Peter Norman: The pursuit

This past weekend, one of Ottawa’s celebrated reading series played host to one of the city’s former residents made good. Author Peter Norman spent three years here at the beginning of his career and found them to be incredibly formative. “I got off the ground in poetry there. It was in that community that I started to write with concentration. I’d write for the open mic nights at reading series and then use the feedback to see what captured peoples’ attention.” He left Ottawa but took with him a long list of friends, supporters and burgeoning projects. “I did a tally once,” he muses, “and about 63 percent of my poems were written in Ottawa.”

Rhodes scholar

W.H. Auden once described a poem as “a well-made verbal object.” Brilliantly, Auden wanted us to realize that the poem is not a catalogue of something, but is in fact a creation made out of the material of language. The most tedious poets are invariably the ones who forget this, and bury the crafting of language under gimmickry or confessional melodrama. At the other end of the spectrum are authors like Shane Rhodes.

The West is broke

The world financial crisis of 2008 has an almost unlimited number of commentators. Honestly, pretty much anyone who was breathing and older than a teenager in 2008 has an opinion on the subject. You might think Dambisa Moyo’s How The West Was Lost would be one of the most technical of the analyses, coming from an Oxford-trained economist. But instead.

How a Canadian university nabbed the rights to the memoirs of Tolstoy’s wife

As appeared in Saturday’s Globe and Mail (Nov 07. 2010)

In the academic world, Leo (Lev Nikolaevich) Tolstoy is a colossus. He’s talked about, read, discussed, dissected and forms a pillar of studies of the novel itself. So how did the written memoirs of Tolstoy’s indomitable wife, Sofia Tolstaya (the Russian feminine version of Tolstoy), one of the most important and anticipated works in modern Tolstoy scholarship, land at a university press in Canada’s capital city? READ MORE

Love of lightness

There is room in this world for the serious poetry built out of timber and stone. And there is also room in this world for poetry that gathers in clouds and flutters, that is fun and fresh. Pearl Pirie’s first trade collection of poetry, Been Shed Bore, is most definitely the latter. READ MORE

Hyper-real debut

Sandra Beck, the first novel from local writer John Lavery, is a stunning, engrossing experience. It’s good. It’s really good. Really fucking good. I get antsy when I hear John Lavery’s prose described as “surreal” in reviews because that is the element I find missing from so much contemporary Canadian literature. Writing in the hands of someone as talented as Lavery, who grapples intelligently with its potential, can create whole new kinds of emotion out of the raw material of juxtaposed words or striking images. READ MORE