Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
ble of shocking when the power is not
undermined by the tic of language-centred
poetics. The most memorable poems in the
book are the peripheral dramas: "the
Shirley Temple Man" is truly scary, partly
because it is plainly told. The intertwined
stories of most of the women in the book
are obscured by lack of narrative or drama,
even though this seems to be the point, that
action is unspeakable or that language is
incapable. Yet when Rees attempts to capture
experience, she is able to make us gasp:
the time you wanted to kiss the boy
called you More Ass and Tits ran his bike
into the Elbow river down by the
horse barns,
put him in a headlock,
dunked his whole head and body,
kissed him on the mouth when he
came up for
This is a lovely use of white space and
breathlessness. Fortunately there are several
moments like this in Rees's book.
In Habit of Blues, Fitzgerald, the author
and editor of more than fourteen books of
poetry, is concerned with the state of contemporary
language, at least partly because
this book is an elegy to a novelist, Juan
Butler, who committed suicide. Fitzgerald
writes in a condition of paradox—"Do the
unforgettable and forget." She says in
"indigo" that "Derrida crushes the right
hand," indicating that Fitzgerald fears the
damage that theory can do to literature.
She seems resentful of post-modern writing
that is often an exercise in frustration and
failure. She claims that "I find my self/fracture,
splintered," and that stories are "not
story enough to fix facts in sequential /
relief." Yet her poetry, while it complains
about theory, uses every banal deconstructionist
technique she can find:
... He ...
reaches through sill and sash
(ill and ash) to untie logical progressions
Surely a good reader can catch the buried
sound of "ill" and "ash" in this poem about
death. Fitzgerald's worst habit, though, is
poor writing. She uses pastiche and allusion,
from pop songs to proverbs to
Dickinson, Rich, and Yeats, but the result is
hackneyed: "A rebel without applause"
"learned to read between the lines / of the
writing on the wall." She relies too heavily
on strings of modifiers. Her language is
often tediously abstract:
Tried to remain in American arms.
Resisted
the clandestine movement, the precious
denial
of the irrational, the incapable heart
supine,
relinquished only in self-extirpation.
The ear is dead here. Yet Fitzgerald CAN do
the old-fashioned show-don't-tell stuff:
"Wish I could kick you out of my brain" or
"I want you, a celebration in my hands, /
somersaulting sense." She seems to have
drowned her concrete and lyrical abilities
in poorly edited ramblings. One poem does
work well as fragment and fear—"arillion," a
complexly structured poem that works with
layering and anger and horror. The poem
acts out a real analysis of post-modern language
and its origins in violence and loss.
Su Croll won the third Kalamalka New
Writers competition with Worlda Mirth,
her first collection. Originally and ironically,
Croll examines our impulse to voyeurism
and she questions whether our seeing is
motivated by titillation or by a search for
understanding. This collection is about a
woman who has a strange affair with two
dwarves, Jocko and Napoleon and about
carnivals which become elaborate metaphors
for women's sexuality and sexual desire:
wishing for more flesh more openings
more free tickets to the inside
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