Ottawa’s small press Chaudiere delivers as good or better

At a reading, I once watched an author bring the microphone to his lips and say, “Book awards are the new book reviews.” Not quite up to Oscar Wilde standards, but with a bottle in my hand it seemed to be graced with a beery concinnity. It’s a statement about our society of “readers” that is unfortunately, and entirely, true. How many of you have read Yann Martel’s marvellous Life of Pi? And how many of you would have picked it up had it not won the Booker Prize?

I don’t mean to denigrate the value of literary awards, or criticism in general. But in some ways art is as varied as the individual (but only in some – no relativism here!). And the problem with using book awards to tell you what you like is that if you only taste the brand name products, how will you know what you really like? It is in this difficult world that Chaudiere Press launches its roster of tiny but powerful books here in the nation’s capital.

The thing that impressed me the most about Monty Reid’s work is the sense of absolute distance that he evokes. With a title like Disappointment Island, this seems laughably obvious, but delving into the opening pages of his first section “Songs for the Mammoth Steppe,” a whiff of something truly Romantic comes out at you. And I mean the good old-fashioned, capital R romance of the 18th century. Reid has the ability to conjure up something of the sublimity of nature – that sense of nature as a thing truly unknowable to the mind – something too big, too vast to be fully comprehended, the scale of it so titanic that it becomes both elating and frightening. Mixing this otherworldly power with his own earthy movements through the landscape of his poems, the tension Reid generates is truly captivating.

Reid’s strongest talent lies in this imagery of the sublime. Occasionally, when Reid distils his poetry to a purely personal level, it fails to rise to the harrowing images of his introduction (a section called “Some Little Songs,” for example) and seems hollow, more brittle. The later sections that thread-in glimpses of the sublime (like “Disappointment Island”) recapture the collection’s original power. Reid concludes by sinking beautifully into the luxury of melancholy that often demarcates Canadian poetry, the sublime as seen in the passage of time: “a small/ wind/ of chemicals leaching/ into the concrete/ destroying it.”

Absolutely wonderful.

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Nov. 9, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=10765