Pneumatic Antiphonal, Sylvia Legris

My review of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris' poetry pamphlet Pneumatic Antiphonal (New Directions, 2013) is now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

Cutting Room, Sarah Pinder

My review of Sarah Pinder's Cutting Room (Coach House, 2012) is now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

Christine McNair, Conflict

My review of Christine McNair's Conflict (BookThug, 2012) is now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books. Can one write properly about their partner's work? Should one?

Holler, by Alice Burdick

My review of Alice Burdick's Holler (Mansfield Press, 2012) is now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

TALE LIGHT New & Selected Poems 1984-2009, Karen Mac Cormack

My review of TALE LIGHT New & Selected Poems 1984-2009 (BookThug, 2010) by Karen Mac Cormack is now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

Prairie Fire Vol. 32, No. 4 (January 2012)

Ghazal beginning with lines

by Yannis Ritsos

I know that each one of us travels to be alone,

alone to faith and to death.

When preparing to lower yourself into a well,

first send down a candle. They breathe air like men.

I dream about the war. Almost every night.

Or sometimes that I have misplaced my child.

Learn to walk as if you had a different history.

Toes unpointed. A hand that never knew a knife.

There is a wildness in God’s mercy,

I misread the hymnal. Think of hawks.

I am preoccupied with angels.

Their pulse and fur. Their eyes on me. (Erin Noteboom)

There is something that struck in the three ghazals by poet Erin Noteboom in the most recent issue of Winnipeg’s Prairie Fire: a Canadian magazine of new writing (Vol. 32, No. 4, January 2012). Over the past decade or so, ghazals have gone the way of the sonnet—everyone is doing them again, and most are unremarkable, watering down the brand. Still, exceptions remain, and I’m intrigued by these three by Noteboom, responding to and from lines by poets Yannis Ritsos, Wislawa Szymborska and Anna Akhmatova. I’m not entirely sure what triggered the most recent run of such, after John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt jack (1976) resulted in the previous burst of ghazals throughout Canadian writing; most were mediocre, but glowing examples by Phyllis Webb, D.G. Jones and a few other stand out. Perhaps the Collected Poems in the mid-1990s? From there, we saw worthy ghazals from Douglas Barbour, Andy Weaver, Eric Folsom and others. And now these, Noteboom’s spiritual reflections through the lines and phrasings of other poets. I’m not sure where she’s going with these, but I admit that I am at least interested in seeing where she is going.

I also admit, I miss opening issues of Prairie Fire to essays and reviews, but relieved that over the past few years the reviews posted online remain, and no longer vanish, as they once did, nearly preventing them from having existed at all. If a book review is posted online for only a year or three, will it have mattered at all? The issue, at least, includes The League of Canadian Poets’ annual “Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture,” produced for and presented at their Annual General Meeting. With previous issues featuring lectures by such as Margaret Atwood and Anne Carson, the most recent was by Saskatoon poet and publisher Glen Sorestad, his “Pristine and Startled: Ways of Seeing,” a biographical sketch of how he came into and through a life of writing, including talk of friends and mentors Anne Szumigalski and John Newlove, writing that “Reading Newlove is, for me, to receive a lesson in the economy, precision and musicality of our language.”

I must also pay proper homage to the late John Newlove, who was very much a mentor of mine with his amazing poems, especially “Ride Off Any Horizon.” I still love that poem and I keep returning to it and rereading it as a way of replenishing the spirit and restoring the enormous importance and impact of the incredible music that can be found in the simplest and most precise expression of our language. One of the reasons I was initially drawn to Newlove and his poetry was that we were of the same generation and had, in fact, spent our boyhoods in east-central Saskatchewan within thirty or forty miles of one another without ever knowing this until much later in our adult lives. So we clearly had shared many common experiences of young boys growing up in this parkland area of the northern plains. Sonia and I visited Newlove and his wife Susan in Toronto in 1979 or 1980. Newlove was, like Marriott and Ondaatje, welcoming, open and generous with his time, though he knew little about us when we arrived on his doorstep. I was full of questions about poetry and although Newlove was essentially a shy man and a loner, not much inclined to talk about his art, he nevertheless took us in and showed great patience with both my ignorance and my clumsy attempts to probe his art. (Glen Sorestad)

And what else can I say about Saskatoon poet Sylvia Legris, given all I have said before? [See the piece I wrote on her here, for The Capilano Review blog] I’m constantly heartened to see new work by her in any venue, and have seen enough now that I’m clamouring to see where and when her next trade book might appear, since her Griffin Poetry Prize-winning third trade collection, Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). Four poems exist in this new issue. Legris constantly amazes in the language she uses, able to consistently bring language into poetry that is rarely seen, and used magnificently, a string-set of cadence, rhythm and acrobatics.

Fabrica (esophageal hiatus)

1

Count coaxial cartilage rings up the air channel. The utmost uppermost point is the pulmonary canopy.

A hole in the oscine layer is a study in tracheometrics. Windpipe orchestra. Woodwind bronchial forest. The voicebox? Flocculent. All utterance

scansorial.

2.

Notes are the things with feathers. Call and release. Hum-tones in antigravitational flight. The well-tempered subclavian avian veins its way to the first rib. From neck to diaphragm the phrenic nerve is a Strat string waiting to sing. The stratosphere

utter colour: ruby-gulleted, rose-torsoed, yellow covert sun with white scapulars, dappled. (Sylvia Legris)

I’d wonder the same of Victoria writer Sara Cassidy, with a short story in the new issue as well. Over the years, she’s published enough poetry (including a chapbook through Victoria’s Reference West in 1998) and short fiction (including a chapbook through Greenboathouse in 2006) over the years to produce a trade work of either, alongside her two already-published “youth novels” through Orca. When might the years of journal publications be selected, collected, collated and released? I call you out, Sara Cassidy.

Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst, Apologetic for Joy

My review of Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst's first poetry collection, Apologetic for Joy (Goose Lane Editions, 2011) is now online at Prairie Fire.

Gil McElroy's Ordinary Time

My review of Gil McElroy's fourth poetry collection Ordinary Time (Talonbooks, 2011) is now online at Prairie Fire.

Rebuild by Sachiko Murakami

My review of Sachiko Murakami's Rebuild (Talonbooks), now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

The Obvious Flap by Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts

My review of Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts' The Obvious Flap (BookThug), now up at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

Dance, Monster! Fifty Selected Poems by Stan Rogal

My review of Toronto writer Stan Rogal's Dance, Monster! Fifty Selected Poems (Insomniac Press, 2011), edited by Paul Vermeersch, is now up at Prairie Fire Review of Books. And here's a note on his reading to launch the same in Ottawa.

my review of David Donnell's Watermelon Kindness (ECW Press, 2010)

now up at the Prairie Fire Review of Books;

Litmags threatened by new funding guidelines

Litmags threatened by new funding guidelines
February 20, 2009 6:34 PM By Stuart Woods

The Harper Tories have promised to maintain existing funding levels for the country’s magazine industry ($75.5-million annually), but guidelines announced this week for the new Canada Periodical Fund could put Canada’s small-run literary magazines in jeopardy.

The new Canadian Heritage-run program merges two other federal funding bodies the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program in an effort to streamline operations and tie support of the periodical sector to “the reading choices of Canadians.” This new system won’t become a reality until at least 2010, but when it does, funds will be allocated using a formula based on paid circulation, and magazines with less than 5,000 annual subscribers will be shut out altogether.

The new formula would be a huge blow to the small number of literary publishers that depend on Heritage to survive, including respected journals such as The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, and Matrix, which have typically received annual subsidies ranging from about $15,000 to $20,000. As it currently stands, the minimum circulation requirement would exclude “pretty much every literary and arts magazine in the country,” says editor Andris Taskans, whose Winnipeg quarterly Prairie Fire relies on Heritage money for a significant portion of its operating budget and about half of its postage costs.

Taskans says the new guidelines are a deliberate “slap in the face to small magazines,” and that he would like to see the special status of literary magazines restored. Says Matrix editor-in-chief Jon Paul Fiorentino, whose magazine has published early works by authors like Heather O’Neill and Pasha Malla, "There’s value to what we do beyond the number of readers we get per issue.”

According to the Canadian Heritage release, the department is still finalizing the guidelines, so there’s still room to have them revised, if not removed completely. “People have to be realistic that there will be some form of minimum,”says Mark Jamison, CEO of the trade group Magazines Canada, “so the question is, how do we manage a specific challenge for a very specialized sector?”

Jamison believes there's reasonable hope that Heritage will ease its restriction on small magazines if the literary community succeeds in bringing its message to Ottawa.

http://www.quillandquire.com/omni/article.cfm?article_id=10538

A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing, eds. Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans

UNTITLED

There it goes again
wafting through my mind
that U.S. Cobra Gunship
guns fully blazing
blasting 7 holes in my rubber duck
and yes I know what happens next
I get shot by the CIA,
so please George
I’ll do anything you want
I’ll get a Stuka Dive Bomber
and bomb whatever you want
the way I Stuka dive my baby
every second night (Patrick O’Connell)

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of regional anthologies; no matter what it is you do in your writing, there really isn’t any way to not be influenced by what is going on in one’s immediate geography (unless one is a complete recluse, which, admittedly, some writers are extremely good at). Adding to a list of impressive books over the past years is the brand-new A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing (Winnipeg MB: Manitoba Writers’ Guild, 2007), edited by Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans. If you’ve lost track of what some of the other anthologies have been, be sure to check out decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2006), decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2007), Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2007), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century [see my review here], Post-Prairie: An Anthology of Poetry, Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets, The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century [see my review of both here]. As I asked in my review of the Saskatchewan anthology, what is it about geography that compels?

Produced as a 25th anniversary celebration of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, the strength of just what the Guild brings to the province is highlighted through ninety-one contributors (Ontario seems to be the only province in Canada without a provincial writers guild; books and organizations such as these fill me with a certain kind of envy), publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction by contributors such as Carol Shields, Meira Cook [see my note on her last book here], Patrick Friesen, Margaret Sweatman, Dennis Cooley [see my recent piece on him here], Laurie Block, Sarah Klassen, Ariel Gordon, Smaro Kamboureli and Sylvia Legris [see my note on her last book here].

In which the Writer Reads

If I hadn’t read this line in John Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t read a line of Newlove’s in Erin Moure’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t hauled out my bike and ridden eight kilometres to the library to get out Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t worked in a branch library for five years, I wouldn’t have found this
misshelved Newlove where it was living an uncirculated life among all the Ondaatje
and I wouldn’t be writing.

If all the undergraduates hadn’t gone home to their small towns, if they hung around the library all summer, smoking cigarettes and borrowing all the Newlove, I wouldn’t be writing.

Energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared. Relativity notwithstanding,
this has nothing to do with writing. Newlove says.

If I weren’t such a liar, I would write off any horizon. (Tanis MacDonald)

Prairie Fire Press in conjunction with McNally Robinson Booksellers is hosting its annual poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction contests at the end of November 2007. We would greatly appreciate it if you would include the following information in any newsletters or bulletins that you might have circulating.

Sincerely,
Janine Tschuncky
Operations Coordinator

2007 Writing Contests.
3 contests.
$6,000 in cash prizes.

1. Bliss Carman Poetry Award (1-3 poems per entry, maximum 150 lines). The Poetry first prize is in-part donated by the Banff Centre for the Arts who will also award a jeweller-cast replica of poet bliss Carman's silver & turquoise ring to the first prize winner. Judge: Barry Dempster
2. Short Fiction (one story per entry, maximum 15,000 words). Judge: Bill Gaston
3. Creative Non-Fiction (one article per entry, maximum 5,000 words). Judge: Mark Anthony Jarman
1st prize $1,250, 2nd prize $500, 3rd prize $250, in all categories

Contest Rules Entry fee $27 (per category). This entitles you or your designate to a one-year (4 issue) subscription to Prairie Fire. Make cheque or money order payable to Prairie Fire and enclose with your entry. Deadline for all contest entries: November 30, 2007

Do not identify yourself on your entry. Enclose a cover sheet with your name, address, telephone number, the title(s) of your piece(s), and word count (prose) or line count (poetry) along with your entry fee. No faxed or e-mailed submissions please. Your entry must be typed on 81/2" by 11" white paper and the pages clipped, not stapled. Prose must be double spaced. Entries will not be returned. If you wish to be informed of contest results, include a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Each piece must be original, unpublished, not submitted elsewhere for publication or broadcast, nor entered simultaneously in any other contest or competition for which it is also eligible to win a prize. You may enter as often as you like; only your first entry in each category will be eligible for a subscription. Winning pieces will be published in Prairie Fire magazine, with authors paid for publication.

Send entries to: Prairie Fire, 423-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3 - Phone (204) 943-9066 - http://www.prairiefire.ca
2007 Prairie Fire Press - McNally Robinson Writing Contests Bliss Carman Poetry Award - Judge: Barry Dempster, Short Fiction - Judge: Bill Gaston, Creative Non-Fiction - Judge: Mark Anthony Jarman. $6,000 in prizes. First prize in each category $1,250, 2nd prize $500, 3rd prize $250. Deadline: November 30, 2007.
For information contact: Prairie Fire Press, 423-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3. Phone: (204) 943-9066, E-mail: http://by119fd.bay119.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?curmbox=mfINd&a=63f68b54059974c1a522f6a0d060766b7dbdf7cbd27410bcea9634238a63c2de&mailto=1&to=prfire@mts.net&msg=EEA27785-C9AE-4674-8EE6-A940649EDBA4&start=0&len=6597&src=&type=x, or check out our web site for guidelines at http://www.prairiefire.ca/ -- Prairie Fire Press, Inc. 423-100 Arthur St. Winnipeg, MB R3B 1H3 Tel.: (204) 943-9066 Fax: (204) 942-1555 http://by119fd.bay119.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?curmbox=mfINd&a=63f68b54059974c1a522f6a0d060766b7dbdf7cbd27410bcea9634238a63c2de&mailto=1&to=prfire@mts.net&msg=EEA27785-C9AE-4674-8EE6-A940649EDBA4&start=0&len=6597&src=&type=x http://www.prairiefire.ca/

The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century, edited by Birk Sproxton & Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century, edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift

Part of my thinking on geography lately led me to the book the late Birk Sproxton [see my note on him here] did through Prairie Fire Magazine out of Winnipeg, the collection The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century (Winnipeg MB: Prairie Fire Press, Inc., 2006). What is it about all this geography lately? Why do I feel, almost, that once you look for something, it's just about everywhere? As well as a recent poetry anthology for Chicago [see my review of it here] or what I've been doing recently for Ottawa poetry and fiction through Chaudiere Books, apparently there's even a new anthology of Saskatchewan poets I have yet to get my hands on. So much history, if it doesn’t get collected or talked about, somehow manages to completely fall by the wayside, as so many of these histories do. For Winnipeg and Montreal, like any centre, they might be the centre of essential activity, but they are the ones that have to keep presenting that argument out into the world (a joke from the 1980s suggests that if it weren’t for Winnipeg, Toronto would have no arts scene…). If not for Lawrence Ferlinghetti as publisher and Allen Ginsberg as promoter, would any of us have heard of the Beat writers? Without Ken Norris spending much of the 1980s doing the same for the Vehicule Poets of the 1970s, would they still even be close to any sort of equal conversation? Any community needs its promoters and cheerleaders as much as it needs those directly active in the production of new writing; without the next logical step, audience a few years down the road could easily suffer the same kinds of forgetfulness. Editor Sproxton begins his introduction to The Winnipeg Connection by telling us:

The Winnipeg Connection began in the afterglow of the special issue of Prairie Fire published in 1999 to coincide with the Pan-American Summer Games. We called the issue "Winnipeg in Fiction," a collection designed to celebrate Winnipeg's history as a place of writing. That summer Winnipeg was alive and bristling with good feeling about herself as she welcomed visitors from across the Americas. The special issue sold out quickly, and we realized we had tapped into a widely shared interest in the city's writing life as it emerges in English-language fiction. With fifty contributors in all, including striking art work and an intriguing batch of archival images selected by Louise Jonasson, the book-size magazine offered a visual as well as verbal feast. For visitors and Winnipeggers alike, "Winnipeg in Fiction" served as a healthy introduction to Winnipeg's literary and artistic life.

Some time later, the idea for The Winnipeg Connection began to brew. Then I approached the Prairie Fire people with a proposal to focus on Winnipeg at mid-century, especially the 1940s and 1950s. These were crucial years, I argued, for the emergence of an internationally acclaimed contingent of writers—Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, Patricia Blondal, Jack Ludwig and John Marlyn among them, a group aided and abetted by Malcolm Ross, James Reaney and many other. This was a time when Winnipeg once more remade herself as a vital hub of the literary arts. She had reached pre-eminent status through her many newspapers and the early-twentieth-century writing of Ralph Connor and Nellie McClung. In the World War II era Winnipeg's output and influence reached new heights, as the list
above suggests.

A celebration of any sort along these lines is worth noting, and worth paying attention to. I just hope that someone continues the thread that Sproxton started, pushing further into the second half of the twentieth century and beyond with, perhaps, a further volume or two? It becomes interesting to see the community that developed that would end up inventing such writers as Dennis Cooley, Rob Budde, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Di Brandt and Meeka Walsh, and so many others. The collection also includes a previously unpublished Margaret Laurence poem, "North Main Car" written in Winnipeg in 1948, that begins:

morning, and the city's steel hulk
heaves, stirs itself, who has been
a lovely giant held by enticing night,
ungilding daylight, exploring now
her savagery and blemishes.

out of the north the streetcar crawls,
an outsize wood-and-iron worm.
people clamber aboard, still yawning,
an uneasiness in their faces
that the harsh day has not yet
pulled into tensions.

people have come from far off to this town,
from europe's handkerchief-sized farms,
from the winding streets of the world,
exchanging the known devil, the overseer's whip,
for another, sight unseen.

Somewhat closer to home (both geographically and temporally) is the critical collection Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century, edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2007), collecting new essays dealing with various aspects of Montreal poetry over the past few decades alongside a few older pieces by the late poet/teacher Louis Dudek, Peter Van Toorn and Geoff Hancock. The collection includes newer essays on works by Robert Allen, David McGimpsey, Van Toorn, Erin Mouré, Robyn Sarah and Anne Carson. One of the finest of the collection has to be Dean Irvine's piece "Fugitive Places: Anne Carson and the Unlost," that writes:

Carson's rise to literary celebrity coincided with her tenure as a professor of Classics at McGill University from 1988 to 2003. Although an English-language author living in Quebec, she had little reason to be concerned with Montreal's limited Anglophone audience. If she ever shared David Solway's anxieties about being a "double exile"—at once exiled from Francophone Quebec, and exiled from the rest of Anglophone Canada—her early critical success in the United States and concomitant penetration of international markets must have helped to assuage any concerns by enabling her to transcend limitations imposed by locality and nationality. After the London, Ontario small press Brick Books brought out her first poetry collection Short Talks in 1992, she rapidly secured an international following through publication by major American presses (New Directions and Alfred A. Knopf). To say that Carson has achieved a kind of literary celebrity unbounded by civic, provincial, or national boundaries is to state the obvious. As accruals of symbolic capital, neither her celebrity nor the status of her work derives from local or national recognition; this is the cultural logic of literary values transacted in an era of late capitalism. Carson trades her capital on a transnational English-language market, where the materiality of civic and national markets is liquidated under the pressure of late capitalism's push toward globalization.

Working to represent some of the threads of English-language poetry over the past few decades, alongside a bibliography of poetry magazines throughout the period, English-language (or, "Anglo") poetry publishers, poetry prize winners and Concordia University M.A. Poetry Theses, I have to admit I was disappointed to not even see a single reference to the Montreal anthology that Andy Brown and I put together a few years ago for the same publisher; was it simply because YOU & YOUR BRIGHT IDEAS: NEW MONTREAL WRITING (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2001) wasn’t a poetry anthology, and instead an anthology of poetry and fiction? As Andre (later, Endre) Farkas and Ken Norris wrote at the beginning of their introduction to Montreal: English Poetry of the Seventies (1978):

English poetry in Montreal has always been written under the most unique conditions. Being a member of a minority culture within the bounds of a dominant Francophone community has made the English poet in Montreal intensely aware of his own language as well as informing him of the problem inherent in the use of language as an agent of communication. When he writes, the Montreal poet knows that the vast majority of people living in his city have no interest whatsoever in what he has to say because what he is saying is in a language that has no relevance to their cultural life. He also recognizes that, because he is Québécois, he is isolated from English Canada. The third disadvantage he experiences is that the isolated Anglophone community, unlike the Francophone, does not consider its arts as necessary for survival; rather, the modus operandi has been economic dominance. Yet, despite these somewhat sobering facts, or perhaps because of them, Montreal has been one of the important centers of English poetry in Canada for most of this century and is now, once again, after the lull of the sixties, beginning to assert itself.

An interesting product of the collection is seeing how Ottawa poet Karen Massey [see my note on her here] finished her M.A. Poetry Thesis, "Soundings / 74 leaves" in 1992 (the only one that year, according to this book), making her a contemporary of 1990-1 students April Bulmer, David McGimpsey, Mark Cochrane, Richard Harrison and Ruth Taylor [see my note on her here]; is it any wonder I think she should have a book out? With a book working to encompass a space this large, it could only, in the end, be as large as the submissions will allow, showing but a fraction of the activity that has occurred in the city of Montreal over the past few decades (two essays that didn’t fit in the collection were actually included in a recent issue of Poetics.ca). Montreal is a complex town, and its poetry could never be encapsulated in a single bound collection of anything; perhaps the editors, or someone else, will see fit to continue the work they've started, perhaps as a subsequent volume, or through some other medium to continue the conversation?

some Cooley notes

Prairie Fire (Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 1998); Winnipeg MB: Lately I've been going through the Dennis Cooley issue of Prairie Fire (edited by Robert Budde and Debbie Keahey) for the sake of an essay on Cooley I'm working my way toward, triggered in part by the second volume of his "love in a dry land" poem, The Bentley Poems (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006), following his previous collection, Country Music: New Poems (Vernon BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004) [see my note on the collection here] from the same 800-plus page manuscript. Amanda Earl is currently twigged on the same, after picking up the new collection of poems, discovering Cooley herself for the first time. Dennis Cooley is one of those post-1960s poets that never really got the attention that his work deserves; highly praised by writers in the prairies, he seems almost invisible in other corners, despite numerous poetry collections including his selected poems, Sunfall, from Anansi in 1996. Apparently there was a small book written on Cooley's work published by ECW Press at some point (I have yet to find a copy), as well as an unpublished folio by Winnipeg poet and critic Karen Clavelle; what I really look forward to is the critical selected, By Word of Mouth, edited by poet, critic and former Cooley student Nicole Markotić out in May of this year, published through Wilfred Laurier University Press' in their Laurier Poetry Series (apparently the press is holding a party/launch in May with various of the authors and editors from a number of the books…).

To go through Dennis Cooley's poems is to reconsider space, and reconsider the use of the vernacular, and his essay on line breaks in his collection of essays, The Vernacular Muse (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1987), is still considered the standard. As David Arnason writes in his piece, moving slowly through the published works of Dennis Cooley, up to the selected poems:

Section 2 of Sunfall contains poems from collections that were not yet published when Sunfall came out. Love in a dry land is a series of poems based on Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, and written from the point of view of Mrs. Bentley. The collection was accepted for publication several years ago, though it has yet actually to appear. As such, the appearance of a selection of the poems here gives the other collection a kind of ghost-like quality, like the "true story" on which some works are said to be based. The collection, like Lorna Crozier's similar but later version, extends Ross's work in the western imagination.

Or this piece by prairie writer Robert Kroetsch:

Poet Tree Sonnet

for Dennis Cooley

He breaks words like twigs from branches, the poet
pruning towards new life. Consider: an old
cottonwood, there by the Souris, brought back
to green, hearing the staccato riffs, the wordpecker.

Or that time in Japan: I saw a bent woman raking
under pines, heaping twigs and cones onto a fire
there at the entrance to a ryokan, releasing poems.
Beware, I said, to Arnason (we had left our shoes

somewhere at a door), Cooley is fooling you and me
again, pretending he is in Winnipeg, making jokes
inside a burning bush, under the hanging tree.

Or consider that time in Portugal: I praised the burnt
colour of peeled cork oaks: he sawed off the limb
we were out on, suggesting that form and fire rhyme.