Poetry Review

Last week Quill & Quire reviewed Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (Toronto: Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2019). Below is the publisher's description (from editor Nyla Matuk's website): 

"Resisting Canada gathers together poets for a conversation bigger than poetic trends. The book's organizing principle is Canada -- the Canada that established residential schools; the Canada grappling with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Canada that has been visible in its welcome of Syrian refugees, yet the not-always-tolerant place where the children of those refugees will grow up; the Canada eager to re-establish its global leadership on the environment while struggling to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty on resource-rich land and enabling further colonization of that land. In the face of global conflicts due to climate change, scarcity, mass migrations, and the rise of xenophobic populisms, Canada still works with a surface understanding of its democratic values--both at their noblest and most deceptive."

Aren't today's "poetic trends" attentive to the very contradictions the publisher is noting to justify the existence of its book? All the same, it's nice to see those contradictions listed. Not so nice are review paragraphs like the one below, where the "found" and the "collate[d]" are (as usual) aligned with the "impersonal," while that which is "embodied" and "firmly rooted in the present" is "vivid":

"The excerpts from Jordan Abel’s Injun collate found texts into an expansive and often impersonal view of the representation of Indigenous peoples. On the surface, Abel’s arrangements have little in common with a poem like Billy-Ray Belcourt’s “Oxford Journal,” whose second-person descriptions of moving through the world are embodied, vivid, and more firmly rooted in the present. However, at their core, both poems are built around a single subject – a self, or a loaded word like “frontier” – that carries so many stories, places, and people within it that it is at risk of rupturing."

Are there not new and "bigger" ways to speak of the work of these two PhD poets -- both alone and in comparison? And by that I mean beyond the expressive versus concretist polemic Dworkin and Goldsmith made so much of in 2011? A good place to start includes the ways poets consider or assume the page (as support). Another includes the strategies we employ to counter our ideologically saturated language. Another is a measure of the colours and textures we associate with "rupturing."