Gift Horse, Signal Editions (2011)

Poetry in Newfoundland has been “growing up” in recent years, in that there is less tendency by some poets to write about themes and subjects that are traditionally “Newfoundland” in nature (the fishery and the loss thereof, small town life, etc). There’s a gradual movement away from what Newfoundland culture was towards what it is and will be. In his latest book, Gift Horse (Signal Editions), St. John’s poet Mark Callanan has created poems that occupy a space somewhere between a mythic past and present that embraces that past.

The first part of the collection is influenced greatly by Callanan’s recent near death experience and, as such, contains many references to life and death, the fragility of existence, and uncertainty that accompanies consideration of the future. “The Meaning of Life” stands out as a poem that acknowledges the strange place between reality and the mind that sees the poet struggling to consider what is really important in life. Flying a kite with a child forces the speaker to assess his understanding of an afterlife and some kind of celestial existence when he feels the string’s tug upwards, but ultimately is brought down to earth upon feeling the tug of the child:

I’m the kind of man whose mind
is often flocked with herring gulls
that dive for chicken skins in parking lots.
And yet, at times, I almost grasp
what’s lost down on this lower plane:
the pull of unseen hands, a gentle tug.
Tangled string; me staring up.

This section of the book is written from grave experience and the sincerity comes through in the work, showing that Callanan is fully capable of tackling topics less traditional in nature. But he is not entirely focused on this stream of thought and in section three turns back to Newfoundland’s primary point of history, namely the sea. There are poems of mermaids, lobsters, ships, and codfish; standard island fare, which is mixed in its success. “Sea Legend”, a poem about a group of sailors experiencing a mermaid caught in their nets, and “Moratorium”, primarily concerned with cultural connotation and personal history as elements of poetry, are fine pieces. The latter’s final lines burst with energy and the power of a well placed image:

                                                      What
I wouldn’t give to taste his oracular gills
and know something beyond these shallows,
know why, when I put a codfish in a poem,
it writhes and bucks its body like a fish
out of water, like a fish about to be fried.

At times it feels as though the addition of certain weaker poems take away from the collection as a whole. One such example is “Lobsters”, which concerns itself with a visit to the supermarket where the speaker and his child stop to watch lobsters in a tank. As a poem, it juxtaposes an adult consideration of the scene with that of a child (“My daughter, leaning in, / makes a fish face / at the lot of them.”), but is removed from the mood of the rest of this section in its use of the mundane and everyday, which clashes with the mythic and cultural elements found in the mermaid poems, for example. While this change does look to the future as it relates to the province’s identity, the poem isn’t strong enough to hold up in the context provided.

The book closes with a section that serves as a survey of human/wolf interaction through the centuries. Here, as in the sea inspired poems, there are both strong and weak links in the poetic chain. The section opens with a poem called “Short Treatise on the Use of Sexual Imagery in Medieval Hunting Texts”, and it truly is short (just four lines); unfortunately what the title suggests is far from developed in the poem and merely glossed over. The sparse imagery does little to live up to the promise of the title, almost as if the point of the poem is that it is a short poem. That said, the book finishes strongly as it improves poem by poem towards the end. With the exception of “The Great Wolf Hunt”, the poems that build to the final scene do well to engage the reader, both in content and character. Each poem expresses a different view of the wolf: at first as hunter of man and methodical in his “work” as a predator in nature, but the tables eventually turn as man hunts the wolf even to the brink of extinction, as in the case of the Newfoundland Wolf in “Last Seen”:

It was the youngest, the boy, not even
tall as his father, who squeezed

and dropped the pin that drove the bullet
that cleaved the air and broke
the skull at a point just above the muzzle,
tore apart the brain and split
the thoughts into a million fragments…

Here one can see the poet’s understanding of the line, the use of rhythm and pacing is mature and powerful in it’s effect. The imagery here is crisp and alive, violent, but not to excess. The speaker is taking his time, considering what the act of killing this wolf means, the loss that accompanies in the deed. It is in poems such as this, when in a careful meditative mood, that Callanan shines brightest. Here one can see the poet’s understanding of the line, the use of rhythm and pacing is mature and powerful in it’s effect. This is found throughout the book in poems that

Callanan has taken great strides from his first collection, Scare Crow, improving his craft and place in the literary heritage of this province. The poems in Gift Horse are varied in their subject matter and attempt to balance, to a degree, the transition of Newfoundland from the old ways to the new. There is little attempt here to glorify the past, but to use it as a stepping stone to a personal engagement with local culture and the wider world.

In an attempt to broaden my background in the classics (an ongoing reading project of mine), I’ve recently taken up Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I knew it was a lengthy book when I started, but didn’t check the actual page tally of nearly 1,300 (#ereaderproblems) and realized a couple of chapters in that I’d signed on for something that will require quite a level of commitment: a challenge for which I’m prepared.

Though I’m 40% into the title thus far (since using an e-reader it seems everything is in percentages, rather than pages) there is much to like. I had expected a lot of descriptive writing to bog down the text, as can happen with some 19th century works, but Dumas never overuses this, but rather relies quite heavily on dialogue to drive character interactions. In fact, conversations and the relating of episodes can sometimes last one or two chapters at a time. If there’s a possible negative, it would be that certain characters, as Dumas created them, can be long-winded, which will slow down the pace of the novel. It’s something I enjoy, as long as it has a purpose and even Dumas realizes that writing this way can be a problem and so has other characters listening along (quite often Monte Cristo himself) express an impatience at having to sit through such lengthy dialogue. I happen to find this much less tedious than it sounds.

I won’t discuss much of the plot, since this is my first time reading the novel and I’ve heard so little about what happens it’s like I’m coming at it completely fresh. At times I worried that some of the seemingly minor subplots would detract from the story, as they appeared completely unrelated to the primary story of Edmund Dantes and his sought after revenge for his years in prison. Being as far in as I am now, I can see that every detail Dumas has added throughout the early parts of the novel have been very carefully chosen and are beginning to contribute crucially to the main progression of the work. The result is that of an incredibly intricate plot that develops in surprising ways as one reads; definitely a positive.

The presentation of the Count of Monte Cristo as a mysterious character with a long and exotic history does a great job of maintaining my interest in the book. Like I’ve said, a long tomb with dense sections in which one can, at times, feel lost will likely end up back on the shelf before it can be finished, but I’ve become so tied to the revenge story that I cannot put the book down. I have to know what happens to Dantes and how his tireless work of creating an intriguing alter ego turns out. I’m not often invested to this degree in a character and it’s a credit to Dumas that he can achieve this kind of interest in such a long novel.

This is not meant to serve as a review, but merely a couple of rambling thoughts on my part as I read through the book. I may pop back with more as the “plot thickens”.

And, really, how can you blame them? They’ve been taught since they were young and wide-eyed that there’s a right and wrong answer to each question and that their value as a problem solver relies on them finding one particular, pre-determined solution. If they haven’t found that response, no matter the effort or outside-the-box style thinking they do, they aren’t considered successful, or at least not as successful as their peers, who did get the “right answer”.

By the time these children reach high school, they’ve been conditioned to think that they will probably be wrong in giving an answer, or that it’s probably not worth the risk to put themselves out there and participate actively in discussion. Somewhere along the way risk-taking and understanding that mistakes are crucial in discovery and learning have been “educated” out of them. How sad is that?

I’ve been interested in this topic more and more lately and don’t want to suggest that I have a magic solution to the problem, but I do believe there are people out there, education thinkers, who are attempting to grapple with this problem. One of the most engaging speakers I’ve heard is Sir Ken Robinson, who has been studying creativity and education’s role in it with an eye towards the future. He’s done a series of talks on the topic and I’ll share one with you from the TED conferences. Decide for yourself if he’s on the right track, but one thing for certain is that something has to change for the good of students and their futures.

Those of you who have read this blog in the last year will know that I’m a supporter of e-readers and digital books. My reasons for this focus primarily on the conveniance of technology (many e-readers can now serve as tablets that have multiple uses beyond reading digital books), but also include financial concerns (e-books are often much cheaper than print books due to skipping costs associated with paper materials), and the easing of stress on forest resources. That said, I know the e-reader experience depends a great deal on the quality of the device and the software provided with it.

In my own reading life, I have selected Kobo as the device of choice for me. A couple of years ago I bought a first generation Kobo e-reader and enjoyed it very much, but, like any new technology, limitations of the device became apparent over time. In December, I acquired the newest Kobo model, the Kobo Vox, and thought I would post some of my thoughts on this new e-reader.

Firstly, if you’re expecting a device that can compete with other tablets, like those produced by Apple or Samsung, than you’ll be disappointed. While the Vox is a tablet that allows the user to operate a variety of applications, including social networking like twitter and facebook, web browsing, office suite and word processing, blogging, games, and more, the device has it’s limits when it comes to functions that require more power (movie and video manipulation and audio editing, for instance). As it happens, the Vox satisfies nearly every use I have for a tablet, and most for which I own a laptop.

There is an internal storage limit of 8 gigs, which is below that of some of the more popular tablets, but includes an option of expansion through a micro SD card slot. Unless you are into storing a lot of high quality video on your device, this should be adequate for most purposes, including document storage and music.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Kobo Vox is the availability of apps through the unboard app store, Getjar. While all apps made available through this service are free, there is not as wide a range available as one will find on the Android Market (by the way, the Vox runs on the Android platform, in case you didn’t know). That said, you can get around this problem somewhat by downloading apps on another computer and copying them to your eReader.

What the Vox lacks in some more high functioning areas it more than makes up for in its primary purpose as a reading device. The library, reading, estore, and social reading links are easily available at the bottom of all front pages, making for quick and easy access. The reading options are much improved organization-wise than in earlier Kobo devices, including detailed font settings (type and size), brightness, book navigation, and annotations/highlighting. The loading speed for books is quite quick, and once reading begins page turning is speedy, requiring only a tap of the page. Access to an unboard dictionary where you don’t have to type in the word you wish to look up, but merely highlight it on the page is a positive. Shifting from one book to another is very easy as well. One of Kobo’s individual qualities is it’s social reading feature, which allows readers to share what they are reading easily through the app itself or through quick and easy updates to facebook. Users can share not only the titles they are reading, but they can also like or comment upon books, or selections within books, easily from anywhere in the app, which is visable to other Kobo users with whom this information is shared.

If you’re looking for a tablet that allows you to work with email and document editing, schedule calender events and reminders, browse the internet with a quality browser, that connects seamlessly to social networking then the Kobo Vox should be a device you consider. It won’t get you all the features of an iPad or Samsung tablet, nor the app variety available through Apple, but for a $200 tablet you get a surprising piece of technology that is affordable and versatile. If you’re looking for a functional e-reader than in my opinion the Vox is one of the best out there.

For now I’ll just post a link to a short article I read recently regarding ebooks and their costs in Quebec as opposed to the rest of Canada. Apparently, in Quebec ebooks are taxed at a rate of 9.5% provincially, whereas print books are exempt from such tax. Not something readers of digital books should be happy about and the article also mentions some concerns Kobo has about what it means for their customers. You can read all about it courtesy of The Quill & Quire here.

Although Budlovsky said the discrepancy “should be atrociously viewed by the Canadian
public,” Kobo isn’t ready to battle the Canadian government to change the tax laws.

“We accept the law for what it is and feel that it should be changed but that is a long and bureaucratic process,” Budlovsky said. “We work in a … fast-moving industry where we need to stay ahead of the competition by working on things that are under ourcontrol.”