20 Canadian Poets Take On the World, ed. Priscila Uppal (Exile Editions) $24.95
Anne Compton, Asking questions indoors and out (Fitzhenry and Whiteside) $15.00
Carmine Starnino, This Way Out (Gaspereau Press) $18.95
To accuse a book of generosity of spirit can be to suggest rather a generosity of ego. But generosity of spirit is what comes across most with these three new volumes from Canadian publishers. There is a generosity towards the world in all three books, although the title to the book of translations, 20 Canadian Poets Take On the World does, indeed, suggests more taking than giving.
20 Canadian Poets Take On the World contains translations of range of poets from the well-known, Horace, Rilke, Rimbaud, to the much less well-known, Kiki Dimoula from Greece, Chus Pato from Spain, Herman de Coninck from Belgium. The question remains moot whether the world needs more translations of Pushkin and Neruda, or Horace and Rilke. However, it is the lesser known figures who catch the eye in this book. Evan Jones contributes forceful translations for Dimoula, one of Greece’s foremost women poets. Her reports from the borders of the gender wars show there are still important things to be written about this topic. The Spanish Nobel Prize winner, Juan Ramon Jimenez, is translated, here, by A.F.Moritz in fine, mellifluous versions that reveal a poet with very contemporary concerns: the fragility of life, man’s interactions with the world, and how art may or may not be able to deal with that. With some twenty original poets, and twenty translators, the selections are rather brief and the quality of translations varied, but there is a lot of pleasure to be gained from this anthology.
Anne Compton is a Governor General’s award winner with a highly individual voice. Her style is often to use quite short sentences combined into long lines. Her technique is to push quite dense material into the short sentences and then pull that through the long lines so that you hang on to the threads of what she is doing. Sometimes she comes across as a Canadian Medbh McGuckian. Compton’s concerns, however, are not McGuckian’s intense, eroticised domestic; Compton has an eye for the sacred. Her description of a boat-builder might apply to her own ambitions:
God’s collaborator is what he calls himself, raising a new world refreshed of sin. He’s just reformed the word calling, plans a trade for the boys, jobs for the wife. Grounded, he thinks, in work.
Compton’s vocabulary is entirely comfortable with such items as: ‘postulant’, ‘purgatorial’, ‘transept’ and there are many references to ‘angels’; she is not afraid to call a poem ‘Poetry and Belief’. Compton is a poet who struggles with mystery both in the world and beyond it, and is finding a language and strategies that cope with that struggle.
Carmine Starnino is comfortable with the domestic, although he, too, ‘wakes in the small hours with big thoughts./Mortality, mostly’ (‘Dear David’). Starnino has something of a reputation as a critic, and his poems are certainly very fluent; he is not a poet who appears to spend long searching for the right word. This is Starnino describing Sunday morning bargain hunting:
Here oblivion is driven out by cheap editions
and good knock-offs, lo-fi gewgaws and ziggurats of baubles
down at hem skirts and misdemeanoured hats,
ribbon-tied letters complete with old bureau.
What stops the ‘ascent’ into over-writing, however, is the keen sense of the human heart beating at the centre of all this. Starnino’s domestic is one that faces out, that sees itself as part of the neighbourhood with all its quirks, exoticisms and occasional glamour. Melded in all this is a very touching portrait of a marriage and the warm joys of family. Starnino is a celebratory poet.
Ian Pople