantly to page). This is followed by The Gastown Riot – 1971 by Michael Barnholden, a “journalistic” piece which is easy to read. Lastly, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s Big Old Things is a poem and an ending to this academic journal that is visually fraught with the familiar and unfamiliar, challenging in some small way the aesthetics of our recent past. (PVP)
journal, summer 2000, 44 pages, subs $15 for 3 issues, Kootenay School of Writing, KSW Collective, 201-505 Hamilton Street, Vancouver, BC, V6B 2R1