Forage
By Rita Wong. Nightwood Editions, 85 pp, $16.95

The Shovel
By Colin Browne. Talonbooks, 192 pp, $19.95

Subway Under Byzantium
By Maxine Gadd. New Star, 128 pp, $20

A question often directed at those who identify themselves as poets is: why does poetry matter? Even responding to such a question implies a genre-related inferiority complex, but I want to take up this problematic idea anyway, because the books here present such amazing answers.

Rita Wong’s Forage, recent winner of a B.C. Book Prize, combines social, political, and economic critique with instances of everyday discomfort and joy. No other genre of writing allows such powerful emotional and intellectual collisions. Wong’s poem “fluorine” gives a good sense of this:

  i sleep smells though i don’t
see it

  transported across oceans &
into sad

  rural neglect how shiny
my teeth are

this cold crisp morning

She also adds handwritten quotes from critics, poets, and other writers to undo the authority of the quotation and as a way to negotiate the barrage of information with which we are constantly faced. It allows us to listen to things that can be difficult to hear. Wong’s poems always function on multiple levels that expose abuses of power while articulating beauty and employing humour.

Poet and filmmaker Colin Browne also creates multifaceted intersections of poetry and documentary, linguistic humour and history, in his latest book, The Shovel. Again, there is such evidence of the possibilities poetry provides, allowing encounters with philosophers to coexist with concrete poems nudging visual sensibilities, alongside recollections that push the limits of language. The evidence is in his poem “Dislodging: The Colonial Temperament at Cowichan Bay, circa 1900”:

“It cost just to tear it open. Is destiny lodged in a name? In his chaste confession, purged of dates and names, Service is a louche tormentor, angling disingenuously in the slough of our forgiveness. Hireling and squirreling, leashed to privilege.”

Has history ever, literally, sounded so good or conveyed such intensity?

Maxine Gadd’s Subway Under Byzantium (New Star, 128 pp, $20) also provides an intense combination of social critique and sly humour. Her views of the places her work inhabits—the Downtown Eastside and the Gulf Islands—provide powerful and playful perspectives on urban-rural convergences. In “February” she strings together an incisive list:

“writing directly into memory. legs up by the lake suddenly locked. the eternal happiness on mountains of the rich. the girls around the big iron pit, ringing it in the glen. the function of the rogue on the contemporary literary scene and its relationship to cows anywhere. backtrack. gridlock.”

Gadd’s work embraces contradictions to both distill and expand language, and get at what matters.