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

BOOKS IN REVIEWYet the language and imagery are notalways this accessible. In the poem filedunder the title "Marriage: Getting UsedTo," the speaker blends images fromfairy tales and cocktail parties and theold northern legends of dragons :It did not take me longto get used to his leatherwings . . .It was his feet I couldn't stand,his horny feet, ugly as a bird's,It was waking to find himwith a flashlight and a mirror,staring under the covers at his feetIt was his nailsclicking across linoleumIt was the fallen gold scalesthat lay on the sheet like scattered coinsOther poems are as dry and restrainedas a prairie landscape, their allusions toplace and to near history. In "ThePhotograph I Keep of Them" Crozierwrites :It is before my brotherand long before I demandedmy own space in her belly.Behind them the prairietells its spare story of drought.I can write down only thisfor sure:they have left the farm,they are going somewhere.Or Crozier can be simply and happilybawdy, as in "Carrots" from The SexLives of Vegetables:Carrots are fuckingthe earth. A permanenterection, they push deeperinto the damp and dark.All summer longthey try so hard to please.Was it good for you,was it good?Actually, this bawdiness seems to me alittle contrived, the images as masculinelyfamiliar as inked on beards andmustaches on postered women. "My NewOld Man, He's So Good" offers sensuouslythe more remarkable lines:"snake / swallows mouse, he dies / insideme often."These poems do not lend themselves togeneralities. Crozier's voice is a consistentone, her lines short and vivid with occasionalself-effacing rhymes that includeinternal and sprung variations. Her images,whether of dragons or drought,zeros or mindlessly fertile carrots, are intenseand precise. Lorna Crozier is aregionalist in the best sense, intenselyaware of the world immediately aroundher but also of its connections to the geographicalpast and to the cultural pastbrought to the land by the language inwhich the poet writes. Icarus and Eden,Englished, are as much a part of theCanadian prairies as of the Mediterraneanworld, packed carefully in thecultural baggage of prairie settlers, alongwith hymnals and pianos and the folkwisdom of "Sex Education" :They saidmice wear paths in the linoleumhide in the couch springs andunder your bed wait for a chanceto whooshup your housecoatnest in your crotchCrozier's angels are of snow, not stone,and they melt and reform themselvesagain and again in this collection as experienceand education come together instrong and witty images.FRANCES W. KAYE139