A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

esult the poet often engages with clichésand risks simplification. On the one handthis problem seems with the poet's ownexperimentation with melody. On the otherhand the melodramatic, perhaps, emergesas an important means of articulatingracialised experiences in Canada. We seethis in the nine poems dedicated to thepoet's experience as a parking lot attendant—particularlyin poems such as "TheMonthlies." In "The Booth," stereotypesdrive in and out of the melodramaticunderground that seems to be both oursuffocating "lot" and the machine-like endsof an identity politics vacant of ethics.Ground level and underground are bothplaces of alienation, though of differentforms. At street level people come and go,talking of Michelangelo:On the streetI wear a Michelangelotieand my navy bluepantsflap in the breeze . . .Enter the booth . . .[and] i becomepart of the parkingmachineryWhen both the "periphery" and "centre"cruise and crash within the autos of liberalidentity politics the question is asked:"Who's financing the assembly line?" Asour literary industry continues to assembleand bind the lines which commodity raceand race politics, in what ways is "race"becoming a discursive fact? It's cultural elegiesand melodrama here, haunted by theforce of a global political economy.Sketches, Fragments andEchoesCarol Anne WienTurtle Drum. Oberon, $25.95/512.95Helen McLeanSketching from Memory: A Portrait of My Mother.Oberon,Reviewed by Coral Ann HowellsThere is still one more Brazil story somewherein the back of my head, but I cannotquite get the shape of it. It's not oneof those stories where you start with asingle taut sentence . . . It's just threeimages, fragments that roll over the floorof my mind like shells on polished hardwood:they leave an echo.The opening of "Shells" from Wein's firstcollection signals both the promises andfrustrations of narrative, together with thenarrator's search for significant form whichwould give order and sense to raw materialswhich haunt the memory. Such quests formeaning characterise the efforts of Wien asfiction writer and of McLean as biographer,so that generic borders blur in the storytellingprocess.The eight stories in Turtle Drum, mostlyabout nomadic women, are held together ina loose design which comes into focus withthe title story at the end. They represent avariety of women as narrators or protagonists—naiveyoung students, brides andmiddle-aged divorcees, old women remembering—anda variety of locations, fromearly stories set in Toronto and Cape BretonIsland, through a group of three set in SouthAmerica: "Transient," "How Far Is It toOuro Preto?" and "Shells," to a final storyset on a Native reserve on an island in theGreat Lakes. Scattered locations and diverseexperiences, but there are common denominators:thematically, in these women'sawareness of being outsiders sometimeseven in their own lives and their dawningrealisations of what they do not—cannot183