Romping, vivacious volumes of verse

Saying goodbye to Richard Sanger, and introducing debut collections, including ‘Xanax Cowboy’ and ‘Baby Book’

Baby Book

Amy Ching-Yan Lam Brick Books, 126 pages, $22.95 “In the house where I grew up, all the blinds were always drawn. / I go back to open them,” Amy Ching-Yan Lam writes in her debut collection. Openness is a key element in this Toronto poet and visual artist’s approach; the speaker in the poems is endlessly inquisitive, whether questioning the nature of perception, pondering the principles that guide how people live their lives or telling family stories. Lam is rambunctiously eclectic: in one poem, she comments on her range of influences, describing her head as “a parking lot with one car parked in it, and / inside the car, Hello Kitty, Jesus, Qin Shi Huang, and Nelson/ Mandela arguing loudly with each other, yelling proverbs and maxims.” Elsewhere, in a poem where she muses on art and mortality, Lam writes, “Sometimes people allow spirit to flow through them.” The spirit that flows through these fresh, often funny poems — some fablelike, some ramblingly anecdotal — is both vivacious and reflective.

Way to Go

Richard Sanger Biblioasis, 72 pages, $19.95 Inevitably, an air of poignancy permeates Richard Sanger’s fourth book of poetry. The shadow of mortality looms metaphorically throughout this posthumous collection by the late Toronto poet, who died last September after living with pancreatic cancer for two years, as in the opening poem, where the speaker, on a bike ride, feels “the sudden chill of trees and shade.” What’s surprising is how much humour there is, albeit wry. Sanger wields the traditional tools of the poet — rhyme, metre and metaphor — brilliantly, and inhabits a range of speakers and situations. In one poem, he recalls a running partner and conjures the vitality of the youthful body in exertion, “our bones and sinews making themselves known / shedding all superfluous weight and thought.” The collection is more a celebration of life than a lament, though it’s often tinged with a sorrowful wistfulness, as in “Flâneur,” where he recalls pubs and bars he once drank in, and writes, “I drink you all in, / your suds, your solace; I haven’t had enough.”

Xanax Cowboy

Hannah Green Anansi 130 pages $19.99 It seems paradoxical to describe a book about addiction, depression and despair as a romp. Yet the Winnipeg poet Hannah Green’s figurative language is so dazzling, her tone so sardonically witty, that her debut is indeed a romp. In this book-length poem, Green portrays the experience of mental illness, particularly as it relates to the myth of the tormented artist, by pairing it with the heroic, hard-drinking cowboy of the Wild West. That image is also a myth, but a contrasting one (“A cowboy goes to the doctor with a bullet hole, / not a list of symptoms with no exit wound!”). There’s an inventive mishmash of allusions: at one point, Green draws on lines “from Westerns, Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel,’ lyrics from Patsy Cline songs & the WebMD page on Xanax.” But it’s her own phrasing that haunts. In a passage about battling suicidal thoughts, she writes, “I have dead-bird energy. Flying into the glass window of myself.”

Continent

Aaron Boothby McClelland & Stewart 88 pages, $22.95 Aaron Boothby brings a voice of conscience, troubled and searching, to this debut collection of lyrical meditations. He contemplates the legacy of colonization and conquest, moving back and forth in time, and examines how our perspective on the past and the present is shaped by a “bleached mythology.” As he puts it, “We like to pretend history / has white sails.” At the heart of these poems is a questioning of how we relate to the land we live on, as the descendants of settlers. “My inheritance is a burning of whatever / whoever happened / to end up in our way,” Boothby writes. There’s an ambitious reach to these poems in both geography (Boothby is originally from California and now lives in Montreal) and history. As the speaker muses on his connection to place, he ponders what it means to belong somewhere — and, tellingly, who is included or excluded (“I know that nearby a border fence / cuts through this landscape”).