Review: Creamsickle Stick Shivs

John Stiles, pictured here, whose work I included in my recent survey of the best Canadian poets under the age of 40 in New American Writing, has come out with his second collection of poems from Insomniac Press lately - Creamsickle Stick Shivs.

The title refers to the evil lurking in the hearts of choirboys everywhere, and the third section chronicles the darkest thoughts of a poet working in a Church Charity Office, who masks his despair and disgust with Richard III's eloquence.

This is a very strong collection. Anyone who wants to know where Canadian poetry is going to go in the next decade should read it. More to the point, it is an exceptionally honest, bracing, funny, angry and raw book - and anyone who is tired of reading poetry that is bloodless or constrained should turn to Stiles to have their socks blown off - the man writes like we sometimes imagine The Beats did - only better - he has a sort of Henry Miller swagger, and tenderness. What I say about Higgins holds true for him, too - his voice, his style, are so unique as to offer a challenge to the idea that poetry has a sanctioned diction whatsoever.

Stiles - who originates from rural Nova Scotia (Port Williams) - opens the collection with a section that presents dramatic monologues in stark, challenging, and utterly musical local patois - and their skewed, drunken lilt is Faulknerian - these are dispossessed lovelorn luckless folk, passionate as all get out, and roaring to grab a chunk of life.

There are a few poems in this collection that variously slip between language poetry, and the purest form of self-confession possible, and the cracks in the vase are hard to find. Well-wrought? Hell, no. Powerful as a poke in the eye? Yessir. This one is great.

http://www.insomniacpress.com/title.php?id=1-897178-18-2

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

IRISH POETIC GENIUS KEVIN HIGGINS HAS DIED

Terrible sad news - the major Irish satirical poet of his generation, and a poet of comedic genius, and powerful authentic resonance, Kevin Higgins, has died yesterday in Ireland. Higgins, the author of many poetry books, most published by Galway-based Irish press Salmon, was known and admired world-wide, but nonetheless deserved even more recognition from the established great and the good - i.e. the prizes, medals, crowns, gongs and other titles thrown at many many lesser lights - except, he was so brilliantly biting, critical, and scathing of all that he spied as dishonest, unfair or wretched. Sweet-natured and hilarious in person, on paper, he was terrifyingly sharp-witted, and sparing of no prisoners. In a just world, he would be seen as the greatest of recent Irish poets, and even so, is recognised in anthologies and critical studies everywhere as the most acute, savagely clever, and startling of Irish political poets. The measure of his unexpected reach - a 'Heineken poe

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