\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWof pained laughter; she hears her childrencalled "unkempt, my name / undone."Admittedly, the self-consciouswordgames are sometimes distracting, butthere is power her, power rooted in adesperate faith thatonly thought might last:the transfer of a mindonto the page. Shadowson Hiroshima walls.And after the grief and desolation, thepages lead to a final affirmation :We are jars that lovehas filled emptiedand fills again.For the Alaskan poet Ann Fox Chandonnet,spiritual clarity is the reward ofmetaphorical imagining. In Auras, Tendrils:Poems of the North, she strives tobreak through separations, to see X as Y,thus glimpsing divine unities. Her poemsare about critical moments of passing betweenrealities. When we are invited to"sing the seasons," we realize that we arenever in one season without sliding intothe next. Death merges with life as themummy-wrappings of winter are indistinguishablefrom the flesh of spring, andbone meal for tulips smells of Dachau.Ghandonnet's northern landscape is inthe Romantic tradition — an other-thanselfwe penetrate in order to enter ourselves.Our opposites are as necessary asthe white space around a poem: "Whattouches us most: / the word, the white,the contrast?" Unifying polarities, findingand crossing edges, we "submergethe temporal," "an act of faith andmagic." A sacred post in a native villagebecomes a wonderful, magic link betweenheaven and earth, while masked dancerswonder if this is "the womb of creation" :"Did the stream of sunlight / become achain of copper arrows... ?"We grip the mask between our teeth anddance,try to become other than men,try to swallow Raven-spruce-needle,become great with spirit.Auras, Tendrils is dense with details oflandscape and native culture, detailsgiven sharp-edged purpose by the poet'sintense commitment to a vision of radicalanalogy.Marianne Bluger's On Nights LikeThis invites us to the "edge" :Right there at the edge of imaginingis what happens in the end.You know it as you blench, your heartknocksand the pieces lockin the only picture possible.On the other side of the edge is the unconscious,symbolized most often by thesometimes terrifying night :He of yellow jackal eyeswith snout smearedand lips curled.At other times, night is a plush jewelbox pried open with a "ruby flash." Inany case, if we hush our chatter, thedark unconscious has a song for us :Shh, be quiet nowlet them come out —the frightened creaturesscuttled under the rocks.We are promised discoveries :as with that Greek who marvelledat the stars and so doing fellinto a pond, a night, an end,his own especial seaweird with reality.Bluger celebrates a certain sensibility, buther characteristic vehicles — "the night,""the sea," "the wind," "spring," "longing"— carry her close to the clichédmoods of limp, "sensitive" verse. Thereis a kind of narcotic pleasure in readingthese poems with their easy flow ofimages, but one begins to find somethingunhealthily passive about that sensibility.Perhaps it is only that after the tough,assertive energies of Vale, Kemp, and182