To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
society churns up, threatening annihilation;
however, each also explores the river's return
to its source, the garden, and, with one exception,
offers an affirmative, sustaining vision.
Sweet Betsy from Pike, the first published
book of poetry for Toronto environmentalist
Stan Rogal, is the exception. These poems
reflect the world as a "terrorain," as "outside
the gate of any idyll garden" where humankind's
fear of confronting the unknown
narrows perception to "[c]rude sights for
cruder eyes long riddled by the (s)word."
Several poems, including the first, "Yonder,"
forecast a return—"What goes around comes
around / Moves civilization to wilderness"—
but, as "Phoenix" establishes, this return
will be from "one darkness to the next."
The river for Rogal is a Canadian Lethe,
the Saskatchewan, memory being "a foul
century's blood" that pollutes "Betsy's waist
with a whelp of chancres / and Ike's teeth
with a stomach for moldering flesh." Near
the close of the volume and Betsy's westward
journey, Betsy, dreaming that she is
every river out of which everything arises,
confronts the Pacific Ocean, "refuses to
break / against the salty tide," slides
"beneath the waves / colliding with untold
other / ill-considered rivers," and creates
some hitherto
Unknown
Multi-headed monster
soon to emerge
erupt
and shroud the world
in its cloudy
Wings.
Betsy awakes, only to turn her back on
the fertile land of the West Coast, and then
fires her rifle into the branches of a tree: "A
mewl. / Rapt in crow feathers. / Silenced."
Three poems, three opportunities for metamorphosis,
follow. In the first, "Echoes,"
the memory of "me" is eradicated; in the
second, "Comedians," the laughter from
the grave is mocking and riotous. The
third, "Stars," endorses, but does not envision,
the "sheer / Abandon- / Ment" of civilization
to wilderness—feeble hope for a
ruined garden drowned in the effluence of
such cynicism and despair. There can be no
return. "Nowhere translates now here''
The return in Kenneth Sherman's Open to
Currents, more modest than the mythic
return of which Olafson speaks, nonetheless
achieves a comforting sustentation and
qualified affirmation. Corresponding to each
of the three sections of the book, Sherman's
currents take him, first, backwards to
memories, then, through the flotsam and
jetsam of everyday life, and, finally, on outward
journeys to foreign destinations.
The volume opens with "Seminal cloth" in
which the child buries himself in the "darkness"
of fabric scraps in his father's tailor
shop "until the box became a boat, / the
darkness, a sea." The second poem, "Currents,"
spins another memory of the immigrant
father whose perplexed forehead
"folded for reference / in my memory, / that
inheritance / open to currents." Currents toss
the poet hither and thither, several opening
up potentially cynical or despairing responses,
but ultimately inspiring him to embark
on other journeys. "Talking it through," the
final poem of the first section, ends
Strange to come to control
by letting go.
I go back into the fray
that is everyman's life,
resolute bedouin in the stretch
of his own inner scape,
sustained by those deep wadis of loss.
The second section celebrates the humble
events and objects in this "fray," from
"Justine's ballet class," to "Fish cart,"
"Hallowe'en pumpkin," and "Chair." At
times, the poet is like "The water skier,"
demonstrating "the fluidity of a motion /
that weaves back against itself," "his joy the
sheer doing of it"; at other times, he is like
"The owls," whose "attitude instructs the
wise / that in this world, be wary / of all
motion, strife and frenzy." When he sets
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