\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWChandonnet, we can hardly believe apoet who tells us, "It comes for us all /as we wait where we are."POETASTINGBRUCE PIRIESTEVEN SMITH, Ritual Murders, Turnstone,$6.00.FRANK DAVEY, Edward and Patricia. CoachHouse, $6.50.ROGER NASH, Settlement in a School ofWhales. Fiddlehead, $6.00.ST. jONN SIMMONS, Wilderness Images.Fiddlehead, $6.00.STEVE MCCAFFERY, Knowledge Never Knew.Véhicule, n.p.LOUIS DUDEK, Ideas for Poetry. Véhicule, n.p.THERE IS MORE TO POETRY than meetsthe ear, even the mind's ear: some versemust be not only composed and presentedbut also taken and interpretedorally, transforming the conventionaloral-aural relationship of poet and audienceinto a considerably more sensuousoral-oral relationship. To the sextet ofpoets and poetic experimenters and theoristshere under review, there wouldseem to be more to poetry that meets themouth, especially the mind's mouth ofingested verse.The mouth as a womb-wound symbolof sexuality and violence abounds inSteven Smith's cryptic-elliptic RitualMurders, a narrative poem sequence disguisedas a prose narrative of interrelatedstories, their narrator a kind ofalphabetical serial killer poisoning hisreader by feeding him ten vignettes ofbrutal murder, both real and imagined.The "ritual" element of the murdersinvolves proscribed forms of codifiedconduct, in particular sadistically methodicalrapes, seductions, and otherultraviolent personal violations, all ofthem climaxing in metaphysical deathmade physical once again. But the narratorhimself is a ritualist, his at oncepoetically and journalistically spare, detacheddescriptions of the most horrendouscrimes assuming a kind of ceremoniousnessin their very effort to outrage.This searing-cering language has an observationaldetachment seemingly at oddswith the participatory violence of thesubject matter. "Subway," for instance,concerns a man at a desolate subway station,waiting for a late-night train to takehim home to his fifty-sixth birthday celebrations.Without ever leaving his spoton the platform or his maculate imagination,he witnesses three tough young girlswho break out into fierce fighting andwho, when he intervenes, begin to attackhim with equal violence :one jumps for his legs, the other pushes athis chest, another throws herself at him.shocked he seems to fall backward forever,he crashes onto the grey tile, then overonto the concrete, his head hits last, stopsJais voice, he pushes back, tries to free himselffrom this choke of bodies, handsscratching at him. knees on him. boots digginginto his ribs, he kicks out. the subiwayrumbles in his ears, one falls aside,stands, black leather draws back, flashes asit moves to his face.In due course this attack turns literallyrapacious, the man responding to hisassailants by himself seizing the sexualopportunity, their engagement so helplesslyecstatic that only the "crush" ofthe screaming train can effect their fourfoldconsummation. That the bystandershould simply imagine this violence,rather than committing it, seems inconsequentialto Steven Smith, who is intenton documenting our propensity towardssexual violence and violent sexuality thatare ultimately murderous. But his photographicdescriptions and crude languageare at their worst merely pornographic,as if life were a sequence of acts of prostitutionand the poet and the readers183