Attention Span 2010 – Susan Holbrook

Robert Kroetsch | Completed Field Notes | U of Alberta P | 2000

This collection establishes Kroetsch as Canada’s most important poet. While a collection necessarily leaves out the wonderful design features of the original individual publications (e.g. Seed Catalogue is no longer superimposed over the illustrated 19^th-century McKenzie catalogue), it’s fantastic to hold all these innovative, funny, wickedly sharp long poems in one hand.

Robert Kroetsch | Too Bad | U of Alberta P | 2010

A new collection of short-winded gems, at once tight and loose, dry and hearty. A master of timing. Kroetsch is 83 years old now, and will still charm anybody’s pants off.

Margaret Christakos | What Stirs | Coach House | 2008

Stunning, as always. The domestic is procedural and recombinatory.

Gregory Betts | The Others Raisd In Me | Pedlar | 2009

Betts composes 150 poems out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150 through the “plunderverse” method: all letters (often words) come from the original, in the order they appear. The excess of it is entirely a pleasure, and every poem is imbued with the whimsy of that originating contortion. It’s a rangey book, announcing its survey of culture from the Renaissance to cyborgism. Delicious tension of maximalism and minimalism. Very appealing small fat book.

Darren Wershler-Henry | the tapeworm foundry | Anansi | 2000

Hilarious stream of compositional ideas. My favourite list.

Damien Rogers | Paper Radio | ECW | 2009

Much of the book is more traditionally lyric that most poetry on the third space lists, but I just really loved it. Intelligently aware of form, fresh, thoughtful, impressive.

Sina Queyras | Lemonhound | Coach House | 2006

Very exciting book – prose poem manna. Lisa Robertson, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf are here by invitation, and the host holds her own.

Mark Truscott | Said Like Reeds or Things | Coach House | 2004

Best tiny poems.

Harryette Mullen | Sleeping With the Dictionary | California | 2002

Loved this book for years, but decided in 2009 to assign it to three levels of students (1^st year, 4^th year, grad students) to see what they would do with it. I had a chance to revel again in its charms, ingenuities and provocations, and the students figured out what poetry could do. We started most classes with 5 minutes of Mullen and that recast the whole year in the most wonderful way.

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007

The perfect title for a book that mines, exploits and puts through the ringer the language of Zolf’s day job in corporate communications.

More Susan Holbrook here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2010 – Peter Quartermain

Victor Coleman | Icon Tact: Poems 1984-2001 | Book Thug | 2006

Sardonic and sometimes savagely funny, other times just plain pissed-off; now and again tender, or screwball. Coleman, who reads widely, should be better known and warrants wide readership—and if the last three words make me sound like Elmer Fudd, well, Coleman would enjoy that.

George Deem | Let George Do It | Post-Apollo | 2009

Paintings and drawings; prose and verse. George Deem, who died in 2008, was a language artist, as well as a painter. As Ulla Dydo says in her introduction, this book “is not about painting, it is about writing.” A modest treasure. I’ve turned to it more than once, since I got it a few months back.

Lorne Dufour | Jacob’s Prayer | Caitlin | 2009

Simple prose is hard to write, and even harder to sustain. Dufour does it brilliantly, evoking the hardships of life in a British Columbia aboriginal village where he was schoolteacher, and the people who saved his life during and after a freak storm on hallowe’en in 1975. Sheer unpretentious good writing; generous, warm, loving—and political as Dickens.

George Economou | Ananios of Kleitor: Poems & Fragments and Their Reception from Antiquity to the Present | Shearsman | 2009

A wonderful romp through the petty, predatory and even campy squabbles and pedantry of certain scholars of Ancient Greek texts, at the same time funny and informative. Economou has a terrific parodic ear for the grave tones of scholarship, and an equally terrific poetic ear for the real delights of ancient Greek lyric. A tour de force.

Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, ed. | The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation | Oxford | 2010

Long needed, superbly edited, indispensible.

Kevin Killian and David Brazil, ed. | The Kenning Anthology of Poet’s Theatre1945-1985 | 2010

Generous (so many plays! so many really good ones!). Eye-opening. Inspiring. Useful. A great read. Let’s hope for a follow-up volume.

Ammiel Alcalay, general editor | Lost And Found: The CUNY Poetics Documentary Initiative Series I | CUNY | 2009

Five issues, each with a different editor, issued in seven fascicles: selected correspondence of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn; selected correspondence of Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara; Muriel Rukeyser on Darwin; selections from Philip Whalen’s Journals; Robert Creeley and Daphne Marlatt at the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Series II, promised for Fall 2010, will include Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, and others. Need I say more?

Gérard de Nerval, trans. Richard Sieburth | The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbé de Bucquoy | Archipelago | 2009

Nerval’s cheeky and indeed risky Tristram-Shandyish response to the crazy law in the Second French Republic (July 1850) which through exorbitant stamp-tax made impossible the publication of fiction in newspapers. Nerval’s quest, serialized in Le National, for the memoir of the man who actually escaped from the Bastille, which he once glimpsed on a bookstall but did not buy, has its occasional longueurs, but the whole thing is a nicely comic demolition of easy distinctions between fact and fiction. Not previously published in English, in excellent translation, with valuable introduction and relevant annotations.

Jacques Roubaud, trans. Jeff Fort | The Loop | Dalkey Archive | 2009

The second installment of The Great Fire of London, Roubaud’s highly resourceful and deeply moving Oulipean struggle with memory and loss; to read this is to skirt terrible despair, yet strangely enough to come out of it refreshed, strengthened.

José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Death With Interruptions | Houghton Mifflin | 2009

“The following day no one died” opens this story in which Death takes a vacation. Saramago’s gift here is a clear-sighted logic which exposes and ridicules (with hilarious ingenuity) the profound and absurd ineptitude of all expediency. The novel turns out to be a passionate defence and celebration of love and compassion—but to say that is to sound clichetic. If there is a cliché in the book, then it’s a fresh one.

More Peter Quartermain here. His Attention Span for 2008, 2006. Back to directory.

Irritable or Iterable

Susan Holbrook – Good Egg Bad Seed (4’54”). A review of the Nomados chapbook on That Unsound. A little more Holbrook on PennSound. About Joy Is So Exhausting, due this October from Coach House.