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Continuing its tradition of publishing daring and challenging works are three recent poetry collections from Toronto's Coach House Books. In three collections by three very different, and very strong writers at different points in their careers, from a first collection by Toronto poet and editor Suzanne Zelazo, a new collection by multi-lingual writer and Montreal resident nathalie stephens, to Windsor's Di Brandt, who has been publishing trade collections for nearly twenty years, they show the range of not only what is possible, but what can still be done.

Former Winnipeg poet and teacher Di Brandt's most recent poetry collection, Now You Care, might be the book that makes me forgive her for how much I disliked her Jerusalem, Beloved (1995, Turnstone Press). Brandt, who now teaches at the University of Windsor, explores interesting links, between the John Thompson references in her ghazals, as well as an interest shared in the work of the late French poet René Char. The physical and emotional city of Windsor, and the border struck by water, are obvious references, much the way the city fell into the work of Judith Fitzgerald in the year she spent there, crafting her Trillium-nominated collection, The River (1995, ECW Press):

See how there's no one going to Windsor,
only everyone coming from?
Maybe they've been evacuated,
maybe there's nuclear war,
maybe when we get there we'll be the only ones.

See that strange light in the sky over Detroit,
see how dark it is over Windsor?
You know how people keep disappearing,
you know all those babies born with deformities,
you know how organ thieves follow tourists
on the highway and grab them at night
on the motel turnoffs,
        (Zone: , p. 15)

The smartest thing the editors and author could have done, was to shape the book around the sequence "Dog days in Maribor, Anti (electric) ghazals" (pp. 29-40), a sequence of twelve pieces that are easily the strongest in the collection:

Now that it's much too late,
now you care.

Poison ivy wrapped around the
ash trees; lover's embrace.

Turtle, are you crazy, get
your diamond shell off the damn road.

The eating and the eaten, all
are gathered here, dearly beloved. The blood, the liver, remember
our mother tongues.

A species gone every three minutes.
History racing us by.
     (Dog days in Maribor 10, p. 38)

The place itself has always been both centre and periphery of Brandt's writing, and Now You Care represents a move on many fronts, leaving both a city (Winnipeg) and a husband, resulting in shifts that can't help but affect. From Winnipeg she goes to Windsor, Ontario, a factory town on the border, as the back cover tells, "another wasteland, rendered with ... exasperated celebration." Listen, too, to the quote under the title for "Songs for a divorce" (pp. 50-61) from Rilke, "Who shall revoke jubilation?"

It was too late then,
dear heart,
wasn't it,
though we cried
and tried,
furiously,
for many furious
months,
to save
the smoking wreckage.
      (p. 50)

Now You Care is the result of a large shift and ongoing change, including some of the best writing Brandt has done in her various poetry collections over the years. As she says, "keeping forever lit, / shining, / through regret // disguised as border hostilities, war" (p. 60). A first collection of poems by Toronto writer and founder/editor of Queen Street Quarterly, one of the best little magazines in Canada, Parlance, which means "a way of speaking," exists in five sections, three of which remain untitled, surrounding the remaining sections "Flex" and three part "Through the Lighthouse." But for the "Lighthouse" section, Zelazo's poems in this collection work in blocks of thick text. Broken and broken down into bare elements, in precise leaps, she quarters the language drawn, and across. In the piece "Coehill" (p. 14), she begins, "A pyramid in reverse. My echo / sees itself / coming." and continuing:

The tongue chases a blond memory. Only
the distance that's well the samplings the
touch. Repeat the optics tinged with.
Blows the rhythm graft the system open
and whistling.

      In the days of being told that all the poems that can be written have already been, Parlance contradicts that, in a "poetry of speed," from "I pronounce. Affirm my hands the scent of movement. / Simultaneous exhaustion. This is feigning the perspective. [...] Gender abstraction delay the migration. [...] There are too many places like the adjacent. [...] Inflection occupies us. It is a sexless multiplicity. A fetish of pres- / cence meant for rereading. Internment has nothing to do with. / Inseminate the momentum might propose less. Inimical. I mean / my being a woman. Same. It's the occasion of character." (Flex, p. 23) to "So much for syllabic management. Your hips riding the progres- / sion." (Cabaret, p. 24). Zelazo's is a movement that builds, sensual to the point of overwhelming all senses, slow before you even know what's happening

I was once the simplistic conclusion of you. Chromatic mainte-
nance awaiting the spread of thighs. Mine or yours, lyrical.
Anthologize the concern with the rest of my flexibility, the mobile
allegory of my tongue in its many stages of undress.
(Cabaret, p. 24)

      The works in Parlance work very much in conjunction with previous writing of language poets such as Jackson Mac Low, Erin Moure, Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery. Zelazo's shifts are quick, fluid and bare-boned. There are no extraneous words or phrases, but the blocks of something that builds. The section "Through the Lighthouse" works from Virginia Woolf, altering the prose of the novel into something else, "subtracting" until there is only a bare thread, writing: "poems with figures dismounted beneath his land / trophies of luxuriated vision / obsequiously she beat the flood" to "reading she wept shapes" (p. 52). "The sad part is busy meant mistaken over / thunder" she writes, in the piece "Bruised" (p. 85). Parlance is a theory built upon itself. And if Parlance is where Zelazo begins, I can't wait to see where she continues.

Paper City, subtitled "a caprice on the subject of disillusionment" fractures the usual narrative, weaving a series of pieces into a long poem or a short, surrealist novel. Does it matter which? Writer nathalie stephens, recently moved from Guelph, Ontario to Montreal, is one of the few working poets in Canada to not only compose in two languages, but to actively publish with presses in both. Once I heard her described as the Nicole Brossard of her generation. Is that an unfair comparison?

      The book opens with the line "A translation is either remarkable / or it is not a translation at all." (p. 5). Is stephens simply translating herself? "These are the body's fictions." the book begins. "They are artless attempts at formalism. / they are entrenchments, fallacies. // They are mathematically correct and as such of little / interest." (p. 7). Is it any wonder the author is beside herself?

"n and b were in their dictionaries when Art fell.
n was néant. / b was betwixt." (Début, p. 9)

      A book of prose fragments, Paper City is a progression of love story, much as the series of prose photographs that made up her previous collection, Somewhere Running (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000). A book of deliberate fiction, disguised as a collection of poems, stephens' associations are fluid, and she easily and deliberately moves from genre (and gender), exploding both sides of the subjective fence.

      Of the characters, n and b, is there a connection to the author? Is there a connection to the dedication to "b of course" at the offset? stephens' work has always overlapped boundaries and notions of genre to the point that such definitions become irrelevant. "At the joining of two streets, a book caught fire. b put the / match out with his tongue and flattened his eyes. // the body is heat. Art is desire. Their city had altogether / fallen." (p. 14).

      Either way, stephens flaunts her disinterest in picking a form and staying with it. Her writing is in constant motion. "Together we have been many places and seen many / beautiful things sometimes even people." (p. 42). nathalie stephens' work seems not to be discussed much, and I wonder if that's because no-one knows where to put it. Is that her problem or yours?