Three Book Reviews: Robert Calder, Marie Elyse St. George, and Susan Harris

“A Hero for the Americas: The Legend of Gonzalo Guerrero”

by Robert Calder

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$24.95  ISBN 9-780889-775091   

  

Robert Calder's A Hero for the Americas: The Legend of Gonzalo Guerrero is an impeccably-researched and compelling nonfiction title offering much to ingest, enjoy, and learn from. The GG award-winning author and Emeritus Professor (U of S) came to his subject as a frequent traveler to the Yucatán Peninsula, where the Spanish-born sailor Gonzalo Guerrero and numerous other conquistadors believed they'd find their fortunes.  

A sculpture of Guerrero, "a powerful figure dressed as a Mayan warrior," first piqued Calder's interest in the enigmatic 16th Century hero, and indeed, Guerrero's relatively unsung story (as compared to that of fellow conquistador, Hernán Cortés) has all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster: adventure, battles, romance, and legacy.

The robust Andalusian sailor defied his country and Catholic religion after being shipwrecked (of nineteen, only Guerrero and fellow Spaniard Jerónimo de Aguilar survived) off the Yucatán Peninsula in 1512. Guerrero was enslaved by a Mayan chief; earned the tribe's respect; married the chief's daughter; became a Chactemal military captain; and fathered the first mestizaje children in Mexican history.

There's more. Both Aguilar and Guerrero lived in Mayan captivity for seven years before the former happily reunited with the eventual Aztec-conquering Cortés, on Cozumel. Aguilar told an incredulous Cortés about their countryman who'd embraced Mayan culture, adopting everything from their language to unique tribal piercings and tattoos. Through Aguilar, Cortés compelled the "Spaniard-turned-Maya" to rejoin his countrymen, and Guerrero politely but definitively refused.

Calder writes that Guerrero's legend as both a warrior and a father are integral. He explains that he hopes to help readers "trace [Guerrero's] path through the tumultuous and quickly changing life of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Spain and of the New World," while allowing that the hero's story straddles "the unstable border between history and fiction, between fact and folklore," as Guerrero left no written account of his experience. Little's even known of his death, though it's suspected he died in Honduras, and his family likely "melted into the jungle".

While Guerrero's definitely the star of this story, the book's also ripe with information on myriad subjects, including the history of maize; Queen Isabella's admission that "she only had two baths in her life;" the historical Mayan practice of flattening a newborn's head between two boards for several months "to [produce] a permanent sloping forehead and elongated skull … considered a mark of the ruling class;" and the Cortés-Malinche story. Malinche was the Nahua slave with the "aristocratic bearing" who was "given" to Cortés, acted as his interpreter, bore his son, and greatly aided in the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. In contrast, Guerrero was "recast as the heroic opponent of Spanish hegemony".

Calder illuminates a part of Mexican history that's long lived in the shadows: the history of the mestizos, who make up 60% of Mexico's population. This book ably demonstrates why a "plurality of perspectives" is critical, and while it should almost be required reading for all beach tourists in Mexico, it's a lesson we can also take to heart in Canada.      

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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 "An Assortment: Darkly Delicious Literary & Visual Oddments"

by Marie Elyse St. George

Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-1-927756-83-6

The enticing title of Marie Elyse St. George's latest book says it all. Delve into this tickle trunk of poems, stories (both fictions and truths), drawings, paintings, and cartoons, plus a tribute to now long-passed writer Anne Szumigalski, and you'll indeed find something darkly delicious to make you smile, laugh, and think.

Saskatoon's St. George has earned an esteemed reputation as both a visual artist and a writer, and a career highlight's been her 1995 poetry and art collaboration (with close friend Szumigalski) Voice, which resulted in both an exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery and a book which garnered the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1995. She's also collaborated with poet Patrick Lane, provided art for the covers of numerous literary journals and books, and published an award-winning memoir.

While reading An Assortment: Darkly Delicious Literary & Visual Oddments, I procured an image of a young girl skipping through a field of wildflowers, plucking blossoms here and there for an atypical bouquet. This image was no doubt hastened by the book's cover image–a photo of the author as a girl beneath what I'm guessing's a rose arbour–and by the tantalizing whimsy of both the artwork (ie: the full-colour "Origin of Angels") and the clever humour in the text.

To read St. George is to leap into worlds that include opinionated silver fox stoles who malign the fact that "Times have changed," and art openings and fashion are not what they once were: "The pretty young ladies in the formal gowns you so admire are art students wearing '40s and '50s clothes as a comment on continuing sexism."  In the story "Who Was That Masked Dog?" a precocious child converses with a guard dog who speaks in the "hearty, courteous manner of Teddy Roosevelt," and in "Feeding Amelia" we learn that a talking shark has eaten Amelia Earhart: "I absorbed her spirit and courage, but I must say, her leather coat and boots were quite indigestible".    

In her poetry, as well, St. George gifts inanimate objects with life. Words themselves can be "rude    they elbow their way/in front of the correct ones and make you look a fool" or they can "spread their shimmering skirts/fold their hands and smile fondly". In her poem "Some Secondhand Clothes" we read that the subjects in the title "resent being bundled from their cozy closets".

I particularly enjoyed hilarious "Hazel," in the opening story, who endures her husband's loathsome wilderness expeditions and has learned a plethora of strange skills, including "how to use wild herbs to season a ragout of grasshoppers".

   

The fleeting nature of inspiration, a stillborn fraternal twin, soldiers, the challenges associated with aging, and the influence of animals-from mice to grey foxes to "elephants listening to lies they tell themselves"-are all subjects that walk through the wildflower fields with that imaginative little girl, who grew to be a talented writer and artist. This entertaining "amalgam of fantasy and reality" is well worth the read.        

                                                                                        

 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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 “Christmas A to Z”

by Susan Harris

Published by White Lily Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$12.00  ISBN 978-0-9949869-1-7

Christmas. Even the very youngest children get caught up in the excitement–the gifts, the tree, and of course, Santa Claus–and to help celebrate and explain some of the season's symbols, celebrations, and emotions, Saskatchewan writer Susan Harris has added to her shelf of children's books with a new title, the brightly illustrated Christmas A to Z. It's important to note that this is a secular Christmas alphabet book; Harris previously published An Alphabet of the First Christmas: A Christian Alphabet Book, as well as several other titles for young children.

The book begins with a broad dedication: "For boys and girls who love Christmas," and ends with a sweet letter from Harris to her young readers. The author uses a gentle tone to address her "Little Friend[s]," and her experience as a former teacher comes across in the letter's engaging text. "Did you know that it does not snow in some countries? I grew up in the country of Trinidad, which is an island, and it does not snow there," she writes. "Do you have a favourite present you received for Christmas, Little Friend? Mine was a little doll whom I named Jane."  

This is not a busy book, which will be appealing for those just learning to read, and for the adults who may be sharing this story with youngsters. The twenty-six alphabet pages contain little text, the letters and definitions appears in a large black font, and there is much white space surrounding the pictures.  

As a writer myself, I'm always interested in what alphabet book authors choose to represent each letter. In Harris's book, A is for Antlers. They "look like sticks on the heads of deer but they are really bony growths," we read and learn. On this page–and several others–Harris includes information that helps readers better understand the word selected to represent the letter. Bells are significant because "churches used to ring their big bells on Christmas Day," she writes. The word for V is Village: "A village is a small group of houses in the countryside. 'Christmas Villages' are decorations which started off as nativity scenes but now include many different kinds of ornaments".

It's easy to bemoan how commercialized Christmas has become, thus it's refreshing to read–on the G page–that "A gift is something a person gives to someone else without expecting anything in return." Q is always a challenging letter, and Harris wisely addresses it with the word Quaint: "Quaint means nice in an old-fashioned way". And what of Z? "Zzzz is the sound of snoring while asleep. Happy, tired boys and girls fall asleep quickly after the excitement of Christmas Day." Indeed they do.

The last page features an image of an undecorated tree, and here little ones are invited to use their own imaginations with crayons or markers.  

Sharing this book with youngsters will merrily elucidate some of the symbols and practices surrounding Christmas. It may even increase excitement for The Big Day. Enjoy!

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Book Review: William Robertson's Decoys

“Decoys”

Written by William Robertson

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$17.95  ISBN 978-1-77187-150-1

  

In Decoys, the new poetry collection by William Robertson, the long-time Saskatoon scribe plumbs his own history and threads personal anecdotes into a textured fabric that reflects the prairie from what might be considered a bird's eye view. In the country, kids push a puck around on ice "rippled/frozen by the wind," and at Gull Lake we see "the grass in all its greens,/that bull, sequestered from the rest". Birds are carefully considered and rendered poetic in myriad unique ways, ie: "Ruffled grouse leads its perfect/rusty brown and black fan/out of the spruce, through the ditch," and in "Raven on Frozen River," the poet beautifully writes "I could spend all day/watching you divide/snowy silence/from itself". The author's urgency to "hold onto things beautiful" is apparent, page after page. There's a reverence for the rural, here, including lakes, and the Muenster area, with its amicable chickadees at St. Peter's Abbey, where Robertson penned some of these poems at Saskatchewan Writers Guild artist retreats, but the city is also carefully considered - and sometimes found lacking - "Outside the rickety/red fence, unpainted for years, the weeds/and long grasses try their best/to hide the garbage". Workmen noisily improve houses, "tapping back into shape/these failing organisms". Poems feature both the innocence and the bravado of the young, and expose a life not measuring up to the advertisements, ie: a scene from a duck hunter's calendar is contrasted against an unproductive father-son hunting trip; children sculpting snow into forts, as shown in schoolbooks and on TV, is measured against the futility of trying to do the same with "the dry prairie stuff/that crumbled in our hands;" and the fish in Turtle Lake don't measure up to the flashy American magazine and TV fishing-show fish a son dreams about.    Small things breathe through these poems: flies, wasps, mice, wildflowers, and an August dragonfly, whom, Robertson writes, "gathers its memories/of mid-summer air, rises/on invisible wings, leaving me/heavy and human on the sidewalk". Again, as with many of these reflections, there's a hint of melancholy, of not measuring up, but also a recognition that perfection's found in the ordinary. Stylistically, as both a poet and a writing instructor, Robertson clearly knows what he's doing. Several poems feature rhyming words on the last and third last lines, which adds a musical lilt. A couple of prose poems are nestled among the free verse poems. Sound is cleverly used in "Dead Clown," which features a bird in a "black/and white gown," (magpie, I assume). The cawing bird's "gaudy yak/yak" is echoed in Robertson's rhyming – or cawing – words" "call," "all," and "fall". This collection makes a good case for listening closely to poems to hear the small songs within them.

Fish and fishing are other favoured subjects here, and in reading these thoughtful poems in particular, I'm reminded of how writing poetry requires a kind of faith not unlike that of an angler: you sit quietly, you wait, and sometimes, you land a good one. This book is filled with keepers.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Three Book Reviews: Byrna Barclay (Editor), Pat Krause, and Jim McLean

"Wanderlust: Stories on the Move"

Anthology edited by Byrna Barclay

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 978-1-77187-135-8

   

  

How does a book idea begin? Wanderlust: Stories on the Move started when seven reputable Saskatchewan writers enjoyed a barbeque together. In her introduction, editor Byrna Barclay explains that the idea for this anthology was spawned when Shelley Banks expressed a desire to tour and read with her fellow prose-writing diners at a Regina barbecue. Barclay compiled and edited the work, and though no theme was suggested, she found that "in every story a person embarks on a journey of discovery". Along with Banks and Barclay, Brenda Niskala, Linda Biasotto, James Trettwer, Kelly-Anne Riess, and Annette Bower share imaginative journeys, and the result's a literary road trip that takes readers to places near and far, real and imagined.

Niskala transports readers to a Norse trading voyage in 1065 in her exciting novel-in-progress, "Pirates of the Heart," and Biasotto's favoured Italian locales. Trettwer takes us to a fictitious potash company, and Riess has contributed a moving novel chapter about a twenty-one-year-old who's never been kissed, and is leaving Saskatchewan for the first time. "Tara had never seen a moose before or a bear, let alone any mountains, except, of course, on TV." Will Jasper deliver the joy she's been missing? Will the attractive stranger who's taken the bus seat beside her?

Each story or novel excerpt possesses its own charms. I give the Menacing Mood Award to Biasotto, for "The Virgin in the Grotto," with its eerie tone and flirtation with matricide: "The only sound from her mother's room is the fan dragging the air in one sustained breath". Niskala wins Best Action-Adventure Award, for her sterling sword-fight scenes. Barclay's gem is the long story "Jigger," which melds Saskatchewan history – the Depression, the Regina Riot, a train-riding hobo, and the Weyburn Psychiatric Hospital – and a tender tale about first love: she receives the Most Effective Storytelling Award. I quickly warmed to Trettwer's downwardly-mobile character, Miller - who drinks himself into oblivion and forgets his daughter's birthday: Realistic Characterization Of A Contemporary Character Award. Banks easily takes the Local Colour Award, with her excellent descriptions of smalltown Saskatchewan, ie: "We drive past the lot where the hardware store once stood, and the rows of Manitoba maples that shaded the long-demolished school and playground, now covered in thistles." (Big points, too, for her "rusted advertising sign for a forgotten brand of engine oil".) Riess's single contribution, "Bus Ride," earns the Reader Empathy For A Character Award, and Bower, in her piece about aging women looking out for each other, secures the Dark Humour Award.             

Linda Biasotto hosted the barbeque where it all began, and she deserves mention for one of the finest images. In "Flying," her teen protagonist describes a veranda at a rich friend's home as "a white barge ready to detach and float across the new lawn". I love it when a writer helps me to see the ordinary in a brand new way, and when a group of writers brainstorm an idea and it comes – beautifully, deliciously - to fruition.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Double Exposure”

by Pat Krause

published by Burton House Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 9-780994-866936

Pat Krause was a founding member of the venerable Saskatchewan Writers Guild, a short story writer and memoirist, and a longtime resident of Regina. Krause died in 2015 but her literary legacy continues with Double Exposure, a novella and new short stories, recently published by Burton House Books.

Double Exposure is a family affair, in more ways than one. Pat Krause penned the stories, Barbara Krause was responsible for the cover and interior artwork, and the book opens with a quote from a poem by Pat's daughter, Judith Krause. Titled "The Women in the Family," the poetic excerpt's a fitting introduction to this work that explores the dynamics between generations of female family members and between the north (Saskatchewan) and the south (Alabama, where the characters and the author both lived), and both realistically and rompishly documents the vagaries of aging and the grief that accompanies the final tolling of the bell.

The book's eccentric and outspoken characters include outrageous Gran Tiss, who had the nerve to up and die on the eve of her 100th birthday; her daughter Vee, who's horrified that the night she passed her mother was kicking her heels up at the January Jubilee in the Odd Fellows Hall; her granddaughter (and novella narrator) Prentice, a self-professed hypochondriac in Indian Head; and the omnipresent Lusa – Tiss's superstitious nursemaid and the family's longtime nanny, who came north with them from Tuscaloosa. Lusa describes a scene from the dance: "[Gran Tiss] done took up the vegetable tray. Plopped a heap of carrot sticks and celery and broccoli and cauliflower on top of it and rhumba-ed round the hall like the Brazilian Bombshell!" This quote illustrates both Tiss's personality and Lusa's voice, and indeed, strong voices are what Krause excels at in her rich-in-dialogue novella, "Southern Relations," which makes up more than half the book.

In a tragi-comedy of errors, guests from near and far arrive for the birthday party only to learn that they've arrived to a wake rather than a fiesta, and the birthday gal is "laid out on the living room right there on the chesterfield!" A pair of wig-adorned senior twins, "The Ladybugs," provide entertainment in the form of sitting and tap-dancing (with shoes on their hands), and afterward everyone physically able to "boogied up to the attic" to take home Gran Tiss souvenirs, including a sugar cane knife, and "The complete set of Sherlock Homes".    

Krause's writing chops also make their appearance in wintery descriptions. "Hoarfrost turned the spruce trees into herringbone designs raked into the sky," she writes in the novella, and in the final story, "Last Dance," the narrator remembers when she was a child and "scratched a poem in frost on [her] bedroom window, with the end of a bobby-pin".

In an afterword, Burton House's Byrna Barclay writes that during Krause's final days she was living in the Gardner Park Care Home, and "she slept in a geri-chair, using her bed to sort new stories". That's dedication. And that was Pat Krause.  

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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“Beethoven”

by Jim McLean

published by Burton House Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 9-780994-866929

Moose Jaw's Jim McLean is all over the place - in a good way. He wrote about the CPR in his first book, Secret Life of Railroaders; about growing up in Saskatchewan in Nineteen Fifty-Seven; and he co-authored Wildflowers Across the Prairies. Now he's turned his poetic attention to that singular composer, Beethoven. Indeed, Beethoven is the title of McLean's third solo publication in an over thirty-year span; surely a distinguished career with Canadian Pacific Railway and Transport Canada had much to do with the lapses between books.

Beethoven is a lively collection of poems presented in several invented voices, including the composer's, the voices of the women in his life - though he's a "poor incompetent/Don Juan"- and that of Beethoven's tyrannical father, but one of the strongest pieces, "On His Deafness," concerns an anecdote about McLean's own aging father, whom the poet is trying to impress with garden "Brussels sprouts/big as fists  tenderly/coaxed from the hard/prairie earth" and a well-heeled garage. Silent and apparently nonplussed, the elder man walks away, "humming softly to himself/off key …" This clever merging of disparate elements - ie: nature - with musical references is maintained throughout the book.

In "Scene by the Brook (Symphony No. 6 in F (Pastorale)), the poet provides the music of a prairie afternoon, including "scolding sparrows  the meadowlark's song always new," and grasshoppers that "chew through the afternoon" beside the rest of the insect "orchestra". McLean brilliantly writes of "frogs singing from the sloughs/a thousand melancholy cellos".        

There's much variety here, including a poem in German (translated by the book's editor, Harold Rhenisch); a sestina; and a humorous long poem in which the poet talks directly to Beethoven, who appears to him in an attic room in Calgary's Palliser Hotel. The book's also scored with McLean's simple but impressive illustrations.

Kudos to the poet for his daring, self-deprecating poem "Alfred Brendel at the Clavier," in which the poet questions his own ability, and, meta-fiction style, inserts "I tried to get that into a poem/but it never fit" and "Tonight  while writing this  I learned/the plural of opus is opera."

McLean claims that he "had the audacity" to write about Beethoven because of his ability – and anyone else's – to appreciate "beautiful, powerful music". He internalizes and translates the music, convincing the reader that he does share an intimate connection with Beethoven. McLean writes "the reason I mention Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto/is that he wrote it for me/one cold homesick night/in Winnipeg." 

Clearly much research went into this book, but research aside, the poet again wrestles with his nerve in writing about Beethoven, and perhaps the finest poem-within-a-poem (it's also William Carlos Williams-esque) is this imagistic shorty:

     All I know

     is that the Fifth Symphony is playing

     smoke rising from chimneys

     under a full moon

     at thirty below

The egotistical composer's great repertoire provided all the inspiration the prairie poet (and railwayman) required to wield his pen, and, as happens with talented conductors, fine songs are the result.       

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

Three Book Reviews: John Early, William Wardill, and Wes Funk

"Tales of the Modern Nomad: Monks, Mushrooms & Other Misadventures"

by John Early

Published by Early Byrd Productions

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$26.99  ISBN 978-0-9952666-0-5

  

Rarely do I read a book that takes the top of my head off (in the best way), but Tales of the Modern Nomad-a candid travelogue and first book by Saskatoon backpacker John Early-did just that. Well-written, entertaining, illuminating, original, cheeky, and real-in that it features both positive and negative experiences-I read chapters of this book aloud to two visiting backpackers in their twenties and thirties, and they were relating and laughing right along. To quote the author's father: "You couldn't make this shit up if you tried."

Early's young, and many of the experiences described in this hefty, full-colour hardcover-with maps, photographs, anecdotes, trivia, poems, art, doodles, and quotes ranging from Eckhart Tolle to Charles Bukowski-may have special appeal for those who possess the desire to surf in Sayulita; zip-line between Laos' tropical rain forest treehouses; or, as Early recounts in the section titled "Down The Rabbit Hole," eat "Mystery Mushrooms from an Indonesian Road Stand," but as one who's backpacked and been to many of the locales he writes about (ie: Bali, Zürich, Bangkok, Čzesky Krumlov)-and I've blown out decades more candles than Early-I can vouch for the veracity and sentiment of the author's accounts (ie: nefarious taxi drivers in foreign countries; being astounded in Paris by those who approach Notre Dame just long enough to get a selfie, then carry on to the next Facebook-able landmark; or defaulting to Spanish whenever someone speaks to me in another language), and appreciated both reliving some of my own travels and vicariously experiencing ones I may never dare to take. Boating down the Amazon to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony deep in the jungle? Hitchhiking with a gypsy caravan in Central America? "The caravan crew consists of Goat, from Northern Oregon; his girlfriend Dancing Water, from Montreal, Blas, a dreadlocked backpacker from Argentina; Max, a Californian non-conformist Goat met at a Rainbow Gathering in Panama; and Chico, Goat's loyal dog he picked up in Mexico." (Oh, all right. Sure!)

As with all great travel writing, Early's tales-gleaned directly from his travel journals-feature the people he randomly meets along the way in hostels, jungles, on beaches, and, uncharacteristically for a backpacker, on a cruise ship (Early worked on one for six months).

The book's format, with its delightful mix of information-including both the extremely personal (receiving a questionable massage from a Thai monk) and hilarious trivia ("10 Ways to Say Poop in Japanese")-is one of its major charms. And this title contains far more than just backpacking smarts; it's saturated with life wisdom, ie: "traveling is in your head/as much as it's under your feet/Never stop being a traveler./And always life a life worth journaling."

I agree with Early that travelling is a great educator. We learn so much about others when we immerse ourselves in another culture-and perhaps put that camera or margarita down for a bit, and really get to know the locals-but moreover, we also learn invaluable lessons about ourselves. What a read, John Early. What a life! 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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"Muskrat Ramble"

by William Wardill

Published by DriverWorks Ink

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.99  ISBN 978-1-927570-34-0 

   

Eatonia, SK's William Wardill has been writing stories and poems for decades, and now the veteran historian, writer, diviner, and small-town Saskatchewan aficionado has penned his "swan song" collection of poetry, Muskrat Ramble, which includes previously published work, photographs, and, interestingly, brief, conversational-style introductions to many of the poems. The "almost autobiographical" and fictional poems (with "roots in reality") are straightforward narrative tributes to people, places, and pre-Facebook ways of life long behind us now. Readers will appreciate the poems' preambles: reading them is akin to hearing a writer present his or her work at a public reading. Many readers (including yours truly) will also appreciate the larger-than-usual print.  

Wardill has lived a rich life across his nine decades. He stretches back to his boyhood re: acknowledgement of an Alsask teacher for helping him to realize "that a little boy who liked to arrange words in patterns, paint pictures, and sing songs could he as useful in the world as the little boy who excelled in athletic competitions." At the other end of his life, in a poem titled "Homo Emeritus," he reflects that "Now there is time for peaceful nights/and waking dreams and building airy mansions/out of moonbeams."

The collection includes Wardill's first published poem: it appeared in Western People, a now long-gone supplement to The Western Producer, and is a tribute to a father and his trunk full of "Perfumed pipes and shaving soap/and polish for his patent leather shoes." The sense of longing is almost palpable. The poet writes of a wish to stand with the man "to watch the stout, black steamships eating blacker coal,/and lesser craft with sea-rimed sails, and, all around, the white gulls wheeling." A beautiful tribute to a man whose "span was over long ago." Other tribute poems include "Consolidation No. 2165, 1913-1961," about a steam locomotive, which stands out both for its details and for its touching personification of the train: "And they say as she passes a fallen-down village/where the station is missing and the people are gone,/her chime whistle wails in a loud, sobbing torment,/like the voice of a soul that can never go home." 

 

Many of the poems contain rhyming and repeated phrases, like song lyrics, and a few poems, ie: "By the River in the Winter, 1881" and "By the River in the Winter, 1885"), are dialogue poems. I felt the strongest piece was "In the Dugout, 1917," which is presented as a letter from a Canadian soldier to "My dearest Clara." In this visceral poem we read "Over the top is the sickly sweet smell of unburied/bodies. Over the top are the screams."

A fine example of the poet's range appears in "Nice Feed o' Nice Cockles," in which the poet emulates the working class vernacular of folks in County Durham: "You're yammerin' o' war. Will. Now the war's/done./Our folks are all safe now at 'ome, everyone one."       

This diverse, reflective "swan song" would be lovely to read beneath a summer sky, back "against a sun-warmed boulder." 

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM

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"Frostbite"

by Wes Funk

Published by YNWP

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-781927-756980

When Saskatoon's Wes Funk died in 2015 at age forty-six, he was well-known and admired in the local writing community. He'd self-published novels and a chapbook of poetry and short stories, hosted a weekly series, "Lit Happens," on Shaw TV, and mentored beginning writers. YNWP's posthumously released Funk's final book, Frostbite, which contains the novel of the same name, plus a novella-"Rocket of the Starship"-in one handsome package.  

Funk's set both stories in Saskatoon and there are no shortages of landmarks to help locate the worlds in which his protagonists-both with cool names: "Deck" from the novel; the novella features "Dare"-roam. Deck Hall, a recently fired accountant and recently separated forty-year-old, lives in City Park, and his estranged wife is a nurse at Saskatoon City Hospital. The Bessborough Hotel, Midtown Plaza, Broadway Bridge, the Senator, Amigo's Cantina and Diefenbaker Hill are locations that help set the stage for the aptly-named "Frostbite."

As the book opens, Deck has just finished his fourth bartending shift in a week, and he returns, wearily, to the Star Wars memorabilia and the companionship of his bulldog, Muffin, at his high-rise. Both the literal and metaphorical forecasts are grim: "Cold, cold and more cold!" Funk wrote of the prairie cold as one who knew it well. "Outside, the snowfall was turning into an all-out blizzard. In another hour, plows and snow-blowers would start to rumble down on the streets below. The machinery would probably wake him up."

Deck meets the character Blue in Kinsmen Park, a known night-time pick-up spot, and the pair form an unlikely friendship. Deck tells Blue: "I think this is what they call a midlife crisis, Blue. My wife booted me out, I'm unemployed again, and the other day I nailed some chick have my age. All I need is a red convertible and I'm set." Deck's other friend is neighbor Halo, a romance writer who lives across the hall in their shared apartment building … and appears ready for some romance of her own.

Clearly there was some overlapping between fact and fiction here. Funk's author photo shows him in a Star Wars jersey, so the "Luke Skywalker action figure," on Deck's nightstand, "Stormtroopers standing guard on the toilet tank," and the "life-sized Yoda" may indeed have belonged to the author, and these details help characterize the slightly eccentric protagonist. Both Deck and Dare share a love of well-organized comic shops.

What I valued most in these two slice-of-life stories is the "realness" they portray: from bartending details to the "wooden cut-outs of frolicking children" in Kinsmen park; from Deck's rural Saskatchewan parents' never-changing home (with its dusty-rose couch) and distinctive culture-"supper" at 5:30, news at 6:00, a "Kaiser club"-everything bears the distinct ring of truth. Deck and Dare, in their separate stories, face hardships and recover, as most of us do.  

I got wrapped up in both of Funk's bittersweet tales, and wish they hadn't ended, like their popular author's time here, so quickly.

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Four Book Reviews: Karen Enns, Anne Campbell, Mika Lafond, and Dawn Dumont

"Cloud Physics"

by Karen Enns

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 9-780889-774612

   

  

She had me at "peonies of sound". She is Karen Enns, and the opening piece -and title poem - of her new poetry collection Cloud Physics, is refined and thoughtful, and it makes me ravenous for more.

A few poems in the first section have a dystopian edge, ie: in "Epilogue," "Nothing was questioned/after the last polar flares broke through,/and silence finally took over." Enns, however, never slips into melodrama, and often her pieces conclude quietly (yet profoundly). The aforementioned poem ends thus: "It was warm for a while/after the birds migrated east/in a single line." Yes!

I love the poet's use of understatement throughout the book, and her use of what I'll call "imaginings". She (or her subjects) ponder interesting "What if?" questions, ie: What if time worked in the opposite direction, "so we could live our lives from death to birth"? What would it be like to "bi-selve"? What if "middle syllables/were lost," and what if we are "made of what [we've] heard"? This last quote is from the list poem, "Ad Libitum," which concerns the diverse sounds that fill a life, from "barking dogs" to "blankets shifting, footsteps on the stairs,/a tractor coming down the tree row."

My sense is that Enns is hyper-attuned, particularly to sound - the sound of words, and the sounds of the world - and though there are no author bio notes in the book, it wouldn't surprise me to learn she's a musician as well as a poet. I'm also guessing she's a birder, for there's a veritable aviary of birds featured here, from owls to meadowlarks, and I'm particularly struck by her poetic facility with crows, "with their dark-knife forms," and their eyes that are "bright metal bits of judgement". The author also really looks, ie: into the back of the mailbox, "where a spider manages its web until a frost one night/leaves it curled and dried".      

Two poems in this collection are well worth the price of admission: "A Son's Story," about a father who wished to hear meadowlarks again before his passing, and "Solstice," about a group experience on a beach, and the moment when all realize that poetry's happening: they're living it. It's challenging to get this kind of piece right but Enns handles it like a master, and the "truth" uncovered echoes what the poet explores throughout the book: "We wouldn't live forever." ("We" reverberates because naturally we all own this truth.)  

I could say that the primary subject of these lyric poems is time and its passing. I could also say it is sound, or light, and that trains and flora feature often, but perhaps these are merely the elements that made the most impact on me. What I know with certainty is that this poet's marriage of language and intellect make for a most satisfying read, and I'll be turning to these provocative poems again and again for the singular beauty of lines like this: "All we can do is surrender to the bright complicity of birds". Karen Enns? More, please.  

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"The Fabric of Day: New and Selected Poems"

by Anne Campbell

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 978-1-77187-130-3

   

I do love "New and Selected" poetry collections, and so it was with delight that I opened The Fabric of Day: New and Selected Poems by Regina's Anne Campbell, who has been making poetry and sharing it with appreciative readers since her first book, No Memory of a Move, was released in 1983. In a retrospective such as this readers can track a poet's evolution, and I was interested to read the new work: what's in Campbell's poetic gaze now?

In the book's introduction Campbell explains that the prairies and "time" have been her major concentrations across the decades. In the newest poems I see that the trials of aging - the poet was born in 1938 - are also receiving attention on the page, and always, there is the undertone of love that's missed, or love that might have been.

In the poem "Retiring, Gone Missing," she writes "It's a puzzle at this late stage, a nuisance,/really, feeling the self, one used to be/      gone" and later in this poem, "it's odd/being with the stranger   I am/                  becoming". Certainly aging is a hard business, but juxtaposed against poems with titles including "Anxiety," "Ennui" and "The Dark Side, Redux," we see the poet celebrating life's lighter moments. One piece begins with the great line "I'm considering getting to know Walter Matthau," and in another, Campbell recounts visiting her mother's seniors' complex and, noting the resident women doing jigsaw puzzles, the poet says to her sister: "'Shoot me if you see me doing that.'" Then, after a minor surgery, she finds herself doing a jigsaw puzzle.

From her first book we've seen Campbell control her poems' tempo via indentations, white space, one or two-line stanzas, and, often, one-word lines, and this has been a stylistic constant for her, though she also includes occasional prose poems, including "The Beginning," which starts with this lovely line: "I picked up a stone that day walking in the hills, it wasn't the first." This ability to slow the reader and give certain words or phrases extra attention complements the "zen" feeling of much of her work. The meditative quality is particularly apparent in short poems like "More Slowly Evolved," which begins with the image of the poet at her kitchen window, viewing birds "ferret    for the tiniest seeds" to "find    whatever's fallen". I also appreciate how Campbell writes about everyday subjects, like "reheated bacon on thin crisp toast," or tacking shelf-paper in a Lazy Susan.

   

I enjoyed these quiet, introspective poems, perhaps because, like me, Campbell lives in perpetual awe "at the mystery in which we find ourselves". Yes, it's all about the awe, whether it's the memory of pine scents, amber around one's neck, valley hills, "green and shining grasses," deer like ballerinas, philosophy, or the work of angels and artists. Time "gentles down" for all of us, but few have the talent or courage to effectively document how that feels in the heart. Campbell succinctly and eloquently delivers "the fabric" of these days.  

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"nipê wânîn: my way back"

by Mika Lafond

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 978-1-77187-129-7

   

In her first poetry collection, nipê wânîn: my way back, Saskatoon writer and U of S educator Mika Lafond pays homage to her Cree heritage, the landscape that nurtured her as a child, and various family members-with particular gratitude expressed for grandmothers and great grandmothers-in heartfelt and easy-to-read poems presented in both English and Cree. As the book's title suggests, the poems tell a story of a woman's "way back" to the lessons her ancestors taught to her in their quiet ways. Lafond writes: "Words are spoken in hushed voices/their sacredness not to be shouted."

Lafond's a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, and, with a strong interest in education and the arts, Lafond and her cousin (Joi Arcand) initiated Kimiwan Zine as a venue for Indigenous visual artists and writers. A few of the poems in this book hint at some of the heart-breaking situations she's faced as a teacher and the difficult business of "[getting] through the walls" adolescent male students sometimes put up. One student is "always tired on cheque day" and though "winter is definitely here now-he still doesn't have a jacket".

The writer finds myriad connections between the natural and human worlds, ie: in the poem "elements," she writes that "teardrop/is the same shape as rain," and I was delighted to learn that in Cree, "fire" translates as "woman's heart". In "way back," I appreciated how stars are considered to be "the ones who have gone before," and this image (from that same poem) is terrific: "late at night they join hands-brilliant serpentine belt/in the northern sky/purple splashes on green-shawl upon skirt/great grandmothers". This is a unique way of seeing.

I enjoyed the poems in the second section, "niya/Me," where Lafond included more of the everyday details that make poetry come alive, ie: it's satisfying to know that the song spilling from the red truck's radio on a hot August day is "Big Yellow Taxi" – details like these make the work original and relatable – and I can hear the "constant patter against the plastic pail" while the poet and her family picked chokecherries with "pails belted to [their] waists".

We see the author's finesse with line breaks in "a letter to chief dan george": "it was a good day/to die." She turns back the hands of time and mixes things up, structure-wise, with the prose poem, "homebound," where the "loud claps of thunder applauded the passing storm". Personification-one of a writer's best tools-is at play again in "bird watching": "great bald eagle a tiny dot/weaving in the highest skies/blesses the day".

The poems in these 183-pages tell an interesting life story in snapshots, using colours, dialogue, images, and miniature poems-within-the-poems, like this: "nohkom smells of sage/and sweetgrass—/it may mean nothing now/but my heart will remember/the scent of smudge/in her braids". Poetry helps us remember those things that "may mean nothing now," but certainly will one day.  

Congratulations, Mika Lafond, and thank you for adding your voice to the collective music of Canadian poetry.

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 "Glass Beads"

by Dawn Dumont

Published by Thistledown Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$20.00  ISBN 978-1-77187-126-6

   

The cover image on Dawn Dumont's short story collection, Glass Beads, is an ideal visual metaphor for its content. The high-heeled Chuck Taylor sneakers embroidered with flowers that look like beadwork and a (notably faceless) woman in a First Nations' jingle dress suggest a contemporary twist on traditional First Nations' culture, and that's exactly what Dumont delivers. The book's twenty-three stories are real, relevant, and riveting, and Saskatoon's Dumont - an actor, comedian, newspaper columnist, and three-book author - was a "shoe in" to write these often hilarious interconnected stories about urban-Indigenous friends in the '90s and early 2000s. The tales are so credible-from the diction to the romantic disasters-one can easily believe the author, who hails from Okanese First Nation, is writing exactly what she knows.

This book's overwhelming success lies in its structure, realism, and its characterizations of four friends whose lives crackle with energy, humour, and heartache. All but a few stories are dated by month and year, from 1993 to 2008, and it's interesting to watch these characters both grow but also stay true to who they always were.

Nellie Gordon is the responsible one, and the majority of the Saskatoon-based book is told through her perspective. Razor-witted and ambitious, at university she's on the Native Student Council and earns a law degree. Nellie becomes the brains behind her friend Taz Mosquito's political aspirations: he expects to become Grand Chief. Taz is a "northerner": he speaks Cree, is "totally bush," and has "black-black hair and pale skin like old-timey vampires and a cocky confidence that comes from isolation and not knowing any better." He also has a severe drinking problem. Pretty and outwardly tough Julie Papequash is an eight-year-old running away from on-reserve foster parents when we first meet her; naïve Julie and confident Nellie become childhood and lifetime friends, though "Envy" was invisible Nellie's "knee-jerk response to all things Julie". (When Nellie applies for a waitressing job she tries to curl her hair "to emulate Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct-but every second she stood [there], her hair went from sexy murderer to electrocuted hedgehog".) Julie hooks up with Taz, and Nellie suffers through the years with Everett Kaiswatim: lackabout, womanizer, and "probably the worst drug dealer the city had ever seen". Everett moves from the Salvation Army into the home of a man who, two days later, "went over to his ex-girlfriend's house and shot her". This information's revealed so matter-of-factly, it offers readers a sense of how inner city "normalcy" differs greatly from what goes on in the 'burbs. Nellie joins a group that volunteers in Mexico, and Everett had "always meant to check where Mexico was on the map but never got around to it".  Nellie hopes not to get kidnapped; apart from her Mom, "her family weren't really the foundation-setting-up type".

Dumont has an ear for the real. I could hear the characters "ch," just as I remembered from my youth in Meadow Lake. I howled. I winced. I recognized. Hey, Canada? Please read Dawn Dumont.

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Four book reviews: Regine Haensel; Margaret Cote; John D. Pihach; and Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos and Adriana Spahr

“Child of Dragons”

Written by Regine Haensel

Published by Serimuse Books

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$14.95 ISBN 9-780993-903212

  

Saskatoon writer Regine Haensel recently released Child of Dragons, Book Two in her fantasy series, The Leather Book Tales. This ambitious publication follows her 2014 novel Queen of Fire, which was nominated for a High Plains Book Award. In the new novel we journey with restless sixteen-year-old Rowan as she searches for two missing children, is romantically pursued by two young men, and benefits from the protection of a foreign soldier with a penchant for making cryptic statements, like "There is no end to a circle … and when you stand at the centre you can see it whole" and "The moon rises in the evening, until it does not." There are numerous interesting characters in this hard-to-put-down tale, and the author does a splendid job of making each distinct and memorable with her keen gifts for dialogue and physical description.

The book's opening image depicts a small caravan of horse riders, oxen and wagons crossing a "dun-coloured land" near Aquila, City of Eagles, to Vatnborg, a city on a lake. Like all good writers, Haensel quickly moves from scenery to scene, and we learn that Rowan's saying good-bye to a father she's reconnected with after a long separation, the leader of the caravan is a woman named Ursallia, and a good-looking fellow traveler, Jernan - "He sits well on a horse" - has caught Rowan's eye. The story's told from Rowan's point of view, so when she's thinking about her past - her mother's death, Rowan's imprisonment in a castle with her father and younger brother, and the dark fact that she's killed a man - the back-story is seamlessly inserted.    

This is fantasy, so dragons, castles, legends, ravens, and ancient magic - including Rowan's bequeathed silver bracelet - are in grand supply. Late in the story we meet the soothsayer, Tristicus.

I'm impressed by how quickly I was drawn into Rowan's adventure. Whether I was shivering with her in the desert night's cold during the caravan, sailing toward an island ("the sail bulging with wind") to find the two children, or drinking yet another cup of "tisane" with her, I was there. Rowan, an herbalist and healer, has several opportunities to impart the benefits of bee balm, sage, coneflower and mint, for example, and it all seems credible and consistent with the plot. 

At one point the precocious heroine says "Such simple and common things we do while horrors go on in the world," and it's partly this deep empathy that makes her character so appealing. She also possesses a fantastic imagination, so at times even she's not sure if what she's "seeing" is a vision or just a young girl's fancy. "Am I dreaming?" she asks the wise Grandmother late in the book, and the woman answers, "Does it matter?"

Fantasy elements aside, this story strikes a very human chord in its exploration of family, and particularly, parents who've left their children, and how this affects those children for years to come. This is a fascinating book.

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“Nēnapohš Legends”

Narrated by Saulteaux Elders

Transcribed, Translated and Edited by Margaret Cote

Syllabics by Lynn Cote, Glossary by Arok Wolvengrey

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$19.95  ISBN 978-0-88977-219-9

   

Nēnapohš Legends, Memoir 2 in the First Nations Language Readers features seven traditional Salteaux stories I'm happy to have been introduced to. As explained by Margaret Cote and Arok Wolvengrey, these language texts have been used to teach Saulteaux (Plains Ojibwe) in classrooms at First Nations University of Canada in Regina, and prior to this they existed exclusively as oral stories shared between generations.

The central character is Nēnapohš (pronounced NAY nuh bohsh), the "'trickster' or culture-hero" in the Saulteaux tradition. Cote First Nation Elders Andrew Keewatin, John F. Cote, and Cote's daughter, Margaret Cote, a retired Assistant Professor of Salteaux Language Studies, are to be congratulated for preserving these stories via sharing them both orally and in this text. Aside from the fun and imaginative bilingual tales, Nēnapohš Legends includes a Saulteaux syllabary, an extensive Salteaux-English glossary, and detailed ink drawings by Denny Morrison, a Salteaux artist from Ochapowace First Nation.

The first story, "When the Earth was Flooded and How Nēnapohš Recreated It," shares many aspects with the Noah's Ark story, though here God is "Great Spirit," the Noah figure is Nēnapohš, and the ark is "a big raft" which saves its builder and "some of his animal brothers," like beaver, otter, and muskrat, who is responsible for diving and returning with the handful of dirt that Nēnapohš blew on to recreate the world. Wolverine and wolf also play major roles. The final line - "That's as far as it goes for now!" – gives the story that storytelling flavour, and indeed, all of the tales end similarly.     

Most of these very short mythological stories begin with the main character "out walking around". Soon he gets bored, or hungry, or mischievous, and something dramatic happens. The one-page legend "Nēnapohš and the Owl” provides an explanation as to why the owl can turn its head around. The brave owl was attacking the protagonist as he walked through the forest, then Nēnapohš "got a good hold of the owl's head" and broke his neck. In another story, "Nēnapohš and the Geese," readers learn why Geese always fly in a "V" formation.   

Humour's especially evident in "Nēnapohš Makes Red Willows". Here sly Nēnapohš is roasting ducks on a fire and instructs his own "rear-end" to stay on watch for predators while he sleeps. When wolves appear, "his rear-end let out a loud fart to wake him up," but when hunters later arrive and quietly eat the ducks, Nēnapohš isn't warned, and his rear-end is punished by having to sit on a "red-hot rock".

Nēnapohš is simultaneously portrayed as playful, dangerous, clever, and dim-witted, ie: at one point he thinks he's eating dried meat left by his grandmother on the snow, when really he's so hungry and dazed he's been eating his own scabs. Chickadee teasingly sings the truth, and "That's as far as it goes".

This University of Regina Press book squarely hits the mark, both as a teaching tool and an entertaining read, and Morrison's welcome illustrations are worthy of frames.

     

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“Mudeater: An American Buffalo Hunter and the Surrender of Louis Riel”

by John D. Pihach

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-780889-774582   

It's significant when an illustrious individual appropriates an ancestry, ie: Archie Delaney reinventing himself as Grey Owl. Frontiersman Irvin Mudeater had Grey Owl beat: Mudeater switched back and forth between Indian and European ancestry each time he crossed the 49th Parallel. Born to a Wyandot Chief in Kansas, Mudeater's story encompasses buffalo hunting, stage coach driving, the Civil War, and criminal activity that saw him flee to Canada in 1882 and become "Robert Armstrong," the white man who settled in Prince Albert and was credited (with two others) for bringing Louis Riel into custody in 1885.

Yorkton writer John D. Pihach became fascinated with Mudeater/Armstrong's Wild West and Canadian stories after learning that his neighbor was the great-grandson of the famous man, and that Armstrong had written an accessible and unpublished memoir. Considering Armstrong's storytelling penchant, "some of his claims relating to certain historical events appear unconvincing," but Pihach believes the "savage nature" of his "Indian" encounters are reliable. The book includes the memoir, photographs, and reports concerning Riel by reporters and others.

Mudeater's great-grandfather was found as a starving and abandoned Caucasian child by a party of Wyandots; the boy was eating riverbank mud to survive. The Wynadot's adopted him and christened him Mud Eater. Irvin Mudeater's father was politically active, serving as a longtime Wynadot chief and council member who helped establish Kansas, and led his beleaguered nation from Kansas to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Interestingly, there's no mention of Mudeater's own Indian ancestry in his memoirs, thus avoiding a conflict of cultural interest when he aided in Riel's arrest.

Mudeater's spectacular experiences included nearly losing his life to Cheyenne warriors while driving a freight wagon over the Sante Fe Trail; "[practicing] scalping on dead bodies" after a battle; joining Buffalo Bill's crew to supply meat for railroad workers; making pets of an eagle and panther; and killing a man "while on a drunken spree" in Wallace, Kansas.

In 1883 Mudeater was living in Prince Albert, captivating folks with his Wild West tales (including the killing of 126 buffalo in one day), and transporting settlers from Qu'Appelle to Prince Albert. During the 1885 conflict he became a chief scout for General Middleton, then a hero upon Riel's capture. Post-1885,  Armstrong became a family man but kept things colourful re: shenanigans that included shooting the toe off a man, and returning to live in the US with two of his daughters before retirement in Calgary, then a final return to the US.  

     

Mudeater's sometimes rough and often boastful memoir ("at the age of fifteen years, I had a man's experience and I had almost said a man's strength") and the articles and oral accounts concerning him sketch a captivating portrait of the pioneer, but Pihach admits that much of the hot-tempered hero's life remains a mystery. Anyone who enjoys tales of the Wild West and/or the Riel Rebellion – and wishes to hear them straight from the horse's mouth - will find much to chew on in this entertaining book.   

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“Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In)Significance of the Hymen”

Edited by Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos and Adriana Spahr

Published by University of Regina Press

Review by Shelley A. Leedahl

$27.95  ISBN 9-780889-774230   

Until I read Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In)Significance of the Hymen, I never knew that viragos are Latinas who assume "'male' traits and [transgress] popularly accepted gender roles.'" I didn't know that sexual abstinence in Stephenie Meyer's popular Twilight series is a subject of academic study, nor was I aware of the sketchy business of virginity testing as a literary motif in both medieval romance novels and contemporary English Orientalist romance literature. The trio of editors for this illuminating eight-essay collection by University of Regina Press invite readers to consider the myriad political, social, cultural, and literary complexities concerning the "utter messiness" of virginity.

Firstly, the editors tackle with the difficulty of a singular definition of "virginity," and point to subjective and objective meanings, and the notion that the hymen is not always "the signifier of virginity," (boys and queers lose their virginity, too). The editors and writers of this text "go beyond the hymen" in their considerations of virginity, and this makes for an especially provocative treatise. They also look at perceptions around losing one's virginity, ie: at what age does it become embarrassing to remain "intact"?

Virginity is a serious subject, but one need only read the section titles to ascertain that the editors also have good fun with their disparate material. Part 1 is titled "Too Much Pain for Such Little Reward," and the essays in Part 4 appear under the title "F*ck: They Entrapped Us In Social Issues And Politics".

The first essay, by researcher Amy Burge, examines virginity testing both historically and in literature, comparing medieval romance approaches to those in contemporary romance literature. Historical tests included the ability to carry water in a sieve, and how loudly-and for what length of time-one urinated, while folk stories and medieval romances included magical proofs, ie: "a harp that plays out of tune when a non-virgin approaches." Burge explains that the problems with virginity testing include veracity and the "patriarchal structures" that make virginity testing an "almost exclusively female discourse."

It's interesting that the editors have selected contributors with disparate credentials, ie: Gibson Ncube earned a PhD (in French and francophone literatures) in South Africa, three have connections to Brock University, and Jodi McAlister researches the histories of love, sex, romance, and pop culture, and is linked to Macquarie University in Sydney. The latter notes that contemporary romance novels are largely written by and for women, and "the hymen is regularly represented," but the pain associated with virginity loss is becoming less of a "gory" emphasis than it was in previous texts (in which blood and passing out was frequently featured), and female pleasure is receiving more emphasis. 

 

From the Virgin Mary to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, from British director Derek Jarman's experimental 1976 film Sebastiane to HBO's True Blood vampire series that unsettles "socially conservative ideologies, such as female virginity and sexuality," Virgin Envy delivers a rip-roaring ride (bad pun?) through the ins and outs (again?), perceptions and misperceptions of virginity now and then, here and there.           

  

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