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Good to see the reception given Lisa Robertson's "Debbie: An Epic". Her earlier curtsy/cheeky gesture towards Virgil was "XEclogue", from Tsunami Editions, Vancouver in 1993. Some of you may have missed it or overlooked it (big year at the KSW was '93 - Catriona Strang's "Low Fancy", Deanna Ferguson's "The Relative Minor" & Jeff Derkson's "Dwell" to cite 3 others): a fine book in its own right & necessary in discussion of contemporary pastoral. I'll quote from beginning, middle & end & allow LR to speak for her sharp & witty selves. from "How Pastoral: A Prologue" "I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed to pry Liberty loose from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress' complicity with a socially expedient code; to invade my own illusions of historical innocence. The proud trees, the proud rocks, the proud sky, the proud fields, the proud poor have been held before my glazed face for centuries. I believed they were reflections. The trees leaned masochistically into my absence of satisfaction. The horizon pulled me close. It was trying to fulfil a space I thought of as my body. Through the bosco a fleecy blackness revealed the nation as its vapid twin. Yet nostalgia can locate those structured faults our embraces also seek. A surface parts. The nasty hours brim with the refinements of felicity. It's obvious now: Liberty has been dressed in the guise of an ambivalent expenditure." from "Eclogue Nine: History" (& hoping the spacings survive computer transfers!) "A fop's lopsided interpolation's folly a wrinkled blind eye hoops" from "Eclogue Ten: Utopia" "How then may we speak of futures? I would prefer to lean and whisper in the throaty privacy of roses but distance brings a discipline both anticipatory and fettering. Our anxieties have dissipated into all the varieties of edge a ruffling hand describes. A vocabulary is no longer adequate to the precisions of our desires. We're on the cusp of an umbelliferous and sweet coin. A timorous wordling flushes and buckles into secrecy. Greeness and violence wipe our lips. Fingers fall into the buxom air, the flickering and rhyming flesh. Skin is a rhythm cupped. Skin hinges the light. The buxom air unbraids us. We regret only our costly addiction to the beautiful." AND, one tour-de-force paragraph later... "A bird's breath is in my throat." I think it's still in print. Best, Pete. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%