I just got wrongly charged $9 by Canada Customs for a batch of review copies
from Krupskaya Books, & then when I got them they'd been copiously bashed
up, & one turned out to have a binding defect that made it fall apart in my
hands so I now can't even send it to a reviewer to review in any case...
This is all just to say I'm not in the best frame of mind. But thought I'd
toss an observation onto the list: am I right to think there's a recent
poetic fashion for "antiqued" verse (in the sense that new furniture is
often "antiqued")? I'd first come across this mode in recent verse (it has
an old history of course--Spenser, e.g.) in Michael Haslam's work--books
like _Continual Song_ & _Sothfastness_ & _Aleethia_, with personifications
and capital letters in funny places & mock-formal diction. That was in the
1980s & 1990s; I doubt any recent outcrops of this mode are indebted to
Haslam (except maybe Martin Corless-Smith?). The Krupskaya batch includes a
book by Stacy Doris called _Paramour_. A casual look suggests it's not
terribly interesting, I'm afraid--rather too overtly pinched from Lisa
Robertson's work (all girls & boys & bits from Ovid). The poems have titles
like "Song of the Piper's _Innocence_" or "A-Wooing Warring Ditty" or
"Pierce and Plow, Men". The design of the book links to the whole genre of
faux-"classical" or "renaissance" or "18th-century" typesetting &
design--Robertson & Corless-Smith, of course, but also Keston Sutherland's
_Mincemeat Seesaw_ or Steve McCaffery's _The Cheat of Words_ or Jennifer
Moxley's _Wrong Life_. More importantly one might link this to Rod
Mengham's attempt to claim an "anthological" theme in the most important
younger writers (see the review of the Talisman anthology in _Stand_ in, I
think, issue 1.4?)--& to Andrea Brady's demolishment of this claim in _Quid_
4. A demolishment which, despite its harshness, I find myself rather more
in sympathy with...I like a number of the books I've mentioned, while
finding others dull, but the Doris does suggest the mode is getting stale.
Brady would be delighted, I'm sure, by the opening sentence of the
introduction: "This is a very conservative book."
That's enough for this evening. Though I'll add that the one really
valuable book in the bunch was fellow-listmember Ben Friedlander's _A Knot
Is Not a Tangle_--worth searching out.
all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865
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