Not just a soldier’s story

The first thing you will notice about the GCTC/NAC co-production of Vimy is that it looks amazing. The costumes are wonderfully detailed and, thankfully, not stylized: The greens and browns of military garb are real, the heft and clank of the props show they’re real equipment. The set and scenery are all evocative of trenches, dirty wood and burnt trees. A lot of love and care have gone into the look of this play, and it pays huge dividends in drawing you in through the senses. READ MORE

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

More than merely players

Taking up the burden of a classic with the stature of Romeo and Juliet is a huge task. It’s even ballsier to try to reformulate it to say something new. There’s an enormous inertia to Shakespeare plays: Like a rolling rock, they simply resist a push in any other direction. This production is classical in nature – a spectacle on a thrust stage full of light, shadow, merriment, festival, death and duels. In entertaining, little is restrained. 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

Alberta bound

Wild Horses is rob mclennan’s 21st book of poetry, written while the incredibly prolific Ottawa author spent 2007 as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Mclennan is a poet of place, always finding his voice out of the material of his surroundings, the continuity of its existence through history. “It’s an Edmonton book,” he says. READ MORE