It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant and Evie Christie’s
Mere Extinction are the latest contributions to a genre I’m calling GTA pastoral. Each offers lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, “bare-knuckled bankers of King Street” and “meat-eating Annex Vegans” alongside nostalgia for a suburban past, filtered through a 21st-century middle-class outlook, in which as Winger puts it, “We can’t really move back / to the last subway station, can we?” Both collections demonstrate the enduring tenacity of the free-verse lyric as the default poetic frame for contemporary experience. While Christie’s book presents these lyrics as discrete events in an ongoing pattern of reflections on motherhood, love, crisis, and poetry itself, in Winger’s collection, these lyrics accumulate at times into longer sequences that pose the challenge of conceiving human existence on a cosmic scale, in which “all the radio signals / we’ve ever heard
It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant and Evie Christie’s
Mere Extinction are the latest contributions to a genre I’m calling GTA pastoral. Each offers lyric meditations on a gritty urban present populated by, in Christie’s words, “bare-knuckled bankers of King Street” and “meat-eating Annex Vegans” alongside nostalgia for a suburban past, filtered through a 21st-century middle-class outlook, in which as Winger puts it, “We can’t really move back / to the last subway station, can we?” Both collections demonstrate the enduring tenacity of the free-verse lyric as the default poetic frame for contemporary experience. While Christie’s book presents these lyrics as discrete events in an ongoing pattern of reflections on motherhood, love, crisis, and poetry itself, in Winger’s collection, these lyrics accumulate at times into longer sequences that pose the challenge of conceiving human existence on a cosmic scale, in which “all the radio signals / we’ve ever heard
Biblioasis, Jan.
Vancouver writer Keath Fraser is one of this country’s most robust and individual literary voices; though despite a career that includes winning the Chapters/
Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1995’s
Popular Anatomy and being nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for the story collection
Foreign Affairs a decade earlier, he is generally consigned to cult status at best in Canada.
With luck, all that will change in spring, when Biblioasis releases not one but two editions of the author’s work. The massive retrospective volume
Damages features stories selected from throughout Fraser’s career, beginning with the 1982 collection