Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I have volumes of poetry that once belonged to my grandfather and which had belonged to his aunt before him. Some are more than 100 years old, mostly falling apart, with fake gilt lettering on the spines – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow. Back then, the rules for poetry went like this.
Introducing the latest poetry magazine to show its face in Canada—this one from Vancouver: it’s called Poetry Is Dead. Irony abounds. For example, on page 1 we have a (moderately graphically altered) excerpt from John Donne’s 10th sonnet. Ironic because an avant garde poetry magazine is opening its doors with a work from the classical…
The Moby Awards are the creature of the MobyLives book blog by the Hoboken-based Melville House Publishing. They celebrate the best (and worst) in a growing book-publishing trend — the book trailer. If movies can have them, then why can’t books?
There’s a traditional view of how a poem relates to the world that has been with us for almost 2,500 years. This view is a reflection of an equally traditional view of how our world is organized. Although we’d like to describe ourselves as up-to-the-minute advanced scientific creatures, this ancient view is still with us in subtle ways.
Something unusual happened as I was reading Michael Helm’s new novel, Cities of Refuge. I stumbled upon a couple paragraphs which I realized alluded to real events. At least I thought they alluded to real events.
The Roman Catholic Church appears to be in crisis with the continued outing of homosexual pedophile priests and revelations of abuse. The sad thing about this is that the abuse is not the crisis. Given that abuse has been happening since the days of St. Peter, one can hardly call the status quo a crisis.
We tend to think of reading as an advanced form of cryptography. At least that’s the default approach for a rational soul like me. The poet has a thought or feeling he wishes to communicate, so he takes that thought or feeling and wraps it in a coded packet called a poem.
The Other Sister is a story of twins and, perhaps necessarily, a story of personal identity. It concerns Julia, a freshly admitted resident of Evenholme, a home for the aged. At 97, Julia is sound in her mind, but growing frail in her body. Her daughter, Rachel, has given her a laptop computer and so Julia reluctantly agrees to spend a little time each day typing her recollections on this new machine.
It’s difficult to decide what The Film Club is. It purports to be literary non-fiction and was nominated for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Gilmour himself identifies the book as “true” and notes, in an afterword, the challenges of writing honestly about people you are in a relationship with — presumably because, if you write too honestly, you may jeopardize the relationship.
Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973, Bezmozgis came to Toronto with his parents when he was six. His collection of seven stories is, according to one reviewer, loosely autobiographical and presents us with a series of vignettes from the point of view of his fictional alter-ego, Mark Berman.
A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
From the age of twelve until I started university I took piano lessons from a man named Alan who loved to read and always had a book in hand when he rode the subway. I remember after one lesson, maybe in ’78 or ’79, when we were chatting about — who knows — life, the universe and everything — when Alan laughed and told me he was reading Death in Don Mills, by Hugh Garner.
Yesterday I went to the Royal Ontario Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which the ROM has mounted with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority and which will continue until January 3rd, 2010. As an educational experience, it’s first-rate, top-drawer stuff, the perfect follow-up to last year’s Darwin exhibit. But then again, being the perverse person that I am, I don’t think I got out of the exhibit quite what the exhibitors intended.
Dear Mr. Comeau, Please accept my application for position of book reviewer. I thought I’d start with your epistolary novella, Overqualified, published by ECW Press here in Toronto. As you can see already, I have a basic grasp of the big words that literary types like to use when talking about the stuff that authors, you know, produce when they write stuff.
The April issue of The Walrus ships with a promotional DVD from HarperCollins — an interview with Barbara Gowdy about her new novel, Helpless. In the interview we learn the secret of how an author finds inspiration for writing fiction.