[Monty
Reid talking to Amanda and Charles Earl at the combined AngelHousePress /
Bywords.ca table] It might have taken a while (we were away for a bit), but
here is some of the last of what I picked up at this past spring’s edition of
the ottawa small press book fair!
Ottawa ON: For some
time now, Pearl Pirie has been producing small items through her phafours [see my Open Book: Ontario piece on such here]. New this time around are the tiny chapbooks not a woman by Kemptville poet Alicia Cumming, talking giraffes by Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, and glass studio by Ottawa poet Anita
Dolman. As a publisher, Pirie has long had a good sense of the local, and
previous chapbooks have featured work by an array of poets from the Ottawa
area, including Phil Hall, Monty Reid, Gwendolyn Guth and Sneha Madhavan-Reese.
turning
right
I was driving in rural
Quebec
and looking for an old
farmhouse
how many of them could
there be
I had a house number
but no street or road
name
I turned around a few
times
and eventually
turned right into the
laneway
imagine that
Given
that the bulk of his three decades-plus of published writing hasn’t focused on
such short pieces, one could argue that the eight short poems that make up
Michael Dennis’ talking giraffes
deserves attention for that fact alone. His poems have long dealt with a
combination of observation and meditation, and these short pieces focus his
gaze in curious ways. Composed as sketches, the lack of obvious endings in some
of these poems are also quite interesting, allowing the poem to remain in the
head, even after the final line. One of the most curious of the collection is
the final poem, containing a wry humour (and even a slight sadness) that Dennis
doesn’t often utilize. The poem reads:
beat
humour
Richard Brautigan
was blowing pot smoke
rings
at a bull’s eye on a
poster
with a photo of Ezra
Pound.
everyone thought it was
funny
except Ferlenghetti, he
never
laughed
at anything.
Witha couple of poetry chapbooks to her credit, Anita Dolman’s poems are often constructed as straightforward narratives, but the ones I find far more
intriguing are the poems carved and boiled down into sharp objects, such as the
final two of her short glass studio. Containing
five poems in total, glass studio
contains a mix of densely-packed short lyric and more expansive narrative, with
the final two pieces examples of her short lyric. Here is the final poem in her short collection, a poem that suggests far
more than it presents:
Circumstance
She breaks the glass
just like that, a new
night. Oh.
Where to begin now?
Ottawa ON: New from
Amanda Earl’s DevilHousePress (an extension of her AngelHousePress) is infamous Toronto writer Tom Walmsley’s chapbook of short fiction, Valentines (2015). DevilHousePress, as editor/publisher Earl has
described, deliberately exists for the purpose of publishing “transgressive”
literature that pushes the boundaries, and Walmsley’s stories are a perfect fit
for the series. Containing the stories “Eilidh” and “Women and Children,” the
first story exists as an accumulation of short scenes that shift from troubling
to contradictory, deliberately kept unclear and precise at once:
I was too old when I was sitting on his knee. I shouldn’t
have done it. I don’t think I knew all this would happen but maybe. Also that
two-piece I wore at the cottage. There are a lot of things I could have done
instead of what I did. He was around too much in the summer. Both of us. I don’t
think you can start doing something and then stop just because you feel like
it. He said that once. It’s true. She said I was a flirt. Probably I was even
if I didn’t know it and maybe I did. I’m sorry they broke up. Last summer I shouted
and screamed on the front lawn and I know that made a lot of trouble. I didn’t hear
any fighting but he didn’t visit me in the basement again. Both of them I think
were mad at me but they didn’t say anything. It was the winter. I thought it
happened in summer because it’s summer now. maybe because most of it always
happened in the summer. I had my ski coat on so it was winter.
