[New-Poetry] Canadian long poem

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080119.BKGEDD19/TPStory/Entertainment
A bridge too frail
GEORGE MURRAY 

January 19, 2008


FALSEWORK

By Gary Geddes

Goose Lane, 128 pages, $19.95


Canadian poetry has had an extended love affair with the long or book-length sequence. As a genre, the long poem thrives as either a creature of exhaustion, patiently exploring every dark corner of a major subject (such as in recent G-G nominee Rob Winger's Muybridge's Horse), or as sprawling epic, forming an atmospheric narrative by pulling down ideas and images like radio signals from the ionosphere of human existence (as in Louis Dudek's Atlantis). In between are a multitude of forms and variations that grow each year as more poets are smitten by the genre.


Gary Geddes is one of the most easily identifiable advocates of the long poem (Terracotta Army, Hong Kong Poems) and of poetry in Canada, having edited the landmark classroom anthologies 20th Century Poetry and Poetics and 15 Canadian Poets (x2 and x3, no less) over the last few decades. Now Geddes, himself an award-winning poet, brings us Falsework, his latest attempt at exploring the long poem tradition that has given us great works such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, bp Nichol's The Martyrology and George Elliott Clarke's Execution Poems.



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