Content area
Full Text
Effortlessness
Anne Carson Short Talks. Brick Books Classics. Brick $20.00
Don Coles A Serious Call. Porcupine's Quill $14.95
Jim Johnstone Dog Ear. Signal $16.00
Reviewed by Jason Rotstein
All the poets under discussion tangle with effortlessness. The poets set the virtue of effortlessness before the work and what we get is the manifest expressive interpretation. Two things are noteworthy: the choice of the pursuit; and secondly, the age in which this pursuit is carried through. Short Talks is Anne Carson's first book from 1992; A Serious Call presents Don Coles, writing late in his career at considerable vintage; Dog Ear is Jim Johnstone, a younger poet-but one now established in his craft-writing about what is for him a well-hewn process to effortlessness. As these titles suggest all three poets are concerned with what it means to have the calling and to be a serious poet. Anne Carson and Coles will undercut the convention and myth, Johnstone will run with it.
Johnstone takes us on a "Drive" at a frenetic pace. The lyrics are smart, funny, original but the poetry is sometimes unnatural, overcopped with anxiety, fillings,
. . . Tell me you're good. Tell me we'll
lend our touch to the nearest MG, drive
south on a
sucker bet until we run dry in the desert.
There are
others who've come uninvited, who've
come to free
themselves from their skin, lose their grip
and trace in a mess of coins. Here's my
loss-fist
lodged in...