A layout frighteningly close to that of Toronto’s infamous Jones’ Ave., this chapbook features work by those in the city teeming with poetry, Ottawa. This is what happened. Amanda Saper muses raindrops. Gold scarlet is smeared in the text somewhere. Then Icarus makes an appearance because he always does. It’s true. But she redeems herself with her fourth short poem “Blue and Yellow Talk”: “red wine bleeds/ over the table/ a marriage/ is easy/ to kill.” While these poems are way too small for me to understand any more, I do appreciate the effort in their preservation. Is poetry shrinking? Check your poetry books. Are the poems getting smaller after they’re published? Maybe it’s my prescription. Okay, so I’ll go beyond my own world and say that I did like Julie Mondor’s “Night Vision” but only for her use of perch and cash register. That was really quite a perfect image; can’t you picture the bird-like claws scratching away at the cash keys? Krisha Wignarajah’s “Braid” is a nice piece because it doesn’t rush into the climax, or try to focus on a result too quickly. There is a bit of foreplay, which I’ve been told is a good thing. “Now the silver gilded mirror reflects her pursed lips intent upon her task. My braids are undone, creating skimpy ripples down my hair. DNA yields to the soft bristles of the brush. Her grandmother’s brush. Soft blond bristles hold in place her ideals of today–” The design is nice but I just wish it was a bit more lexically meaningful. I mean these short things can be meaningful if you read it once and run off to something else. But when you have the collection at your disposal, it gets a bit weak. They only do so much for one’s appreciation of a genre whose respect fluctuates with the collapse and creation of litmags nation-wide. (Nathaniel G. Moore)
poetry chapbook, Friday Circle, $4,Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ottawa ON, K1N 6N5