Starting off with Anne Compton:

Alex: I know some people hate it when you start talking about books with "themes," but it seems to me that the GG poetry shortlist this year features a number of titles that are more than mere collections. And this is something that really interests me. Whatever happened to the long poem? Or even the long poetic sequence? I often find myself wishing poets would be more ambitious and try something bigger than the usual bag of lyrics. 

Of course, how successful they are in realizing these ambitions is another question, and one we're all going to have to answer on this jury.

Did anyone else notice how on the back of the title page of Processional, along with the catalogue information, there is a "summary"? Here's what it says: "A poetic processional, leading the readers through a house affected by both daily life and the extraordinary, - stopping only to take in the changes in the seasons." 

This is a thread I had trouble holding on to. Yes, a number of the poems are concerned with house and home. And the seasons are represented (though I don't think they are kept in sequence). But that is the only (loose) coherence I could see in this collection. I'm not sure the summary was necessary and I think it might even be misleading.

On to the poetry.

This is a book I felt I should have liked more than I did. I have lived in the same old farmhouse most of my life, and when Compton writes about inner and outer weather (Frost's "Tree At My Window" is a text I see in the background of "Trees in Summer"), it has more than a little resonance. It's not quite cabin fever I'm talking about, but an almost obsessive interiority that sees a place as both an extension of one's identity and a kind of physical and mental prison. The house (place) that is a home (family) that is a tower (ego). And so from "Q & A: She Talks to Herself":

Why did you say tower just now?
The thing is, there's no way out
and nothing gets in. All our days
are days spent there.

As the epigraph from Walter Pater tells us, "Experience . . . is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced." Oh yes, I can relate to that. And more. Heating a big house in winter, for example, which is the subject of another poem. And I've even stood by the gate and called out "cow-bossy here-bossy" at feeding time (this from the poem "Milking"), though in this neck of the woods it's just pronounced "co-boss" and "so-boss."

But I didn't think this was great poetry. In particular, I didn't have the sense of there being a flow to the language. Maybe this was intentional, as the following passage (from "The Store in Winter") seems to suggest:

Tea and soap on the list. Bread and a wick.
The quadratics of winter. Now is the time
for monosyllables. Words that square
fire and water, house and belly.
Wind chill is a factor.

This is not the Beautiful Voice. And so much of the writing seems like this - blunt, fragmented, and awkward. Obiter dicta isn't just the name of a poem, it's a style. Again, this time at random:

Something in there tugs at the nape of your name. Wants you deeper.
Its voice furred with forgetting. Oblivion's a low ceiling.
No rafters. Night in the embrace of Ursa Major.

That's rough sledding. There are flourishes, like the alliteration, but it seems totally without rhythm. I don't know if this is because Compton isn't really comfortable with a "voice" yet (this is only her second book), or if this is her voice and she can't help it. Even in a line like "the light will not stall once on the river" you get a jerk in the meter. But why? Shouldn't this be a smooth line that doesn't stall? Or is the "will not stall once" supposed to make you say "stall . . . just like that"? I don't know. I also don't know why she did damage to a really nice poem like "Women of a Certain Age, Spring" with a line like "Forsythia's for sissies." Ugh.

I didn't find many of these poems particularly memorable. There's surprisingly little imagery, even of the purely fanciful sort (the June bugs flying about "as fallibly as hens" being a great exception). Instead there's a lot of symbolism that is abstract, self-consciously figurative (the lesson of the schoolmaster), vague, occasionally generic (melancholy's a cab drive in rain, minds are home-made toys), and hard to see. Poetry communicates through its images, and the more physically direct, provocative, or mentally arresting they are, the better. I didn't think Compton's made enough of an impact.

Without strong imagery or a special music I had a hard time getting excited over this book. There were only moments.

Shane: There ought to be a special GG award for female poets who write about domestics. Carol Langille, Lorna Crozier, Anne Simpson, Sue Goyette - and these are off the top of my head. There really are so many competitors that I think this constitutes a sub-genre in Canadian poetics, and awards really are indicated. Anne Compton vies for the title from the very first poem, "The House After Dark, Winter," which begins: "The lamps extinguished, moonlight carouses the kitchen, / takes a shine to the fridge, a lick of the butter knife." Now I don't object to domestics as a subject in poetry - I think anything's game - I just think the field's been mined enough for the moment. Mirroring subject, the poems have a ready-made feel to them. They follow the formula of the other poets mentioned, where inanimate objects lying about the house are first mystified, and then a higher-order word like "love" is used to somehow transform the list into a poem. The same poem goes on to say: "Upstairs, downstairs, rooms for this and that, / Why aren't there better words for what we love?") Well, one might ask the same question of the poet.

One catches on to Compton's tics early. She loves rhetorical questions, especially vague ones. In her second poem she writes, "How is it weather got in? Why didn't it stop at the wall / of everything you'd laid by in the name of love?" She likes it vague, but she also loves that word "love," thinking it can give her poems a shot in the arm, a feeling they don't otherwise
earn. The third poem, "How we Care for Trees in Winter," has a full stanza of posers:

I was wondering, do you remember the view from there?
Or did that cloth you were called to
enforce a forward focus? Is God's voice when it calls
like snow falling: a flurry that wipes out tracks?

Not egregious, by any means. But the "forward focus" is soft focus, God's voice could sub in for the "love" of the other poems, and the remainder of the poem's prosody - a preference for hyperkinetically short line breaks and sentence fragments, no idea ever clearly expressed - really tugs like an undertow on her questioning. How pointed can questions be, after all, when, while striving for deeper meaning, they are in expression obtuse? And when they appear after dribs and drabs of naming? I just can't stomach poems like the terse and listy "The Store in Winter":

Tea and soap on the list. Bread and a wick.
The quadratics of winter. Now is the time
For monosyllables. Words that square
Fire and water, house and belly.
Wind chill is a factor.

This is not to say that all is not well. There are some nice metaphors ("Oblivion's a low ceiling") and some occasional clarity. Yet there's a staidness here, no mess, and no fuss, and no RHYTHM. Almost what I would refer to as a very proper book of poetry, no blood on the page, no stakes. I wish it were the case when she writes in "Women of a Certain Age, Spring"
that "the blood acts up at any age." Or on a single page. There's no excess verbiage - she trims her lines quite carefully - but there's also nothing much said, though a whole lot is asked.

I reviewed her debut, Opening the Island, for Books in Canada a few years ago, and I can't tell if Compton has evolved. She's more terse, and has perhaps worshipped at the altar of Crozier a little more. But the inherent stiffness is still there. I do think this book is an improvement, and if I sound a little harsh, it's because I expected more, not more of the same. Where are the PEOPLE in this book? Why is it so sedate? This book is boredom. It's the kind of book where a family member can be on an OR table for heart surgery and the poet rhapsodizes, "In the chambers of your heart, it's our overture you're hearing." That's a gross mistake, clumsily sentimental.

I could go on.

Alex: Hey! Are you saying you wrote the blurb that's on the back of this book from Books in Canada? How can you turn against her now? Bastard!

And why is it both you and Zach Wells are asking for more "blood" in your poetry (he said it in response to Roo Borson's book last year)? Are you guys vampires?

Vampire bastards!

Shane: All I can say is that Zach and I have very different conceptions of what poetry should be, and we’ve argued about that rather acrimoniously in the past. But one thing we do agree on - and one we should agree on - is that poetry should somehow evoke a feeling. Form is one thing, content another, but somehow both should interact or collide so that a reader should feel something. My shorthand for this is “blood”; and I will remain skeptical of poetry that insulates itself from feeling, poetry that’s inescapably dull because it expresses thought and thought only, poetry that can’t feel because, perhaps, its poet cannot adequately feel. Mainly this is the case with descriptive poets, and Compton is primarily of that mode. Seeing something doesn’t necessarily make that something profound; I’d like that something to have a life, its own interior life, inside the organism of the poem. As for myself, I want to suck the “blood” of all poetry that achieves this vitality, so perhaps I am a vampire of that kind. But I always say thank you after I’ve drunk my fill. I’m a very nice vampire once you get to know me.             

That said, I’d rather be a vampire than a pallbearer, or more accurately, a eulogist, which is the function most reviewers serve in Canada nowadays. Unable to speak ill of the dead . . .

Dani: I have to agree with you, Shane. Most reviewers today act as eulogists and those who don't adhere to the formula are singled out for being brutal. I'd love to see a little balance between the two. But that's a topic for another time.

There's one thing that neither of you have mentioned, and probably rightly so, since it's not a tell of what's inside the book. I'm talking about the cover. I have to say that when I greedily tore into the package of books that Alex sent me, "Processional" caught my eye immediately. The overcast and moody cover, an oil painting by James Lehey called "Ice Forming on a Stream", I think, is a perfect fit for the poems. Little action, more reflection.

Now, the lack of a lot of action is not necessarily a bad thing - not at all - but they're not the kind of poems that draw me back to the bookshelf time and time again. Like Alex, there were only moments where I was drawn in. One of those times was with the poem "How to Get to St. John":

Dear Simon,

This is what you need to know if you're coming by car:
Through Maine, there'll be moose, Canadian on this side.

Ignore the signs for the candy factory 40 miles on.
They're delusional. Also, the dragon at St. George.

Entering the city, there's a toll bridge, no trolls,
but the falls, if you take that route, could reverse.

You intend, I know, to arrive in good time, but remember
we live in a different zone. Time's late here by an hour.

I wholeheartedly think this is how all directions should be given. It's a lovely progression of images that takes you along with the little asides that make all road trips interesting. I even like how she's set up the poem to mimic written directions. I do think, however, the poem could shed the epigraph by Simon Winchester, which felt a bit heavy.

And, yes, there are a lot of questions in this book. I like it best when Compton's work affirms something, like she does at the end of "Passionate Thinking":

In the elegiac light of April - when buds are rouged with sap
and mud underfoot is juicy - I tell you again
the turn of phrase I fell for. The cognition of the kiss.
(Could be, I mean the reverse. Infatuation fuddles thought.)

How every night in my sleep, I finger the large-to-small
vertebrae on the spine of a categorical syllogism.

Hip of the mind. Curve of refusal. Get me out of this.

Again, it's the strong images like "buds are rouged with sap and mud underfoot is juicy" that initially draw me in, but it's her affirmations that sell me the poem. Hell, I fall for a confident woman every time. She does it again at the end of "Women at a Certain Age, Spring": "We've wintered over, not seized up. I'm here to tell you / the blood acts up at any age." This is the type of strong and visceral stuff I'd like to see more of.

Shane: Alex, you mention the Beautiful Voice. I think this collection was written for that dreaded purebred creature, ready to sabotage readings everywhere, the Poetry Voice. The book reeks of stale pronouncements, limp rhetoric, and weather, just the stuff Poetry Voice loves to solemnly intone. So often while reading this book, I felt the urge to yell BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Alex: Well, none of us seemed to have been too excited by this one. Though I think it's interesting how we had some quite different responses.

Next!

NEXT: Is Barry Dempster the One?