Westerns

by Maxine Gadd

A gathering of three previously published titles by Maxine Gadd: book of practical knowledge, guns of the west and hochelaga

78 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Susan Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maxine Gadd, born in the UK in 1940, grew up in Vancouver and became a fixture of the Canadian west-coast poetry scene in the late '60s and early '70s. This book gathers together three previous titles of Gadd's: book of practical knowledge, guns of the west and hochelaga. All the poems in westerns are very much of their time, with pointers to the drug culture of the day; some random-seeming works have not stood the test of time. Gadd's themes are oppression and injustice and encompass mythic figures, western, indigenous and ancient. Her poems, many of them laid out in the typographical style of concrete poetry, make reference to legends ancient and modern, from Apollo to Kit Carsen. The long narrative poem hochelaga, taking the Iroquoian name for the village that stood where Montreal is now, is the most coherent. I liked this crie de coeur, "Poetry is unreal, / It remains and breeds / in the best of everyone burning."