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Brian Palmu: Catherine Bush's Accusation
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Wednesday, February 18, 2015. Novels and non-fictive explorations about Western professionals challenged by shifting their work overseas have a long and (in tone) varied history. John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Is a dispassionate recording of a horrific event; Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. Is a semi-hallucinatory novel about an archaeologist’s efforts at exhuming a victim of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war; and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Catherine Bush’s 2013 Accusation. Bush’s narrator comes in contact with a...
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Brian Palmu: July 2014
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Thursday, July 10, 2014. 8220;The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.”. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions. The epigraph to Shane Neilson’s 2013 Will. It), it’s a good bet you’ll move through the blood and anguish with eyes wider than an initial, indifferent perusal might have gained. Though the operating room and palliative care facility make for a lot of the settings, medical care is also backgrounded and foregrounded. Outside the hospital. “Gorblimey! Links to this post. Collection...
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Brian Palmu: September 2014
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Monday, September 22, 2014. George Elliott Clarke's Black. George Elliott Clarke’s 2012 poetry collection from Gaspereau Press, is. And against what Clarke’s titles may suggest are colour-specific metaphor, his scope overspills what must be a temptation in jargon-ridden ideological poli-sci students juggling ideas for a Master’s thesis. I say “overspills”, because, unlike the protagonist in Doris Lessing’s masterwork, The Golden Notebook. Lines like “I gabble a garrote. I mentioned Clarke’s emotion...
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Brian Palmu: January 2014
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Monday, January 27, 2014. The reader may be forgiven for thinking the poems in crawlspace,. John Pass’ 2011 collection, claustrophobic and dark. Surprisingly, then, one flips from one page to the next and discovers moods both light and confident, heavy with knowledge yet unwilling to submit to philosophical defeat. And doubly surprising since his recent book, Stumbling In The Bloom,. Became bogged down in muddy walks, muted colours, and pointless digressions. Pass is still beset by personal crawlspaces o...
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Brian Palmu: Jim Johnstone’s Dog Ear
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Sunday, January 25, 2015. Jim Johnstone’s Dog Ear. With its mix of scientific observation and metaphysical questioning, Jim Johnstone’s. Latest poetry collection, Dog Ear,. It was years before I learned to call. This prayer: the right-hand corner. Of a page turned down to make another. Page I attempted to escape, then return. To the boneyard where I’d removed. An earring from my wife’s right ear—. Diamond, the crux of the universe,. Contracting to leave a pin-sized hole. Proof that while I swore the world.
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Brian Palmu: Shoshanna Wingate's Radio Weather
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Tuesday, May 5, 2015. Shoshanna Wingate's Radio Weather. Shoshanna Wingate’s first book of poetry, Radio Weather,. I also like another “reading” association of a storm, in the same poem, which “felled trees older than most houses”. Brilliant! And “older” is the perfect word here. Especially when, in the case of “The City Dwellers”, the garden (metaphors are only overworked when they’re rendered poorly) was relatively Edenic. Is she the neighbour? Is it her sister, perhaps? Her neighbour’s daughter? But t...
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Brian Palmu: February 2014
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014. Philip Roth’s follow-up to Exit Ghost. Kakutani is the worst culprit for this. But whereas the protagonist of Roth’s preceding novel was seventy-one, Indignation’s. I’ve only read eight or nine of Roth’s twenty-nine (? Links to this post. Tuesday, February 18, 2014. Jerzy Kosinski's The Devil Tree. Jerzy Kosinski’s career makes a farce out of the notion of artistic progression. His first novel, 1965’s The Painted Bird,. His second novel, Steps,. 1973’s The Devil Tree. Is also ...
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Patternicity | Just another WordPress.com weblog | Page 2
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Cactus Press Chapbooks Reviewed. The winter 2010 Cactus Press chapbooks got a little bit of press last week in the form of a review written by Jacob McArthur Mooney for Northern Poetry Review. It’s rare that chapbooks get such focused attention, so I’m very pleased for the four authors: Darren Bifford, Edward Nixon, Marc di Saverio and Sarah Teitel. About Marc di Saverio’s. You can read the rest of the review here. May 26, 2011 at 3:03 pm. After 7 1/2 years,. For the curious, here’s a cover preview:.
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Brian Palmu: March 2014
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014. I dislike almost every online review I’ve read of this novel, pro or con, thus providing my chief stimulus for this consideration. Because it’s based on the actual lurid adventures of a female hebephile, got a lot of coverage, much of it focusing on the sociological issues and legal ramifications weighing on the narrative like a 60000 lb elephant expanding with each ingested and titillating doughnut while among several innocents trapped in a rec room. Out of the bedroom. Father...
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Brian Palmu: Will Ferguson's HappinessTM
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Monday, May 4, 2015. 8217; “). But succeed it does. Because it’s funny, which is kinda the point in a humourous novel. If one can forgive the increasingly (and again, ironically) preachy, broad-based, vapid counters to new-agey blandness and smiley narcissism (I could), the laughs are frequent and variously structured. Ferguson is fond of the Beard and Kenney technique, appearing in that duo’s parodic masterpiece Bored of the Rings. I mean, it’s kind of redundant, don’t you think? 8217; “). Caroms insouc...
