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Soothsaid Verse Stephen Brockwell Cometology. ECW $15.95 Stephen Cain Torontology. ECW $15.95 Bruce Whiteman The Invisible World Is In Decline, Book V. ECW $14.95
There's an undeniable new strain of the prophetic emerging in Canadian poetry. In part it is a reaction to the aggravating inward spiral of postmodern confessionalism: there is a need for a public, even popular poetics to address the sensory bombardment an allegedly postliterate world experiences. Our stories and autobiographies seem so conditional now that we live, however uncomfortably, in the future.
Stephen Brockwell watches the skies. For him the future arrives in paths and patterns, perhaps fleetingly discerned through the telescope as well as in the more immediate "rivulets of water" of whose greater river of memory we are part. In Cometology, he traces the gazes of Osceola, Kepler, Elizabeth I, and Herod, and locates comets as their mutual object. Although he writes of a heavenly body "I will not / catalogue her beauty," Brockwell does in fact offer an index of naturalist's observations, dreams, and mathematical propositions. For the apocalyptic reader there is star-fixed cultism of a...