шш in review DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER - University of British ...

BOOKS IN REVIEWOften there is the recognition that thereare "worlds / we'll never touch / whatwe touch / are the frames / in ourminds" — the words with which westruggle to grasp a world.The speaking voice in Ken Norris's Inthe Spirit of the Times also recognizesthat "there are pages to fill, there is alife to live; / somehow they are connected."Norris's poems suggest that thepoet writes out of a love both for wordsand for the experience which words seemto offer: "I want to say it and I want tostop / saying it." But his poems are balancedprecariously between despair andidealism, between having only words, andhaving all that words seem to make possible.If I can adapt lines from "TheEdge," these poems are "walking thethin line between / cynicism and romance."The final and longest poem ofthe collection, "Poem for Katherine toRead on Her Twentieth Birthday," selfreflexivelyposits the poet writing at anotherprecarious edge — in a presenttense that is at once future and pastbecause, as the poet says, "it gets soconfusing when I try to write about life,Katherine" :iWe all stood on the other side of the glass:Richard and Deirdre, who had to alternatecoming upto the maternity ward because one of themhad to staydownstairswith Nicholas, who was seven weeks oldand who perhapsyou've grown upknowingThe speaker of this poem tells us that heis "wrestling with the spirits of these darktimes / trying to clear a space for you"but what he is also doing is clearing aspace for himself and his words. As thepoem "Reach Me" argues, "I wanted tomake / something beautiful out of mysadness and my sense / of the personallytragic." Along with the romanticizedpoetic "I" comes the sense that it is onlyin words that "I" speak; "what we reallyknow is inconsistency and moments /without cues."Steve Noyes's Backing Into Heaven isamong the most flamboyantly "selfcentredof the four books. Al Purdywrites on the cover, "he flows, he dances,he's alive, and accomplishes all three atonce." But just who is the "he" of thepoems? At one moment "he" is a loverwriting in the absence of a beloved:"Walking a loss / strung from my / head/ . . . stand as I / do now / where youhave gone." At other times "he" is parodyingthe "I"-as-Canadian poet:I wanted to write aboutthe subliminal landscape"the inconceivable white of Canada"you know the sort of thinghoweverdue to poor poetic planningthe flight's at nightand I have to dream it backwardsfrom the nothing.These poems recall that the telling is inand about words, not "life" : "I will startimmediately / from nothing and forget /all movies books last words" he writes in"Learning to Die"; but of course it isthe "movies books last words" that arethe poem. Noyes is a poet for whom signifiersoften have a playful relation tosignifieds. "Julie / Or Ten Feet" speaksof a woman "going off the road / and inthe river, / right between a rock and tree/ ten feet apart either / would havestopped her." As the poem continues, thespeaking voice realizes that he and hiswife "are sitting / about ten feet apart."He asks, playfully, "Were you close toher?" The humour in this poem is notcaused by Julie's tragically comic death,but by the words which tell more thanher story. The words, not the life, interestboth poet and reader. Similarly,the poem "Four Dollars" also suggeststhat meaning is always contextual :259