Canada

by John Hartley Williams

In Canada, poems arrive out of the ether like the fabled, lantern-jawed Mountie coming to the rescue out of nowhere. Others are on their way back into the ether, transmissions from the brain of an uneasy redman. These are poems that make you feel the hairs on a pony's neck.Canada opens in the backwoods of autobiography and narrative, then reports crisply on calls of sex and desire. After crossing the frontier, a final movement blows innocence off the map for good and all.

126 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 1998

Reviews

[Robin Petty · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Sometimes the writing is no more
Than a pentouch, a delicate dragonfly music
That captures the weird stealth of its own progress
Filling out a dull envelope of air"

A wild, bumpy, but overridingly-likeable ride across the provinces of a personal imagination. It often feels like a uneditted stream of consciousness - a busy boxed-set with b'sides and album tracks but full of re-readable similes and moments you want to share.
While absurd, it's frequently got moments of genuine intimate candour - which you might think inconceivable in a surrealist collection, but you'd be wrong. Conventional metaphor is (and always was) quite inadequate to describe human relationships. And here, amid all the dracula charades, is the proof.
What are my picks? Well 'Bean Soup' is spectacularly evocative and 'Pyjama Story' the most brilliant poem I've read in a considerable time.
"Mice Glue! Mice Glue!"
Something to savour.

[Karlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 word review: ‘Mad & spunky’.