“Table for Four”
Written by Eccentric Crops (Colin
Smith, Jennifer Still, Steven Ross Smith, Ted Landrum)
Published by JackPine Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$30.00
ISBN 978-1-927035-40-5
JackPine Press has been challenging traditional
ideas re: what constitutes a book since the press’s inception, and with Table for Four, written by the four-poet collaborative Eccentric Crops—Colin
Smith, Jennifer Still, Steven Ross Smith, and Ted Landrum—JackPine once again
reimagines “book” and gives us an imaginative, multi-media chapbook, about the
size of a bread and butter plate. Fittingly, this tasteful chapbook features a
red coaster on the front cover and comes with a large red and white checked
napkin folded inside a back flap that’s held in place with sturdy toothpicks. Also
included: concrete poems, drawings, and a mostly black image with white
pinpoints, titled “napkin braille”. Different? Indeed! Welcome to JackPine
Press.
This collaborative project’s interesting on numerous levels. Firstly, contributor Jennifer Still, from Winnipeg, co-founded JackPine Press in 2002, and in her own work she “[explores] the intersections of language and material forms”. Both Still and Saskatoon’s Steven Ross Smith have worked with sound poetry, and both also publish with traditional publishers. Poet Colin Smith, in Winnipeg, was previously “strongly allied to the Kootenay school of Writing in Vancouver” and last published Multiple Bippies (2014). The fourth member of this poetic quartet, Ted Landrum, teaches at the University of Manitoba and participated in another collaborative chapbook project in 2018. A diverse group.
I began reading these experimental poems in the order they appear and noted several words repeated in consecutive poems, ie: ass, code, harpoon, migraine, falling, flutter(hand), heart, fistful(l), shaped, meteoric, nature, offer(s), sips(s), orchids, shamble(s), stretch, thin, veil, stitch(ed) and breath, and I wondered if the poets selected these words in advance and gave themselves the task of creating their own individual poems around them, or if each poem was in fact a collaboration. I flipped to the back and read the poets’ explanation about “What Happened”: “Steven invited us to make text together. We decided to work with quoted material. We imagined ourselves sitting at the cardinal points of a table. Jennifer suggested we pass versions around, widdershins. Numerous constraints were occasionally obeyed.” I also learned that Still “cut out every line of the sixteen line Ur-text and wove them into a grid [resembling a tablecloth] because she was interested in weaving”. The quotations for the former were drawn from disparate places, from T.S. Eliot’s work to “Claudio at University of Manitoba, Gym Locker Room, July 10, 2017”.
Clearly, these poets were having great fun, and each member of this “eccentric” quartet shares a poetic interest in “undermining convention”. The sounds of words prevail over meaning here, at least for this reader, ie: in the poem “DIVERSIA CHART” we read: “inner tango can coin top line snarl” and “legal space race rumble legs love testing radios”. Sound words are prevalent, ie: “thin/whine,” “Birds honk bright code,” “hum low,” and “oinking”. Alliteration abounds, especially in the poem “AIR” with its alphabetical alliteration, ending with “Wilderness sings within without”.
The chapbook’s a hoot on the page, but these works deserve a microphone and a stage.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“kireji: partial portraits &
biofictions”
Written by christian favreau
Published by JackPine Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$30.00
ISBN 9781927035436
I have a special interest in reviewing “first”
books, in part because it’s been thirty-one years since my own first book was
published, and though I’ve followed up with another dozen titles, I still meet folks
who claim they liked my first book best.
Today I read Montreal writer christian favreau’s first book. Kireji: partial portraits & biofictions is an attractive, hand-sewn chapbook with a cover image of a bird. The book contains nine free verse poems, a business card-sized note to “Please be gentle while handling,” and four actual leaves. Leaves? Now that’s a new one for me, but JackPine Press is all about originality, and favreau’s work definitely fits the press’s mandate to “publish chapbooks whose form and content are both artistically integrated and unique”.
What did I find? Firstly, like fellow Canadian poet bpNichol—whom favreau quotes in the opening poem, which is comprised solely of three epigraphs—this new poet also sometimes eschews punctuation. In his second poem, “the finch,” he writes “Id dreamt/Id screamed/all the while unheard,” and he includes a measure of treble clef notes, perhaps to emulate the finch’s song. The poem concerns “relying only on one/self” and how “cutting out the others is an act of self/preservation”.
Family and how one makes his/her original way in the world seem to be themes: “I learn to refuse to fly/in linear fashion/to flit while you blink” he writes in “to my parents”. In this poem two of the poet’s subjects of interest merge: birds and independence. “I must fight the urge:/ to fall—/needing you/not to chew my food”. I loved “the blue sky’s enticing fishhook” in this inquisitive poem that asks “what is?/how can?” and “why that?/ why not?”.
I’m intrigued and delighted by the creative use of colour in these pieces. We read about “the snow-petaled whites between her lids” and “red azaleas bloomed in the cracks of my lips” in the long poem “me (first) / river of forgetfulness”. This is an environmental poem, with numerous references to nature, place (“stawamus and its rock-formed apron”), climate change (“unpredictable rainfall” and “oh, the heat/rises two degrees”), and the part humans play in the planet’s destruction (“blackbird, lift your frequency/drown the sound of spade/on rock”). The focus on the environment’s a natural fit for favreau, who is a climate justice organizer as well as a writer.
While reading this thoughtful, introspective book, I turned to Wikipedia to learn what kireji means: “kireji (lit. "cutting word") are a special category of words used in certain types of Japanese traditional poetry [like Haiku]… … Used in the middle of a verse, [kireji] briefly cuts the stream of thought, indicating that the verse consists of two thoughts half independent of each other”.
Finally, what’s a first book without a love poem or two? The poet writes “we were singing/the same aria/I like to think” but on the same page we find this tender and “just right” image concerning loss: “a hand on a wrist/holding gently/letting go”.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
