What’s the Score?

David W. McFadden’s devil-may-give-a-damn attitude is well enunciated in his new collection of poetry, What’s the Score, 99 poems of varying forms and conventions that discuss his trip to Italy, interesting characters from his life, and musings on literature. Beyond the themes, his voice is accented with French, Italian, as well as a humour that yields to almost everything, no matter how cynical his tongue may become, he is ultimately taken as lighthearted and heavy minded. It feels as though the world weren’t capable of being as serious as he could be and so he compensates with parody and sarcasm, that’s how, through these poems, he retains his grandfatherly wisdom and smirk. Perhaps it’s all in the poem the title’s from:

6. Friendly Waitress

The big baseball game was on TV.
Last game of the World Series.
Me: What’s the score?
She: I don’t know. I have no interest in sports.
Me: It must be a pain having customers
ask you all the time what’s the score.
She: Yeah it is, I never know.
Me: Just tell them 5-5.
She: That’s a good idea.

Now whenever I go in there I say
what’s the score and she laughs and says 5-5. (more…)

In This Thin Rain

There is in Nelson Ball a despondent flâneur, strolling under a raincloud of thought. His first publication in 20 years, In This Thin Rain, in spite of its paucity of words, steadily develops several themes to conclusion. There’s the meditation on urban sprawl which through Ball’s poetry comes off as having half-assedly replaced the poet’s rurality, not overcoming the poet’s work; then, the theme of visual-symbolic memory, so important to the images in the poetry; finally, without having had to name them, elegy for his late wife, artist Barbara Caruso and his late mother Frances. The mélange is well composed and potent considering its minimalism, responsible for one two-word poem and making me feel as though I were composing poetry in writing my annotations to the poems while reading them.

The first fourteen poems comprise the first train of thought, that stylistically accomplishes a number of affects of a grade ranging from eureka to indifference.

Dead Flies

I

Three small piles
of grey dust

flies expired
on white paper —

a sheet for notes
easily brushed off

II (with boots on)

Resting
on hind legs and rearmost tips

of
wings

titled
like a rocket launcher

it died
just like that (more…)

Holler

Alice Burdick’s Holler opens with a poem that ends in two questions: “What does the moon mean? / Where does the air fly / when it’s all breathed out?” These are questions on the symbols she uses in her very imaginative poetry, whose lines are made up of fragments of thought, the gibberish screamt by her children, and the free association of other lines. The moon seems to be an icon of insomnia, whereas air is at once a symbol of poetic voice and the analogue to her medium, so, the enigma of the importance of the nation’s literary memory. But before exploring these assumptions, let’s look at her poetry and what she has to say about books:

Another book? Another book?

Once upon a time, next week,
I will light a fire on the stairs.
Three wolves in total will sleep
on or near the fridge. A piece of apple
will enlarge three times
due to cat hair and lint.
The blue jays will find a way
to balance on the windowpanes.
All the books in this house will
become human
and tear themselves apart, so what.

What should I feed the wolves
to keep them all at bay? (more…)

Mansfield Press Spring 2012 Launch

Stuart Ross plays host to introduce the four new books published by Mansfield Press where he was editor for the four Spring titles. He is playing host because he is also a poet, who has a new book of poetry to launch. Before letting the four new Mansfield books be read, he reads from his You Exist. Details Follow.

Cobourg Commerce

The Chinese buffet opens, then closes.
Another Chinese buffet opens.
The Chinese buffet changes its name
and opens again, two doors away.
Another Chinese buffet closes, then opens.
A week later a Chinese buffet opens.
Three months earlier one closes.
There is a new Chinese buffet down the street.
It’s called what it was called
before it opened then closed.
A Chinese buffet has opened. (more…)

The Letter Killers Club

Nobody’s found Krzhizhanovsky by asking for Krzhizhanovsky. In the Muscovian twenties and thirties, the lawyer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, leaving Kiev, would not cease writing: novellas, plays, and criticism. Dead in 1950, his voice would not echo until 1976, when a scholar happened upon his works in the Russian State Archives. The entry in Georgii Shengeli’s notebook read: ”Today Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky died, a writer-visionary, an unsung genius.” So, Vadim Perelmuter began publishing his materials. It’s only in the last decade that Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov published translations of his work. (more…)

Lover Through Departure

Love has been a theme in Rishma Dunlop’s poetry since her first collection, The Body of My Garden (2002), included with the rest of her poems in Lover Through Departure, published by Mansfield Press. It is appropriate then that she open Lover Through Departure with a Viconian epigraph by Yeats, “One should say before sleeping, ‘I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has shall be again.’” In the poem about the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, Yeats had:

Old lovers yet may have
All that time denied —
Grave is heaped on grave
That they be satisfied —

In her 2002 poem, “Montreal”, is an appropriate response to Yeats’ ”Mohini Chatterjee”: The heart is buried at frequent intervals. (more…)

Hooligans

“I was told to read something happy, well I think this is kind of happy” Lillian Nećakov said during her reading at the Mansfield Press Launch in Kingston, Ontario, introducing “Bus Trip #2″:

Bus Trip #2

There is no one on the bus
the sun has wedged itself
between the ribcages
of clouds
a generous helping of fists
propels me off my actual feet
an image of steaming nostrils
escorts me
as my cheek collides with the sidewalk. (more…)

The Crystal Palace

Carey Toane’s début book of poetry The Crystal Palace contains 49 poems of varying settings. The reader sees Sir Joseph Paxton in The Crystal Palace, a glass building that was designed by Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, England. The publication The Lives of the Engineers by Samuel Smiles has its title as Toane’s first poem in her book. Smiles’ publication describes Paxton as a genius botanist, too: “Paxton, the gardener to the Duke of Devonshire; [...] he was so old in the service, and so skilful”. Toane’s book contains many horticultural themes, especially the fourth of six sections of which several poems “are named after lost or forgotten varieties of domesticated apples, namely Little Greek, The Hawkeye, Bottle Greening, Oxheart, and Ladies Favourite of Tennessee. Crab can refer to a wild or feral variety.”

Some of Toane’s poetry is found poetry, and she claims as her sources Paxton’s Palace, by Anthony Bird, and Pocket Botanical Dictionary, by Paxton himself. “WHAT WAS INSIDE” is the title of several poems in the first section, and the first of which describe the setting and the book well enough:

WHAT WAS INSIDE

Seven thousand, three hundred and
eighty-one British and
six thousand, five hundred and
fifty-six foreign exhibitors.

Eight thousand, seven hundred and
sixty-nine words. (more…)