The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Home Fires
Kevin Irie
Burning The Dead. Wolsak and Wynn $ 10.00
Dennis Cooley
This Only Home. Turnstone Press n.p.
Michael Harris
New and Selected Poems. Signal Editions $ 12.95
Reviewed by Richard Stevenson
If poetry can be construed a journey of
sorts, then the ground, space, and time
covered by the three volumes under review
reaches widely across generations and cultures.
Yet an insistence on the particularities
of the local, the vernacular, the
prophetic in the profane speaks volumes
about their shared humanistic concerns.
Kevin Irie, the youngest and least wellknown
of the three poets, has been widely
published. His debut collection offers an
accomplished and finely chiselled suite of
lyric and serial narrative poems. His subject,
the culture conflict of growing up a
third generation Japanese Canadian in
Toronto's Little Italy — dealing with the
forces of assimilation versus the riches of a
multi-cultural inheritance — is given a
contextual grounding in a section entitled
"In Retrospect and Consequence," a serial
lyric centrepiece and several short lyrics on
Canada's betrayal of Japanese Canadian citizens
in the 1940s.
This final section should be the best; it is
the most ambitious and far-reaching in
terms of the social-political ramifications
of the theme. But too often the poet rails
against the faceless bureaucracy instead of
mining his work with the carefully observed
details and subtle nuances of speech that
characterize the bulk of the collection.
Perhaps the poet himself knows this:
Am I choosing
to speak for a voice,
which, collectively,
still
prefers its silence?
It is when he speaks in the first person
singular, or chooses to record the observations
of a third person narrator — when he
hones his line to a a short, terse set of imagistic
phrases; when he observes coolly, with
a matter-of-fact tone of feigned objectivity
— that he is able to get in close for the final
ironic twist of the knife that the best of
these poems deliver:
The boarder upstairs
was the best nominee,
he gave a performance
that won him your hand.
You moved one flight
above your parents, finally a tenant
of their own beliefs.
(" For Maria, Growing Older ")
If Kevin Irie occasionally errs in the
direction of declamatory denunciation,
Dennis Cooley, in his latest collection,
sometimes pares his lines to barest bone
and delivers rapture and awe in absence of
grounded description. The subject of
Cooley's eighth full-length collection is the
humanistic and deeply personal response
of would-be empiricists and scientist/
explorers to the vastness and ultimately
inscrutable beauty and mystique of space.
As the poet notes in his preface, the poems
were initially inspired by his chance
encounter with an enthralling coffee table
book, The Home Planet, which depicts
earth from the vantage point of deep space.
The central insight throughout the poems,
and the original photos.is how all the
socioeconomic problems and political
mayhem on the planet and all man's petty
personal concerns pale before the awesome
splendour and fragility of spaceship earth.
This theme seems a natural progression for
a flatlander poet who has already explored
the prairie and — indeed — the vastness of
the spaces in between our poor language
when confronted by the raw power of
nature.
Cooley notes in his preface that the political
realities of Vietnam and the Civil