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es the theme and then is rewarded if not always emerging from the experience unscathed it s a long book packed with long line poems many of which are two to three pages in length so i ll concentrate my attention in this review on four poems the opening poem the closing poem the eponymous to the title of the book poem and the poem that made me laugh out loud so often that i read it and re read it to amuse my silly self but then i once coined the question what s the difference between being solomon and being sirius so you might forgive my deep appreciation of the truly funniest poem in the book the opening poem caul and the closing poem mount pleasant provide us with something of a framing device in that caul deals with birth and mount pleasant an apt coda is a seven verse contemplation of death and mortality the alpha poem rather than being metaphysical is an odd poem concerning a baby born fully enrobed in the amniotic sac a one in eighty thousand rarity i m reminded of the star child in kubrick s film 2001 when hamilton compares his own christening to the first cosmonaut who left earth well in advance of his lift off prior to his re entry and splash down i had already made my entrance the originality of hamilton s perceptions and the quirkiness of sensibility enrich the reader s experience throughout this volume in his closing poem he writes when you are little you learn to classify the living and make distinctions between those you ve seen die and you ve journeyed here if you read this book from front to back by way of an intelligence that is restless and never satisfied with the obvious surfaces of life the range and depth of this poet s concerns remind the reader of the importance of both breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding he becomes something of a reliable guide directing our attention and illuminating what we see and what we experience is sometimes achingly sad as he writes of the untimely death of a lover best friend husband wife or someone you love no less and the journey through grief is equal to the music of orpheus and his doomed beloved eurydice the pain is almost too much to bear like hamlet contemplating yorick we are brought to the edge of the grave to think upon this ultimate enterprise each holds an equal share all have a common stake yet you distinguish still you compare and i note the way that word yet lingers at the line s end before tumbling to you distinguish and the final words of the closing poem still you compare and is that not the poet s lot to compare to seek a metaphor for the strangest and most mysterious of all experiences our own mortality we are born only to die this need not be morbid or ghoulish contemplation like the gravedigger s comic relief there are lines in this poem that elicit a smile as it is with the punning of the grave differences leading to a list junior and gramps magnate minion maven twit and so on the wit in these lines does not go unnoticed and the rhyming of twit with the phrase pulses quit disallows the reader from descending into a dark mood commensurate with the overplaying of morbidity in the title poem panoptic i am reminded of avison s importuning of the reader to fully engage the world in her sonnet snow the idea that in order to understand and appreciate experience the individual must engage in active cognition nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes she writes and hamilton s opening salvo in his poem diminished as i am in your ears i cannot get between them enter and leave without a hearing the way rodents and roaches cross more freely than thoughts from one cell to another the word panoptic is all by itself an invitation to engage and the poem ends with an echo reference though diminished in your eyes as the opening line in the last verse understanding these lines is not easy work but wrestling with them is damned rewarding play like avison hamilton rewards reading and rereading the music sustains and the effort rewards and then there s the quirky home ec a poem in which the speaker is a teacher and the reader is privy to the reactions of an imaginary class wherein we are invited to contemplate the joy of cooking squirrels rabbits woodchucks opossums beavers raccoons bears and finally humans and the teacher chastises the imaginary class like that in monty python s sex education class in their film the meaning of life to give but one example seminoles who tasted settlers runaway slaves and their own reported some differences alright that s enough go stand in the hall ialics are mine the poem ends with and now for your assignment and so i end this review by suggesting to the reader of this review and now for your assignment read panoptic and then see me after class to order your copy send 24 20 4 p h payable to tom gannon hamilton 577 o connor dr toronto ontario m4c 2z9 posted in reviews leave a comment luciano iacobelli s dolor midnight reviewed by stanley fefferman posted on march 22 2019 by stanley fefferman luciano iacobelli dolor midnight quattro books 84pp 20 00 there is a poetry in gambling and luciano iacobelli has written an important book about it as a child watching the neighbourhood men play dice in the streets he felt the poetry crawled across our young souls like poetry gambling is an art the energy of gambling inflames iacobelli s language to a high level of poetic speech i come to practice my art so that when death arrives it s features will be known iacobelli is a kind of canadian françois villon who finds glory in his vice it s always my falls that summon miracles draw up enough compassion and grace to bring forth angels dolor midnight is a rich tapestry of stories portraits of gamblers anecdotes of addiction iacobelli is honest about his own addiction take a 16 hour bus ride to new jersey play 3 or 4 hours just to quell the fever then return home to be back in toronto by monday morning in time to teach my first class in the seven sections of the book iacobelli writes fascinating poems about the history of cards dice horse racing casinos the habits of gamblers and he reflects brilliantly on the kind of things that go through the mind of a player how many birds will land on a branch some say luck can be trained you can whistle and it comes his speculations rise up from philosophy to religion what counted was how nothing became something how a fish and a loaf multiply into feast iacobelli s wit churns out surprising one liners debt is a sea weighed down by its own salt nostalgia is hope walking backwards these are very satisfying to read but at the heart of his book is iacobelli s effort to articulate why the gambler is driven to take risks after losing he asks whether it is a genetic disposition or chemical wave washing the brain if so is gambling a vice or a disease he doesn t settle on either of these alternatives rather he moves the issue to the spiritual level taking a gamble is an attempt to outrun the weight return to the original lightness if that is the case who can point the finger at tossing dice for the last time a sick old yellow man wears an oxygen mask and who is to blame him iacobelli s art is both ruthless and compassionate if i had to choose a single word to describe the poetry of dolor midnight that word would be redemptive posted in reviews leave a comment valentino assenza s through painted eyes reviewed by stanley fefferman posted on march 20 2019 by stanley fefferman valentino assenza through painted eyes piquant press 19 95 here are some admirable lines from through painted eyes valentino assenza s first full length collection of poems that precious subliminal taste of the past through my senses these lines say that though his form resembles chopped prose the lines are in fact made up of spoken word held together by the real voice of a sensitive personality assenza s memories come through his senses and this conveys the livingness of the episodes and characters making up his personal epic journey into the past whether he is chronicling growing up with his mother in toronto neighbourhoods or among relatives in sicily where he spent summers with his father assenza s memories carry with them a sense of life my father peeling me a cucumber from the garden and a lizard crawling across a stone wall through painted eyes contains a gallery of portraits notably assenza s father grandfather relatives and neighbourhood characters drawn so you get what these people meant to him and still mean the portrait of jack the barber and his victims is touching and deft conveying a sense of neighbourhood life in the class of laurence hutchman s two maps of emery and that is makes me think somebody should appoint assenza poet laureate of a toronto neighbourhood perhaps leslieville whether he writes about life in sicily or in toronto many of assenza s spoken words are in the sicilian dialect and he scatters phrases throughout these poems where they function like charms and spells and incantations summoning up a richness in the mouth that is one of the more rewarding effects of reading his work all the more so if you ve had a chance to hear him read the tobacconist is one of his best in performance where you also get a strong sense of how at ease the author in his world where he is happy to fit in there are dark touches in the poems due to separation death and failure of ambition but remarkably there is not a trace of alienation in through painted eyes posted in reviews leave a comment tom hamilton s el marillo reviewed by stanley fefferman posted on march 2 2019 by stanley fefferman el marillo is an elegaic work of great passion focused on hamilton s late wife rhena hymovitch and her humanitarian passion to bring boots on the ground aid relief and protection to thousands of displaced campesinos during the 1980 s in el salvador where she lost her life el marillo commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of her death with poems that record the brutal conditions she and hamilton worked under from 1984 88 when hymovitch drowned the book concludes with a handful of poems in which hamilton reflects how the passing years have been marked by his devotion to his late wife s memory hamilton s verse forms are as he says a consequence of extreme lived experience matched with a poet s imperative to give it voice his lines are filled with facts penecillin amoxocylin tetracycline imodium with no expiry date later than ours we hope they also record actions finally we sneak under the bridge turret and sleeping machine gunner as we cross rio lempa then traverse the playa seca to the pueblo el marillo with our forbidden medicinal cargo the thought lines run in long narrative and discursive stanzas sometimes marked by a complexity of rhythm a loftiness of diction and a profundity of thought that blossoms into a more traditional mode of poetry terror is to the survivor what valor is to the warrior a priest consider the multi faith corpses whose myriad beliefs had this covered a mystery who will get it humor is their talisman any swatch in a field hamilton s verse often rises to an eloquence that extends to the limits of speech in lines like no hand is big enough to cover the river s bloody mouth and oblivion pure unmitigated nothingness compels him to pray the latter line is from the closing poem of the book entitled susto it serves as the concluding portion of hamilton s elegy or lament for the dead in which traditionally the grieving poet reconciles himself to the loss and experiences a realization that allows him to let go through the closing lines of the poem in the formal elegaic manner the poet uses his susto the illness of his grieving to liberate both the memory of his beloved and himself yet with susto you take up and face what you ve long been seeking to exorcise the dread you must embrace to extinguish tom hamilton s chapbook is so personal and so intense i have to let go of some lines that leave me in the dark even after several readings it is possible their darkness forms a part of hamilton s intention as he seems to indicate in the closing lines of this remarkable poem bituminous train cars their tomorrows trail off each day to follow they ll see me not whole but if not for the darkness they wouldn t see me at all and they wouldn t know el marillo won 1st place in the 2018 big pond rumours chapbook awards i say it possesses the gravitas to earn a permanent place in the archives of this country and beyond posted in reviews leave a comment penn kemp s fox haunts reviewed by stanley fefferman posted on july 26 2018 by stanley fefferman penn kemp fox haunts aeolus house 2018 97 pp the way suburban garden fences are a line the fox crosses from the countryside to steal our chickens is like the line fox since time immemorial has crossed from the countryside into our myths into our dreams into our literature and our language shenanigans is derived from the gaelic word for fox a skulk of foxes is the collective noun jimmie hendrix sang of his foxy lady and here is a stanza from penn kemp s poem to inari the shinto fox god deity fox girls dance beneath the twisted maple caling their sister to tranform from mist as beguiling women with red in their hair fox haunts is a meditation in 90 poems on a predator who is our closest neighbour and who is getting closer all the time as it s habitat yields to subdivisions the longest section of fox haunts entitled urban fox consists of poems about foxes kemp might have encountered her writing can be elegant it s true you walk on toes like cats like a ballerina of the wildwood kemp empathizes with the drama of the hunt the inside as well as the outside of it fox circles her prey closing in on her victim in ever tightening gyres her fixed glare freezes poor rabbit into terror so pure it dissolves to acceptance suspended acquiescence adrenalin overload almost like peace soft as comfort this compliance in the fox s grasp just a single shriek before the neck snaps at her best kemp s narrative and poetry are transparent she has variance in her voice sometimes she addresses her images directly to the fox i come upon your prints on muddy path neatly deliberately splayed sometimes she drops into a journalistic mode and addresses the reader directly in what sounds to me like chopped prose like canada geese fox may be adopting city life to avoid hunters the tough slog of country life clever fellow only to follow that with a passage of the most startlingly direct poetry they look upon the easy prey of pets soft and vulnerable bichon frisés left outside by themselves in the yard those with no defense but a petulant startled bark before they are meat carried off dangling in the soft jaw of a mother triumphantly keen on feeding her kits kemp is entranced with the world of wily wiry trickster tales and devotes a section to fox references in the writings of taliesin ovid in the legend of samson in other hebrew scriptures relating to solomon and ezekiel in aesop w b yeats and st exupéry akiro kurosawa and alice munro whose...