Review: The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg), by Natalee Caple

The vicissitudes and vagaries of the life of Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) form the basis for this 2010 collection by Ontario poet Natalee Caple. Tapping into a rich tradition in Canada of postmodern books that conduct a poetic rendering of an actual historical figure, Caple assembles an assortment of fragments, missives, interior monologues and other ephemera from Strindberg’s troubled life. The result is a sly, hagiography-free lens into a fascinating and fraught character. The added twist here is that Caple has actually re-imagined this infamous playwright as a woman in disguise.  

Strindberg experienced periods of both dizzying success and heartbreaking failure over the course of his career, and much of his life on display in The Semiconducting Dictionary is punctuated by his obsession with his first wife, the Finnish actress Siri von Essen. Caple strikes a good balance in this book between matters of the heart and matters of career, exploring Strindberg’s insecurities in each camp. They coalesce into what is probably the book’s strongest poem, “The Playwright Interviews Herself to Stave off Loneliness.” Here Caple writes:

What do you want?
To be a famous playwright whose plays run day and night
everywhere in every language. 

What is the greatest misfortune you can imagine?
To be without Siri and unable to write. To be unable to write.

The grandiosity of Strindberg’s vision for and of himself unwinds in this and other poems as his talents and self-image fail to live up to his ambition.

What works less successfully through this book are poems that project a rawer infatuation that the playwright felt for Siri. In pieces like “Ours [Siri]” and “She Leaves Me,” I was left with the sense that Caple was dancing up to the line of cliché and sentimentality, that she was perhaps foisting too much of her own personal emotion onto a fictional construction.

Still, there’s no denying that this book possesses a queer and original power. Whether the gimmick of turning this notorious woman-hater into a woman himself works will be left up to each individual reader. But the versatility and lyric beauty of Naple’s vision is enough to make this collection worth checking out.    

Review: Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann

Just a short review of this big, brilliant book—not only because I’m pressed for time but also because longer, better reviews of this book can be found elsewhere. Let the Great World Spin won both the National Book Award in the States and the International IMPAC Literary Award, and deservedly so. McCann has written rich, fragmentary tale focused on the twin themes of love and loss.

The interwoven tales within Let the Great World Spin coalesce around a real historical event: tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s improbable journey on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City one morning in 1974. McCann’s novel could almost pass for a hefty collection of interconnected short stories: each section of the book has its own protagonist whose life intersects with the novel’s other protagonists in startling ways, and each is related to or affected by Petit’s walk,  a stunt that really awakened the city to both its lost and future greatness.

McCann takes several risks in this book, chief among them killing off two pivotal and meticulously drawn characters early on in a horrendous car crash. How those deaths reverberate throughout the lives of the remaining characters provides much of Let the Great World Spin’s emotional heft. The tragedies that unfold are shadowed by the inevitable reality of what is to become of those twin buildings looming on New York’s skyline. 9/11 is only referred to in the book's coda, but the reader will bring that emotional baggage into the book from page one.

This is also a very thorough portrait of a New York that doesn’t really exist anymore. The city was in full decay in 1974, and McCann captures the rampant crime, drugs and danger that seemed to contaminate every street corner at the time. The city becomes a perfect mirror for the troubled lives of his characters.

A challenging but wonderful book, Let the Great World Spin has helped to establish McCann as A-list material in terms of New York’s current literary scene. I’ll definitely be pursuing more of his work in the future.  

Review: The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

There is often a blurring of the lines, with creative types, between manufacturing the conditions to create art and manufacturing the art itself. I suppose it’s inevitable that we expend a disproportionate amount of energy shaping the circumstances in which our creativity can flourish. And of course, should those circumstances not match our idealized (romanticized, fetishized) view of them—well then, that just explains the reason for our failures, and our fury. Dammit, if only I had a different job. Or no job at all. If only I had a supportive spouse, or no spouse at all. If only the critical culture out there was more in tune with the type of art I create. Maybe if my children, my parents, could just respect me more as an artist. If only I had a room of my own. This mentality, it seems to me, is bourne out of the notion that circumstances create artistic propulsion, rather than the other way around. I often need to remind myself that this kind of griping, if left to fester, will privilege the lifestyle of an artist over the art itself.

These issues seem to rest at the heart of Claire Messud’s controversial new novel The Woman Upstairs. It tells the story of Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge Massachusetts who holds pretensions toward the life of a working artist. Nora feels she has sacrificed her dreams by comporting herself to various societal pressures and expectations—the chief one being the responsibility of looking after her mother as the woman dies of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Yes, Nora is bitter and angry that her life has worked the way it has, that she is “just” an elementary school teacher and devoted daughter and sister, rather than the fiery creative genius she imagines herself to be. These feelings are aggravated when she meets the Shahids, a family visiting Cambridge from Europe for a year. The patriarch of the family, Skandar, is a visiting professor at Harvard; son Reza becomes a student in Nora’s class; and mother Sirena is everything Nora wishes she herself could be—a full-time working artist with a respectable following and reputation.

Messud brilliantly captures Nora’s inner world as her infatuation with each member of the Shahid clan grows. There is something a bit Single White Female about her obsessions, but Messud is wise to have Nora cast herself as a kind of Alice Munro-esque protagonist struggling to cut her way through all the expectations weighing on her to achieve the life she wants. There is even a part when Nora channels Munro when she hears her mother’s chiding whisper in her ear: “How dare you, Mouse? How dare you? Who do you think you are, Mouse? Who do you think you are?”

So what kind of idealized vision does Nora have for her creative life? Messud portrays it spectacularly, melding together a perfect devotion to creativity with a frothy, flawless domesticity:

If you asked me, upon my graduation from high school, where I’d be at forty … I would have painted a blissful picture of the smocked artist at work  in her airy studio, the children—several of them, aged perhaps five, seven and nine—frolicking  in the sun-dappled garden … I wouldn’t have been able to describe for you the source of income for this vision, nor any father to account for the children: men seemed, at that juncture, incidental to the stuff of life. Nor did the children require a nanny of any kind: they played miraculously well, without bickering, without ever the desire to interrupt the artist, until she was ready; and then, the obligatory and delightful picnic beneath the trees. No money, no man, no help …

What’s conspicuous about this passage is not just the absence of a man or a steady paycheque (conflated here, as creative women sometimes do, into a single monolithic unit) but the absence of the art itself. We aren’t given even the slightest glimpse into what this fetishized version of Nora is creating. And it is this absence, I found, that provided the novel with much of its narrative drive. The book is less about Nora coming to terms with herself as it is with her coming to terms with the nature of her subject matter.

Of course, her art does have a shape: it takes the form of dioramas of some of her favourite female heroes—Dickenson, Woolf and other solitary figures. The “smallness” of these works are meant to juxtapose the enormity of Sirena’s massive installations. The two women end up sharing a studio space together, and Nora is able to feed off Sirena’s creative force even if it imbues her with jealousy and frustration. Messud takes us step by step through Nora’s infatuations, first with Sirena and Reza, then finally with Skandar himself. To say more would be to reveal various undulations of the plot.

There were times, unfortunately, where I felt that plot took too much of a backseat to vague ruminations and interior monologues; there are large swaths of The Woman Upstairs where nothing much actually happens. Messud does give us a potent view into the complexities of Nora’s character: on the one hand, she is narcissistic and self obsessed; on the other, she has a deep and abiding altruism and generosity toward the needs of others. But the narrative spends too much time in these places and not enough time in the action of the story.

What saved this novel for me, though, is the various small revelations that Nora encounters as her story progresses. Her mother, it turns out, was not the powerless housewife she imagined her to be. Sirena’s relationship Skandar is far from perfect. And, most importantly, her subject matter is one that can obsess her, that can transcend her romanticized notions of the artistic lifestyle.

There is no denying that this is a powerful and well-envisioned novel that captures perfectly a kind of self regard that feels so prevalent to the 21st century. The Woman Upstairs is a deeply contemporary novel that reflects back the darkness and the light of ourselves as we try to shape our own worlds and how we define the meaning of success.  

Review: It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, by Jeanette Lynes

It was so nice to finally get around to reading a full collection of poems by Jeanette Lynes. I’ve seen her verse around literary journals for years and have always been impressed by her output. She strikes me as a poet who revels in her own versatility, her ability to hit her subject matters from a variety of angles. She also strikes me as a poet unafraid of having a bit of fun on the page.

Both of these attributes are apparent in It’s Hard Being Queen, a kind of poetic rendering of the life of Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, better known to the world as Dusty Springfield. Lynes’ approach to capturing this crooner’s 60 years of turbulent existence is unapologetically linear but nonetheless engaging. The collection takes us from her early days in England, making her own recordings and trying to convince her family she’s destined for greatness, to the various vicissitudes of American show business and popular culture.

One of the focuses in the early part of the book is Springfield’s notorious perfectionism. Lynes captures this best in “The Producer’s Poem” when she writes:

If he had hair
he’d tear it out.
Hour nine, she records
the same syllable again,
again, again. She makes her art
one syllable at a time and it
hurts to watch …

Such methodical obsession could be applied—as Lynes no doubt knows—to poetry itself.

It’s Hard Being Queen walks us through Springfield’s initial rise to fame as well as her subsequent collapse into obscurity. Lynes captures this fall from grace in such aptly titled poems as “Some Things She Did for Money” and “How To Be Born Again (in the Secular Sense)” with its cheeky queries, “Have the fan letters the flowers/ stopped? Do your shoulder pads outsize/ your bank account?” The collection then leads us through Springfield’s improbable comeback, which culminated with Quentin Tarantino’s inclusion of her song “Son of a Preacher Man” on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. With strokes of small genius, Lynes braids the film’s relentless violence with Springfield’s animosity towards the journalists who once again pay her attention:

She knows them, they’ve been calling
her fat and bent and lost for years,
their meat-grinder words pressed
into scandal-shaped patties.
She’s often wished them
gruesome ends.

As the collection comes to its close, one must inevitably ask: Is this hagiography? The answer, I think, is both yes and no. To be fair, there are times when it feels like Lynes is a bit too enamoured of her subject. She has a tendency to place Springfield on the right side of every situation, every dispute or flare of tension in these poems. Yet her ultimate goal is to gain a prismatic view on the life and career of this celebrity, and this is a goal she achieves. I never once felt like Lynes was telling me what to think of Dusty Springfield. There is a enough wiggle room in these pieces for a reader to come to his own conclusions.      

Review: Whiteout, by George Murray

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I attempt to review—even just briefly—virtually every book I read over the course of a year. It’s no easy task. But a curious thing happened back in 2011 when I read George Murray’s collection of sonnets The Rush to Here. Here was a poetry book that I enjoyed quite a lot, and yet found that I had nothing really constructive to say about it. It’s not that I didn’t admire the book—I did. I thought it was great. But I struggled to articulate why. So rather than force myself to put down thoughts I didn’t actually have, I thought it wiser to just remain silent.

I’ve had no such issue with Murray’s new collection, Whiteout. This book is a tiny tour de force, a gently but meticulously crafted array of poems about life, death, love, and the randomness of the universe. Indeed, Whiteout spins itself into its own little galaxy, tugging at us with the gravitational pull of life’s arbitrary moments. Murray understands that joy and tenderness can arise out of such machinations, but so too can chaos and catastrophe.

A fine example of theses ideas in action is his poem “St. John’s.” On one level, the piece takes us on a briny, beery tour of that city’s downtown, but there is also something larger at play. Murray hints at the possibility of alternate universes in this poem with lines like: “Your future could lean in that door and you/ might not recognize it as anything/ but the next in another series of nows.” And he closes this exploration with an arresting statement that halted me in my tracks:

… Somewhere under
every inch of skin is a Venn diagram

with lovers overlapping just so,
and it’s here I want us to be. No one asked,
What if there’s only the one universe?
If it turns out there is, then one is enough.

For me this statement hung over the entirety of the book, a kind of neutral resignation to the random power that life can exact upon us. I saw these ideas at play when I went back and reread “The Uncountable”, with its lines “Mass exists, numbers exist, but there’s no/ power one has over the other without/ the intrusion of our invention.” And I also saw it in the violence of his poem “The Ants”, where a bomb blast at an opera house leaves the audience in a state of shock as they “stumbled about like straggled/ scalpers calling out spares and outrageous asks.”

If this all sounds a bit intense, rest assured that Murray is capable of great playfulness here, too. His piece “Song of a Divorce Budget” uses traditional rhyme and the assemblage of puns to build a fun little counting poem about one of life’s least fun experiences.

Other critics of said it and I’m happy to echo them: Murray is at the height of his powers in Whiteout. This book is a great place to start if you haven’t read him before, with lots of ideas and imagery to savour.

Review: Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse, by Phoebe Tsang

Sensuality and fairy tales abound in this 2009 debut poetry collection by Hong Kong-born, Canadian-based violinist Phoebe Tsang. There is a rich (some might say overtired) tradition in our literature of firing the tropes of classic fairy tales through the lens of contemporary living; but Tsang breathes new life into the genre by focusing her verse on an oft-overlooked aspect of those traditional yarns for kids: the erotic.

Indeed, in poem after poem, Tsang peels back our expectations of what can be conveyed through a traditional image for kids—a mermaid, a black cat, a pig with an apple in its mouth—to reveal a visceral world of lust, desire and even violence underneath. Take, for example, her poem “With Cherries for Eyes.” Even the most prudish schoolmarm would notice the steamy flush that accompanies the following lines:

My suckling piglet, my prize.
You have come here through fire, red and well-oiled.
…
You lie there, legs sprawled wide as a treat—a sweetmeat—
with your glazed maraschino-eyes.

And the telltale apple between your lips
as if yours was a death by choking—burning—unsatisfied—

Or take the piece “Golden Goose Pie”. Here the bodily desires go airbourne, climbing the proverbial beanstalk toward some elusive crescendo, a passionate peak. Tsang writes: “You carry me on your back like Hercules/ and I wonder: Is there a giant in you/who eats girls for breakfast?” Her climatic stanza begins, “If it’s true we are/ what we eat, I have swallowed/ a sapling whole and now/ must rise each day entwined/ in tendrils …”

These preoccupations culminate in what I felt was the best and most explosive poem in the book, “His Mistress the Witch.” Lured in like Hansel and Gretel, we cannot escape the immediate eroticism of the poem’s opening salvo, “She tastes like gingerbread—/ fresh from the oven/after the icing’s licked off—”? The candied carnality continues with lines like:

When your tongue finally
reached her nectar
all you could do was lap faster
greedy as a kitten
for the sweet cream
liquid sugar ebbing    

But what really brought me home, so to speak, in this small masterpiece was the linguistic volleys that Tsang deploys. Gently jarring rhymes—often enacted mid-line—occur throughout the poem (“And how could you forget the thirsty/ miles alone in the desert before/ the woods were grown”); and an understated use of alliteration and assonance provide the piece with much of its propulsion. Yet what made me want to read “His Mistress the Witch” over and over (and over, and over) again was its searing climax, which seems to coalesce all of Tsang’s preoccupations into one concentrated thatch of verse:

… her nutmeg and cinnamon skin,
and as the glucose high
kicked in, it seemed
all of life’s questions
had simmered
to one longing distilled:

what would you give
to sleep with a witch—
inside a witch’s bed,
under a witch’s candied canopy
(that melts peppermint relief
onto your raw red face),
while heat rises
from the oven, where
your own children are being fed
like kindling, daily bread
to keep your home fires burning.

If the hornier side of fairy tales is not your thing, then Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse offers other delights. Tsang has a real knack for verbal illustration—she describes a medicine cabinet as “flat-chested”; she describes an orchestra as “attentive as wait staff/ at an upscale restaurant”—and there is, not surprisingly for a professional violinist, a certain musicality to much of her writing. This little book is definitely worth picking up.    

Review: A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove

As I approach this thoughtful and well-organized overview of the 40-year poetry career of John Newlove, I feel at once uniquely equipped and wholly underqualified to assess its merits. This is because, with the exception of a few anthologies and lit mag reprints, my experience with Newlove’s work has been fairly sparse. I remember his name still being bandied about in the English department hallways at the University of Manitoba when I was there in 2000-2002, but I had few occasions to read anything by him. So perhaps I’m coming to these collected poems with little baggage. Or, perhaps, little context.

No matter. Editor Robert McTavish has done a stellar job in his chronological selecting from and organizing of Newlove’s oeuvre, providing us with a thorough and overarching view into the man’s poetry. Mind you, I could have done without Jeff Derksen’s illiterate and turgidly academic afterword—shocking, that this kind of “scholarly” dross still gets published—but I didn’t allow his convoluted and suffocating pleonasms to spoil my enjoyment of the poems. McTavish, in his work, has stuck to organizing the pieces in the order of their original collections’ publication, rather than trying to group them by theme. The book is stronger for it.

It goes without saying that you get a real window into the development of a poet’s voice when his selected works are laid out in this manner. Newlove’s first collection, Grave Sirs, was published in 1961, when he was just 23; his second, Elephants, Mothers & Others, was released two years later. There is evidence in both of an earnest young man still trying to nail down his craft. You can see this in the arresting misogyny of “My Daddy Drowned” or the stunted framing of "Birds, Dear." Naturally, as the collections progress, the poems get better. I was left stunned by the final line of “Kamsack,” a poem from his 1965 collection Moving in Alone, in the way that it reveals a self awareness so uncommon in a man not yet thirty. Here the poem is in its entirety:

Plump eastern saskatchewan river town,
where even in the depression it’s said the wheat
went thirty bushels and was full-bodied,
the river laying good black dirt each year:
but I found it arid, as young men will

By the time Newlove won the Governor General’s Award for his 1972 collection Lies, his poetry had become ensconced in the rhythms of prairie regionalism and the nationalistic agenda of CanLit as a whole. I don’t mean that entirely as a dig. There is something in Newlove’s voice that transcends the pack with which he ran; one gets the sense reading, say, “Every Muddy Road” or “My Dreams” (with its delightfully disturbing first stanza) that Newlove was unafraid to reach for the universal, to write sly, occasionally crass poems alongside the nationalistic observations that would help earn him Canada Council grants.

Still, the prairies loom large in Newlove’s corpus of work, and this is no more evident than in his long poem The Green Plain, published in 1981. (Or is it 1979? There is a discrepancy in A Long Continual Argument.) The cadence here is a tour de force of crafty line breaks and rhythmic descriptions, unleashing images of plains, forests, stars and farmland alongside ruminations on the larger world. Reading it, I couldn’t help but hear the voice of another great prairie poet, Dennis Cooley. And I mean that literally. Go online and find a clip of Cooley reciting his work, then come back and read this excerpt from The Green Plain. See what I mean? It’s amazing how Newlove is able to replicate a thick prairie accent almost entirely through enjambment. I wager this work played a key role in inspiring the entire genre of the prairie long poem that flourished in the 1980s.

As Newlove got older, his poetry grew increasingly meta. I suppose this was inevitable. Still, there are numerous gems to encounter as you get deeper and deeper into A Long Continual Argument. “The Permanent Tourist Comes Home” teems with sharp observations about middle age—the death of parents, the visits home, the horror of starting over (it closes with the chilling line: “Awkwardly, I am in love again”). “Big Mirror”, by contrast, is a fun, playful take on a visit to the dentist, using battered grammar to represent a temporarily disabled mouth. Indeed, Newlove grew interested in writing about the limitations and inconveniences of an aging body as he entered his final years. His poem “The Examination” shows how our fate can be sealed within the larger genetic tapestry of our families.

A Long Continual Argument wisely ends with “The Death of the Hired Man” (“He collapsed like a sack of wet shit,/ which is what we all are, if you think of it”), a fitting swan song to cap off a life, a career, at its summit. Newlove left us with an impressive body of work, a rawness and honesty about the world he came from as well the world of the self. He was unafraid to put even his harshest observations through the musicality of his art. As he puts it so sagely in his long poem “White Philharmonic Novels”: “What good is a witness/ who will not tell his tale?”