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According to the book's biographical note, Patria Rivera was born and raised in the Philippines and now lives in Toronto. Her collection of poems Puti/White (Frontenac House $15.95) ends with a glossary of words and phrases in Spanish, Polish, German, Greek, and (mainly) Filipino. In the loping and stretch of her Unes, Rivera teaches the reader the inadequacy of the terms available in any one language system, and hints at the subtle gradations of difference between nada and nothing, between Puti and White. But even when the glossary is not needed, the Rivera poem typically negotiates the dynamics of translation-between geographies of persimmon and frangipani and "the movements / of bear, deer, lynx, squirrel, and porcupine;" between dreams of "bazookas and bayonets" and an elusive "world bathed in the soft light of snowdrifts." Rivera is constantly translating the pain of having "once been vulnerable," remembering and reliving. She is speaking in one language and thinking in another: "Somehow the words do not seem to match / the nettles that lacerate and I roil inside / because I cannot put words to my anger."
Jordan Scon's Silt (New Star Books $16.00) at once reminds of blackberry, brown river, and theAvork world of the Lower Fraser in Tim Bowling and Daphne Mariait Scott, although not explicitly, apparently learns precise observation and attentive listening (to his own language) from these poets. But he writes his estuarial geography in two directions interestingly different from theirs. In quoting from his grandfather's (invented?) journal, he translates-compare with Patria Rivera-the trauma of fleeing Poland in the wake of World War II to "taking splendour in / the river's shale floor." Such translation often founders in silent frustration. Scott embraces his own speech impediment and makes of it a poetics of stuttering, manifest in repeating consonants isolated from one another on the page, and in the "blockage repetition replacement" as tongue tries to talk river. This is a book of poetry-and I mean this in the most complimentary waythat merits careful study.
"The poem wants / to beat the crap out of you then / make love," Jeanette Lynes announces in "What the Poem Wants." This mix of bluntness, crudeness, and desire might serve to describe the variations of her voice. But somewhere...