Indigenous Poetics in Canada. Ed. Neal McLeod. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 404 PP. $42.99.

Cree poet Neal McLeod has gathered together essays by, and interviews with, various Indigenous poets and trusted non-Indigenous readers on the subject of Indigenous poetics. Many of the contributors express discomfort with the latter word, however. When asked to “define Indigenous poetics,” Chippewa poet and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm replies “I’m sort of hung up on that whole concept of poetics and what does it mean in an Indigenous context” (266). Métis poet and Canada Research Chair Warren Cariou notes the word’s origin in Aristotle, “a drawer of boundaries,” and adds “Sometimes that makes me wish Indigenous artists had a different word for the thing he defined as poetics” (31). Onondaga scholar David Newhouse begins with the disclaimer “Poetics – and particularly Indigenous poetics – has not been a part of my formal education, which has been primarily in the sciences and social sciences. I am more comfortable with the knowledge paradigms and truth traditions embedded in them than I am with the interpretative and hermeneutic underpinnings of the humanities” (73). The sciences, of course, and European notions of objective truth, have their origin in the categorizings of Aristotle.

Many other contributors avoid using the word altogether. Those who use it most often employ it as a synonym for philosophy or world view – “the voices of our ancestors” (Tasha Beeds 65), “ways of knowing” (Christine Sy 187 – who also writes of a “poetics of personal decolonization” 185), a “praxis” that resides “not only in our cultural and spiritual inheritances and legacies but also our intellectual and narrative traditions (James Sinclair 208). “When we sing, the bones of our ancestors hear our songs and they work their way to the surface of the land, singing themselves up” writes Lee Maracle (305).

In his 1997 study of Maurice Blanchot, Gerald Bruns contemplates the origins of Aristotle’s terms poesis and poetics, and suggests that they were part of an unsuccessful strategy of containment, a way of domesticating an unruly

Northern Soul by Ron Silliman. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.

This is the second published volume, and 10th section, of Ron Silliman’s three-century 360-section writing project Universe. The first volume, Revelator, I looked at earlier this year. There is not a great deal of difference between them. Both are written in short lines – Revelator in 5-word lines, Northern Soul in lines of 1 to 5 words. They have much the same abrupt shifts in focus, and a similar number of bird sightings per line -- birds come in and out of view in these two books more frequently than people.

Silliman, like George Bowering, is an older poet very much preoccupied with aging. “What time have I left / to live this dream” he asks in this book’s final lines (78). A few pages earlier, while recalling passing his childhood home in California, he had written “what visit / will be my last / to survive is / to sneak past / all the traps / Stones in / my head sing / This may be / the last / prime the pump / as if this / ink were blood” (65). Part of priming the pump for him is to undertake this audacious 360-part multi-century poem.

The various abrupt shifts among geographic locations – London, Lancashire, New Jersey, Rome, Los Angeles, Tuscany, Delaware, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Ottawa – some visited in recollection, some in dreams, some seemingly in the

Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 by George Bowering. Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2013.

This is how George Bowering’s 1991 poem “Death” begins:

   I’m going to write a poem about life & death, I said,
   but mostly about death. But you are always doing that, said D,
   your last poem was about death. The poem before that one was
   about death. In fact if you looked at all your writing, especially
   the poems, you would find pretty near nothing but death. A lot
   of the time you seem to be laughing about it, but that doesn’t
   fool anyone. (Urban Snow 23)

Twenty years later in his latest collection, Teeth, he’s still writing poems about death, aging, the slow dying of our planet, and the missed opportunities of a now long distant boyhood, so I guess it’s nothing to worry about. Though it does worry me that he has received such little recognition from the ecopoetry/ecocriticism writers. His “Summer Solstice” (1976) and Kerrisdale Elegies (1984) are two of the most powerful works anywhere of ecopoetry, and written – according to Wikipedia – much before that necessarily death-concerned category was invented.

Being still one who reads poetry mostly for what I can learn about writing poetry, I was attracted most to the unexpected forms in this book – especially to the several poems Bowering has constructed here out of lists of