Woodshedding
by S.E. Venart
London, ON: Brick Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-894078-61-0, 115 pp., $18.00 paper.

Cypress
by Barbara Klar
London, ON: Brick Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-894078-67-2, pp. 103. $18.00 paper.

If pages were miles, than both Woodshedding and Cypress would have miles to go before arriving at that sacred place I like to find when I'm finished reading a book of poetry. Both collections exceed the limits of what I'll call good taste by pushing past the 80-page mark that often defines a poetry collection by a single author.

Venart's debut collection Woodshedding has received criticism that pulls both ways. While some sing praises for her work, as evidenced by her nomination for the ReLit Awards (2008), others argue her range is too "narrow," her tone too "confessional," and the collection itself too "self-indulgent." The truth, I think, lies somewhere in the middle. I agree with Jakub Stachurski's assessment (Matrix) that the collection suffers from an "imbalance," but it's not her subject matter or craftsmanship that are to blame for this, but rather, an abundance of poems that are perhaps not fully realized combined with pieces that by themselves are quite worthy of attention. As do many authors of first books, Venart draws from what she knows: her childhood, her home and family, and the process of self-discovery often found through writing and "the miracle/ of pens" (22).

Both Venart and reviewers of this book may also be guilty of trying too hard to match the thematic direction of the book to the definition of "woodshedding" she cites before the poems begin. Originally entitled "We Are Really Happy," this title seems to fit more closely with what the book is really about. In what once was the title poem, Venart sings a perplexing tale of domestic bliss as defined by a child watching her parents in the living room. Looking back on her parents and their life together, the speaker concludes, "life takes place/ in gardens and cars and living rooms/ where the moment isn't him anymore, isn't her" (46).

Conflict in this book does not occur with the narrator railing against her parents, or receiving "parental thrashings," as the definition for woodshedding suggests, but in the quiet uprisings of a child and later a young woman longing to escape from her house, the familiarity of domestic life, and from time's inevitable stronghold. These "solitary rehearsals," these longings for flights real and imagined, often lead the poet to write about the wings of insects or birds. Sometimes these images and metaphors work, but more often they appear as an afterthought and overwhelm the poem, as they do in "Breathe," "Trappist Monastery," and "Lucky." Perhaps with fewer and better edited poems we might hear "the story [Venart] meant to tell/ instead of what's happening" (87).

Yet, despite the book's flaws, Venart's poems are important cultural representations of our time and neatly fit the niche of what academics might refer to as our sad postmodernist syndrome of 'split subject,' or our reliance upon what-ifs to create another and better existence for ourselves. In "One Kind of Courage," a powerful poem, the speaker attempts to "light[en] up/ the dark trough// of [her] house" (95), but finding a certain necessity and attachment to house and home, admits, "the pit of my stomach slams/ against its own walls. As if/ it could be anywhere but here" (95). Frequently distracted, unable to settle into her life and get on with it, she "can hold nothing longer than a blip" (64). Life and "the failing of our world" gives the speaker in "Ice Storm" a "rush" and "stirs in [her]/ excitement, something/ familiar and wished for" (83). In "Hope You're Happy Where You're Living-," the narrator echoes our sentiments about contemporary life and reminds us that perhaps we haven't really changed much since Prufrock began to measure his life with coffee spoons:

. . . I'll also never have a keeping room,
three-cornered hat, pearl-handled pistol, the right word,
on my tongue. I'll eat my life with big utensils, thank you,

never pre-measuring my retorts for tartness, I'll continue
to survive by insisting on it. (75)

It's this moment and others in isolated stanzas throughout the collection that convince me Venart is a very capable poet, one I'll keep my eye on in the future. In the instances where she allows herself to breathe the world and to become one with it, in the quiet when she is still long enough to listen to its peculiar hum and tick, she writes spontaneously, improvising as if the poem were a jazz or blues riff, some "kind of super light" (63), and sings with certainty across the white of her page. A 'woodshedding' of possibilities, this collection takes us Home where after dark We're braver, watching lighted windows From our lighted windows, resetting our table for a solo Breakfast, one bright orange next to one bright knife (79). Barbara

Klar's third collection of verse, Cypress, has also received its share of praise and criticism. Nominated for Saskatchewan's Book of the Year and Best Book of Poetry (both in 2008), it has also been denigrated for its simplicity and dependence upon place, in this case Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan. A more mature effort than Venart's, Klar's craftsmanship saves the collection from becoming too repetitive, but craft alone may not be enough to stop the feeling I have that this collection too ought to be shorter. However much I admire her seductive language, which often comes close to perfection, about three quarters into the book, the poems start to sound too much alike. By this time the right side of my brain is tired of unscrambling her abundance of metaphors, most of which are admirable. Still, by the end of the book, I'm glad I've made the effort.

Klar's poems are haunting not only for their language, but also for what they tell us about humanity and our place in a timeless world. Following her into the bush, I've met a host of interesting people: ghosts of the indigenous people, Mounties, members of her family, or strangers who have travelled the road before her. Accompanying her on her journey through a strip of land I've never visited, I'm so deep under her spell I "lie down" with her "map of sadness" (46), I greet the never dead, and "wait for the horseman/ to take off his hat and call me ma'am" (20). Intoxicated by the sound of her voice as it sings of the "oldest heat," "the Lodgepole, lodgepole, windwood bone," I "burn for the night" (43), for the "angel who stopped waiting" to speak (89), for the mountain's song, this is the world and was always/ the world (88) to ring out loudly in the air, but mostly, I wait for a chance to "talk to the dead" (52), who "limping by/ in their rags, blind and arriving" leave "blank and invisible, a mirror/ signalling to the good and steady star of the cold" (73).

Walking, waking, sleeping and dreaming her beloved hills, Klar's fear of "being left behind" by her father, mother, hound, lover and friends (72) never detracts from her love of life, history and nature, and man's place in it as something permanent. The timeless space she inhabits in these poems lets us live momentarily in a world that "no longer die[s]/ but fl[ies] past itself to the white gazing stars" (51). And when she asks us near the end of the collection to "come out of the hills,/ out of hiding, out of the canvas nightroom, circus tent/ of the mad" to "go now from the hills toward sleep," "[t]he night/ flashes out, the cold in [our] bod[ies] falls away,/ the hills bleed into [our] leaving" (95).

In "Forty-One Stones," a strikingly beautiful incantation, Klar rides us "to the edge of the world" (17) on her mythical wheel to the place where life and death meet. Swayed by her intoxicating rhythm and the magic she finds in simple words and phrases, I believe her every word when she tells me:

The wheel invents me.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I breathe earth like a stone breathes.
I breathe the grave of my bed.

The wheel turns, stone-go-round,
it writhes, a wreathe of worms
around the choosing: that stone
for its question, that stone for its wolf back
that stone for its eye in the shoulder, the stone placed
by the boy going blind from answers
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the eyes close, more open than before. (88)

Kath MacLean's poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have earned her national acclaim. Her first book, for a Cappuccino on Bloor, was the recipient of the New Muse Award. She teaches creative writing at Grant MacEwan College and operates her own business.

Buy Cypress at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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