\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWenters and stays in the "dance of humanity."It is the most satisfying of thesebooks, allowing the reader access to manykinds of experience, not afraid to beconfessional, full of deep feeling. Hegives us fragments of the autobiographyof a sensitive and intelligent man, comingto grips with his subjects out of necessity,not out of fashion. We come to know thepoet's friends, his journeys, his fears, hishopes, what he has read, what his life islike, and it is all done with a freshness ofvoice which convinces and persuades.(This voice transcends the irritating habitof leaving spaces between words, evenwhen there is no syntactical justification,and the poems which are too long andindulge in superfluous detail.) It is, aboveall, a human book and one I shall returnto for its insights into the swaying conflictsof a life, of happiness suddenlyturning sour, of a self-mocking and/orserious exploration of personal struggle.Edmonton, Toronto, Regina, Nelson,Vernon — the poems are rooted in realplaces, but these are turned into placesof the mind, way-stations of the migrantheart, touchstones in the poet's search formeaning. The search is intensified by thetonal range of the poetry, from the highserious to the most colloquial, blendedsmoothly and always at the poet's service.The poems here do not lend themselvesto short quotation. Suffice to saythat this is a very fine collection.Perhaps the lesson to be learned fromthese five books is that strong, complexfeeling does not require complex surfacetechnique; that power in poetry does notnecessarily derive from technical experiment;that the good poet can examine,define, and transcend the everyday andmundane; that mystification, in languageor technique, can do nothing butmake wider the gap between poet andreader in Canada — those few hundredcopies sold, and, often, no wonder.CHRISTOPHER WISEMANMONSTERS WITHINSUNITI NAM jos HI, From the Bedside Book ofNightmares. Fiddlehead/Goose Lane, $6.95.JOHN OUGHTON, Gearing of Love: Poems andPhotographs. Mosaic, n.p.ALTHOUGH CANADIAN NOVELISTS havebeen noticeably engaged of late in socialcauses (Margaret Laurence and nucleardisarmament, Margaret Atwood and politicaltorture in Bodily Harm), Canadianpoets are no less committed. Themost recent collections by John Oughtonand Sunti Namjoshi bear ample testimonyto this fact, and reveal, as well,both the challenges and pitfalls of combiningpoetry and social issues.Oughton's collection, as its title suggests,is primarily concerned with theclash between the artificial or technologicaland the natural. The structure ofthe work highlights this clash; in the firstsection, "Welcome to Japan," the poet'sappreciation of the traditional reverenceshown to nature in this ancient civilization("Take rocks / for text / learnstream's / tongue well") collapses whenhe is faced with "geisha-land,"from whose assembly loins springHONDASONYPIONEERCANON. . .This convergence of Eastern and Americanvalues reaches a climax at the end ofthis section, when the poet kisses a cryingJapanese woman whose "lips are bittersweet/ as berries on a rough, Ontariofence." Back to the land of rough fences— chained and imprisoned nature — wetherefore return in Section Two, "In StillLife."Here, the confrontation of artifice andnature reaches a fever pitch, and thepositive motifs in Japanese culture areentirely inverted, as though one were190