New, Old and Notable: Volume 1, Issue 2
Reviews by Gordon Phinn
New, Old & Notable is a reoccurring column by Gordon Phinn in which he concisely reviews several books from the past and present. Links will take you to the publisher’s page for more information.
Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (Above/Ground Press, 1879/2015)
Chapbooks: As outlined in Eli MacLaren’s Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks (McGill-Queens 2021), these diminutive pamphlets have been a low profile but integral element of CanLit for decades. Between 1925 and 1962 Ryerson Press produced over 200. Since the 70/80’s the genre has, with the advent of copy machines, blossomed. Heck, I’ve done about a dozen myself. In its now expansive corral, new work is led out of the barn by poets and prose stylists trying out experiments in form and expression that might not otherwise see the light of day. Once not always so easy to acquire, the digital age, with all its websites, podcasts, and Substacks, has simplified the task. One can observe a wide selection as they canter around the exercise yard, finding their new legs and admirers. One seemingly inexhaustible source is Rob Mclennan’s Above/Ground press, and if I’m not mistaken, his stable has at least 600 residents. Mind you, I’m a past master at being mistaken.
Allow me to remedy whatever lack you may feel by introducing a couple of new contenders, each with a unique and valuable contribution to make. Jamie Sharpe, a Comox BC writer with five books to his credit, has uncovered a long neglected 19th century Quebecois poet, Eudore Evanturel, whose only book, Premieres Poesies from 1879, was not well received by the critics of the day and the disappointment led him to retire and relocate to Lowell, Massachusetts.
In his preface Sharpe reveals that on encountering Evanturel’s work he felt confronted with “a misplaced heirloom, a finely etched reliquary of longing, wit and restraint” and that his approach was “not archival but sympathetic”, and his use of “succinct English cadence” was to “allow the poems to exist without the velvet rope and museum glass.” In this he has succeeded admirably, allowing the shelved sentiments to breathe freely. Many of the verses are tantalizingly brief, some approaching the remote elevation of the haiku:
Village at Noon Whitewashed walls lean Under noon’s sunlight. A lone bicycle Collapsed by the door. Somewhere: Laughter, a saucepan clatter. The village slow and bright. A midday lull in a world Kept small.
To My Reader Hold these words close, like a flower Pressed, preserved, between pages. Let it oblige your fingers to turn into Glints of quiet contemplations waiting For your own heart to finish them.
One hopes for more translations and research on this buried treasure.
Lives Of Dead Poets by Penn Kemp (Above/Ground Press 2025)
Penn Kemp has been regarded as something of an iconoclast and trailblazer for fifty odd years, the composer of thirty plus books of poetry and prose, seven plays and several daring, and dare I say seductive, experiments in sound poetry. If you suspect that there are boundaries that yet require breaking then Penn has already been there, joyously deconstructing. In this chapbook, she fondly recalls the lives and work of contemporaries who have shifted their focus to that universe next door. Let me say: she knocks and gains entry.
Gwen MacEwen, Robert Creeley, Robert Hogg, bp nicol, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, Robert Kroetsch, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades & Ellen S. Jaffe: all are evoked, praised, loved and grieved. Her heart is in the right place and her aim is true.
One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones
The sound of voices I wish I could hear, voices now dissolved to ether, to the vagaries of memory, lost in translation. What’s that? How could such presence disintegrate? How could so much wisdom evaporate with the body’s decay? A chasm awaits Across the great division. As the poets fall into their tradition, our beloved dead are more intimate now than they ever could be in the flesh. Only their poetry can still convey intimations of immortality, subtle slips we grasp as truth, not knowing for sure what is real, what is fantasy and false, what lies somewhere in between as true. Only their poems can transcribe mysterium tremendum – where they’ve gone. Their words embodied on the page, For me. For you.
Exile: The Literary Quarterly (vol.47, #1)
Literary journals supply a living steam of creativity and inspiration to the arts community in any country where they are permitted to flourish. Many come and go with the fluctuations of fortune and finances, but some manage to persist, and indeed thrive, for decades. Exile is one such. Now in its fifty-third year of continuous publication, it continues to wave the flag of non-conformist artistic freedom. In Volume 47, #1, I was pleased to find not one but two articles circling around the Canadian artist and mystic Bertram Brooker.
Thanks to editor-in-chief Barry Callahan, we now have more Brooker inspired meditations to add to the growing bubble of interest emerging from the 1920’s when his friendship with the Group of Seven, particularly that of Lawren Harris. His first one-man show brought his name to what was then the forefront of artistic endeavour in our geographically huge but artistically tiny country. While appreciating his visual expressions, from portraiture to abstraction and writing, journalism and fiction, I was initially intrigued with his allusions to the tradition of the mystical and transcendent, from Blake to Dostoyevsky,
Whitman and that turn of the century Canadian doctor Richard M. Bucke, whose memoir Cosmic Consciousness was then influential. My long interest was reignited by the 2023 retrospective of his work at the McMichael Gallery, When We Awaken.
Alongside a generous selection of Brooker’s art and thought, Callaghan adds some pertinent and insightful commentary. After quoting the diary entry where Brooker noted his sudden revelation of sunlight on running water, not dissimilar to others’ leaps of faith into knowing, that, “Everything in the universe is one, united, it is like knowing the answer to everything all at once”, he writes “From that moment on, in all his work, Brooker sought to become at one with what he said was a cosmic consciousness, a state of being in which there was no time, no beginning, no end. Only the possibility of understanding the meaning of existence.”
In the second essay Icons And A Walnut, on the cultural significance of religious Icons, he quotes the final paragraph of Brooker’s award-winning novel (1927) Think Of The Earth: “The universe is not good. It is perfect but it is not good. Perfections lies beyond good and evil….The universe was not made for man – a part of itself. It was made whole and is perfect always and yet is ever-changing, creating a new harmony, creating a new perfection at every moment.”
The Atlantic Magazine, September 2025
General interest magazines, like the New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, The Walrus and the late lamented Saturday Night, often offer pertinent long form investigative journalism that supplants the all too brief and misleading reports in the daily print and digital media. My wife and I regularly spend Saturday evenings submerged in them while sipping at our lattes and nibblies. As I and the Seaboard Review of Books have not shied away from the controversy over our recent implementation of the MAiD program, I thought it prudent to comment on the September issue of The Atlantic, which included Elaina Plott Calabro’s exploration of our pioneering program and its current status from the POV of the US reader/consumers, who likely have heard of the concurrent applications in Oregon and The Netherlands but perhaps do not yet realize the complete integration that their neighbour to the north has embraced in this medical frontier.
The article wisely refrains from any finger pointing hysteria re now-look-what-those-crazy abortion-providing-socialists-are-up-to-now and instead concentrates on the experiences of medical personnel and those who have applied for the program, undergoing it willingly despite the complaints and injunctions of family members. That we as a country have sided with the inalienable right of the individual in both situations rather than any outworn religious or legal tradition, has only increased my pride in our progressive and laissez-faire democracy.
Calabro’s recent investigations will bring you up to date, especially in the developments concerning those who fear not just inevitable physical deterioration but the progressive and inevitable collapse of their mental functions, rendering them unable to make coherent decisions. The solution appears to be tendering applications while the brain retains significant functionality. Assessments are made and papers signed for later, sometimes much later, procedures. Names, dates and locations, sometimes here, sometimes in the EU, of patients and doctors are provided and the general tone is one of civilized debate. And that’s what we’re all about is it not?
About the Author
Gordon Phinn, a longtime resident of Oakville, Ontario has been active in literary production since 1975, with a number of titles in a variety of genres to his credit: Non-fiction, fiction, poetry, criticism and memoir. His early critical work for Books In Canada and Paragraph are collected in It’s All About Me, and his four year reviewing stint at WordCity will be soon available as Joy In All Genres. Other recent essay collections: Bowering and McFadden, Laughing At The Universe Of Lies and Consciousness: A Primer. A novel, An American In Heaven, a memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions and a poetry collection, Winter, Spring and Eternity’s Seduction. He is currently editing a collection of essays in celebrating the work of Laurence Hutchman, to be published by Guernica in 2026.