Surely Biblioasis, the small independent press run out of Emeryville, Ontario, is among the bravest entities in Canadian literature. This spring, after all, their list contained not one but two books of critical essays. One would be risk enough. Two is sort of admirably crazy. Fortunately for them, though, both books are very good, and I say that not just because both authors are contributors to The Walrus. Charles Foran’s Join the Revolution, Comrade and Stephen Henighan’s A Report on the Afterlife of Culture are excellent in part because their publisher has encouraged their scope to extend beyond the traditional confines of Canadian essay collections. Foran and Henighan are decidedly internationalist in their orientation, and what results are wide-ranging surveys of everything from, in Henighan’s book, Roberto Bolano to Haruki Murakami to Wole Soyinka, and, in Foran’s, from finding memories of Vietnam movies in Hue to searching for quality in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. (I’ll put a preemptive plug here for Biblioasis’s new edition of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s collected poems, which I’ve not yet bought, but sort of has to be good, no?)

But what’s most endeared the press to me this year is Jailbreaks, a collection of ninety-nine Canadian sonnets, edited and annotated by Zachariah Wells. (Just how eclectic and broad is Biblioasis’s scope? This fall it will release Wells and Rachel Lebowitz’s children’s book in verse, Anything but Hank!, which has a really awesome cover.) Wells’s collection makes me happy for a number of reasons, but foremost among them is the eccentric range of names contained within: Margaret Avison, Eric Ormsby, Carmine Starnino, Steven Heighton, Charles G.D. Roberts, George Murray, John Reibetanz, Raymond Souster, P.K. Page, Archibald Lampman, Pyhllis Webb, and, my personal favourite, the woefully underrated George Johnston. I also love the book’s sly organization, which I can’t help but read as a winking nod toward Canadian literature’s decades-old obsession for understanding itself along thematic lines. That approach is an unfortunate for many reasons, but most of all because it is usually more concerned with what work is about than how it functions as literature. What Wells offers is a thematic survey on formalist grounds, a sort of sleight of hand that makes the collection immediately familiar and intelligible but also, as his insightful notes on each poem show, rigorous in its aesthetic evaluations and thoughtful in its attention to details of prosody. As an editor and commentator, Wells is incredibly perceptive and mercifully concise. (His notes of Johnston’s “Cathleen Sweeping” made me see the poem anew, and it’s a sonnet I’ve read dozens of times.) It’s perhaps a fine distinction, but this is a collection for those interested more in poetry by Canadians than Canadian poetry. I’ll leave this one here unless I find out I shouldn’t:

“Cathleen Sweeping,” by George Johnston

The wind blows, and with a little broom
She sweeps against the cold clumsy sky.
She’s three years old. What an enormous room
The world is that she sweeps, making fly
A little busy dust! And here am I
Watching her through the window in the gloom
Of this disconsolate spring morning, my
Thoughts as small and busy as her broom.

Do I believe in her? I cannot quite.
Beauty is more than my belief will bear.
I’ve had to borrow what I think is true:
Nothing stays put until I think it through.
Yet, watching her with her broom in the dark air,
I give it up. Why should I doubt delight?

Tags: literature

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Posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 11:27 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.