“Ghost Oracle”
By Douglas Burnet Smith
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 (softcover) ISBN 9-781779-401472
Six years ago I reviewed poet and professor Douglas Burnet Smith’s collection Burden, and praised his “spectacular ability to juxtapose the tragic and the beautiful.” I’ve now read his eighteenth book, Ghost Oracle. It’s set in Greece, and again, the juxtapositions—between elation and sorrow, beauty and filth, history and now—stand out. With his distinct and often minimalistic style, expat knowledge, and original phrases, Smith’s effectively transported me to an island 10,000 kilometres from my own.
Here is a poet of observation and reportage. Indeed, many of Smith’s poems are story-like, including the opening piece, “Neo Kosmos,” which details an experience in Athens: jetlagged, the narrator missed his metro stop on the way to the Acropolis, met a woman (“reading/a novel by Kavvadias”) who helped him, and together they “glided slowly up toward harsh/Athenian daylight.” The poem is structured in laddered couplets and indented, single line stanzas, echoing the stops and starts of subway travel. Several of these pieces are formally structured—ie: poems written in tercets or couplets—with generous indentation. This first poem also demonstrates Smith’s fondness for listing, ie: in “glassed-in relics,” the narrator observes “clay pots, figurines, armless/torsos, toys and bones from a child’s grave.” Trees, groceries, and tourists’ accoutrements are listed. In a poem titled “Byzantine Riprap,” lines are structured like steps and the poet uses another delightful list to describe
[…] Terraced slops of myrtle,
sage, thyme, oregano, olive
groves, poppies, wild roses,
daisies, eye-blue cornflowers, and small
yellow bell-like somethings—
chamomile?
Many poems feature three-word
titles, ie: “Masts, Doves, Cigarettes,” Shutters, Rooster, Rhomboid,” and
“Figs, Oranges, Oaths.” In the first of the aforementioned, I was happily
stopped at this dazzling description of the horizon:
[…] where the Aegean’s matte
blue
stretches west
to an impossibly long, silver
hinge
clasping it to the
sky—
This poem also begins the naming of
birds—dove (“double soft grey/stutter-steps in the shade”), sparrows,
starlings, swallows, crows, shrikes, hawks, falcons, pigeons—that wing through
this fine collection, and illustrates Smith’s use of personification:
[…] the sea has tried
all night, and failed
again, all night,
to shed its wrinkled skin.
Goats are “mangy hecklers, snorting.” There’s “wind/tormenting the roof tiles,” and “A water truck rumbles by, waking the dust.” There’s barking, screen doors slamming, a “Cicada high-hat rap” and “a screech owl,\like a battery-drained car alarm.” Sheep?
“… pointillist dots on the
crest, foraging, loitering, wool
greyish white, sun-on-rocks”
Aside from paying attention to
sounds—ie:, in a “sketchy Vespa” with failing gears, “he mistook the engine’s
whine/for cicadas”—scents also viscerally elevate these poems … “Bread,
the scent rising/out of the bakery,” “salt air,” “the perfume of jasmine,” and
this gorgeousness:
Undeterred, thyme wafts
down from amphitheatric hillsides
through the empty streets.
Greece is the Aegean (“Crepuscular,
sorrowful,/violet”), olives, cats. It’s long queues and anti-tourist graffiti.
“Heat, ticking like time.” Slow ferries and whitewashed houses. Upon finishing
these much-enjoyed poems, I feel I’ve been escorted to somewhere exotic … and it
smelled of lemons and dust.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“This Book is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies and the Invention of an Idiom”
By yasser elhariry
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$34.95
ISBN 9-781779-401502
Hol[e]y: the intriguingly titled This
Book is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies and the Invention of an Idiom, by
yasser elhariry, is a dense compendium that explores what is so not
there—holes—it’s worthy of its own study. At times erudite, at times downright
silly (“dead unserious”), ehlariry, an author and Associate Professor of French
Studies at Dartmouth College, focuses his cultural, literary, religious,
philosophical, and scientific gaze on holes of all types in this wide-ranging
treatise which “began as a serious joke,” and, in which, the writer “took a
massive gamble in writing.”
In this “alternative cultural history of holes, long thought of as enclosures, container, graves, or one-way dead ends,” elhariry “push[es] back against these age-old conceptions of holes, countering that holes are openings and heavily coded sites of significance.” Throughout his heavily-referenced text he “demonstrates how cultural forms and theoretical discourses about holes shape modern and contemporary cultural production as much as they are shaped by it.”
This is a deep dive into a peculiar subject, but the range of references alone make for playful and interesting reading … and plenty of puns. “I write badly and put holes in my writing (mistakes, typos), but it’s not like I’m writing in a hole,” elhariry asserts. The author’s background—“born to migrant Egyptian Muslims, grew up in Dubai in the 1980s and 1990s, listened religiously to grunge and metal and the Spice Girls, and [his] teenage years were ruled by American shows, MTV, and blood-soaked action movies”—informs his work. The trilingual writer includes English, French and Arabic in this text, and he “drop[s] song lyrics everywhere like they’re hotcakes.”
The first chapter opens with a black and white photograph of a hotel in Geneva. The sign above this nondescript dwelling, Hotel Montana, reads “HO EL.” In this chapter, elhariry’s subjects include the work of “Queer francoarab poet” Karima Ouaghenim and “southern French poet” Christophe Tarkos. The writer contends that “Critics are down on queer poets. They miss their holes like the deserts miss the rain” (a lyric from “Missing,” by the English duo Everything But The Girl).
Holes in headlines are examined, ie: “Sand Hole Collapses at Florida Beach, Killing 7-Year-Old Girl” and “How did a Boeing Jet End Up with a Big Hole?” Song lyrics; poetic statements (“Black holes are stars falling in on themselves”); idioms (“You’re in the hole if you’re in dire financial straits” and “Shut your piehole”); narrative plot holes; holes in the human body; black holes in the universe; donuts and Swiss cheese; Islamic rituals involving “corporeal holes;” and Oscar the Grouch, who “lives in a hole under a trashcan” … it would seem that elhariry has left no hole unturned.
But this is also a book of questioning: “Are there happy holes? Do holes even exist? Aren’t they more accurately called openings?”
In his Acknowledgements, we find the “largest hole” is the grief elhariry experienced upon his mother’s death, and “ghosts and grief …. Haunt each of [his] words here.”
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
__________
By Solomon Ratt, Illustrations by Holly
Martin
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$34.95 ISBN 9-781779-401427
The striking cover of Solomon Ratt’s latest work, mâci-nîhithawîwin: Beginning Woods Cree, is an image of two stylized muskrats vertically swimming in green water with fish and aquatic plants connecting them to a circle. Titled “That muskrat life” and created by artist Bree Island (Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, Treaty 8), the image is “a reminder of our ability to adapt and transform,” and Muskrat’s story “is about strength and perseverance, and believing in oneself.” These attributes are critical when it comes to learning a language, and that’s what this hefty, coil-bound, introductory workbook aims to do: help the reader learn Woods Cree.
Ratt is a well-known educator, storyteller, and Cree-language advocate from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band with several publications to his credit; this new workbook complements his earlier publication, mâci-nêhiyawêwin / Beginning Cree (Y-dialect), and he’s also published nīhithaw ācimowina/Woods Cree Stories and the memoir kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember, about his residential school experiences, plus other Cree language workbooks, with the University of Regina Press. The retired Associate Professor worked for several years at First Nations University of Canada, and his many literary awards speak to his recognized talents.
This latest publication “offers simple and accessible grammar lessons” with “clear explanations, engaging exercise, and helpful illustrations”—the latter are provided by Holly Martin, a Swampy Cree artist, originally from Moose Lake First Nation, whom Ratt’s worked with in the past. The often humourous line drawings provide a light complement to the lessons, and will be appreciated by both young and older learners.
The workbook begins with a short introduction of the Cree, “the most widespread of Canada’s First Nations peoples,” (of the 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan, 49 are Cree Nations) and explains that there are five different Cree dialects in Canada, and in Saskatchewan the N, TH, and Y dialects are spoken. This book uses the TH dialect and the Woodland Cree Standard Roman Orthography (SROw), in which “one letter represents one sound,” and there are ten consonants and six vowel sounds.
The book is organized into eight chapters, ie: “Nouns” and “Inanimate Intransitive Verbs,” and includes exercises, verb charts, and a vocabulary list. While linguists generally estimate that the Cree language is about 2,500 to 3,000 years old, this publication offers 21st Century aids to assist in the learning. Online audio resources from the Cree Literacy Network (creeliteracy.org) are available to help with pronunciation, and there’s a QR code readers can scan “to request [their] copy of the answer key.”
Tâpwî mâni-mâka (it is so true) that a thorough, well-organized resource such as this one will be helpful to individuals undertaking independent Cree language studies as well as classroom educators. Notably, the vocabulary includes important weather words and phrases, like kaskatin (it freezes up) and mithoskamin (it’s break-up).
It’s interesting to me how many Cree words I know from my years of living in Turtleford and Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, ie: mistik (tree), môniyâw (a Caucasian), and amisk (beaver). Now I can learn some more.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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