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I n the late 1960s, there was a record store in Winnipeg called Opus 69 which had what were called 'delete bins' where records could be obtained for very cheap prices. I was looking through one of these bins one day and came across an interesting looking album. The cover was indigo and featured a stately looking black man holding a saxophone which radiated in the light. I bought the record, took it home and put it on my turntable. Thirty seconds later, I took it off. Couldn't stand it. But there must have been something which held my attention, even for the brief moment I listened, as, about a year later, I put it back on. This time I lasted for about two minutes before taking it off. Still couldn't stand it. About a year, year and a half after that, I put it back on and recognized greatness. For I had been listening to John Coltrane's Transitions album - his double quartet album which announced his leaving the safety and security of his modal period - the one which was making him a lot of money - to begin exploring the spirituality of the avant garde of which he would become a leader.

Erin Mouré, although not having etched a place of greatness in my mind as yet, is much the same. She is probably the most difficult Canadian poet one is ever going to approach. And 'approach' is the correct word. You have to take her in in little bits, let that initial sampling take hold, dissolve into your unconscious, reconfigure your synapses and ganglia, and then, when this reconfiguration has occurred and a space for her type of poetry has been created, read a little bit more. Mourés poetry is never your usual poetry. It challenges you. You react to it - usually by jumping backwards away from the source of pain. But, somehow, you realize that there is a certain pleasure in that pain - and that you want more. Slowly, you become accustomed to the zap that zips through your consciousness. The pain decreases. Does the pleasure increase? Perhaps - until Mouré puts out her next book and you begin again at square one. But that's half the fun, isn't it, knowing that your senses are going to be assaulted, knowing that on your initial reading you are going to feel like throwing that book against a wall but catching yourself just before the release and saying, hhhmmm, I wonder what she meant by THAT.

I prepared for this review by initially reading Mouré's The Green Word: Selected Poems 1973-1992 which contains selections from her first several books. What I learned was that she was normal once and did write lyrical poetry at one time. And then came Furious which ripped off the niceties of Canadian poetry and lyricism was ejected like the booster portion of the rocket ship allowing her to escape earth's gravity and atmosphere and enter into the realm of theory which became the space from which she would henceforth write.

I also read a number of books and articles. One of the best articles regarding Mouré is that written by Jamie Dopp in the Spring, 1999 edition of Essays On Canadian Writing, 67, '"A field of potentialities": Reading Erin Mouré' which begins with the following:

One of the challenges in reading Erin Mouré is to find a suitable or at least a relatively noncontradictory procedure, a form of inter action that responds to the demands that Mouré (as a body of poetic texts, as a critic and theorist) makes on the reading subject. She is, after all, the poet famous - or infamous - for her resistance to "meaning", … who writes in "The Anti-Anaesthetic" that entry into "the Law" (of language, of society) "reduces anxiety in the organism" and that desire for this reduction is "deadly" (261).

and then continues in the second paragraph:

What is mainly discomforting about Mouré, I think, is her persistent and multifaceted challenge to authority: the authority of received codes of language, of the poet with the one voice, of the critic with the mastering discourse … Mouré's work teaches the importance of being as receptive as possible to discomfort, to its productive possibilities, as well as the importance of turning discomfort itself into a focus of critical inquiry (261).

In commenting on Mouré's poem 'Unfurled & Dressy', Marie Carriere, in 'Erin Mouré and the spirit of intersubjectivity', in the Spring, 2000 edition of Essays on Canadian Writing, 70, states:

The speaker expresses her desire (or imposes on her reader the authority of her own intent) which is to write these things … that can't be torn apart by anybody, anywhere, or in the university. I want the overall sound to be one of making sense, but I don't want the inside of the poem to make sense of anything. People who are making sense are just making me laugh, is all (68).

To which Dossy adds:

With this kind of practice, Mouré suggests, she seeks to "Make a fissure through which we can leak out from the Creal' that is sewn into us, to utter what could not be uttered in the previous structure" (263).

In 2002, Mouré was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for O Cidadán which was described by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, in 'three; why not be excessive' in their Poets Talk, at p. 43, as the last in the trilogy that began with Search Procedures (1996) and A Frame of the Book (1999). Mouré advises (in a recent exchange of emails) that "O Cadoiro is a part of a new series of works, the first of which was Little Theatres (2005). There will be a third book in that series, but I haven't written it yet, or am about to write it soon"

O Cadoiro is about translation. Let me repeat this: O Cadoiro is about translation. The phrase as stated is important. The book is not translation. It is 'about translation' and it is 'about' it in a visceral sense, not a logical, rational sense. You'll get the drift of that statement as I get more into the work itself. But, for the moment, let me turn back to the Erin Mouré interview in Poets Talk, specifically at p. 55 where Mouré states:

I want readers to come to the work and get what they can. If they miss things, then those things are not important for them. I want people to realize that it doesn't have to mean one fixed thing all the time. New readings make new attentional elements visible or audible. You can also just get pleasure out of reading the words and revelling in the play and echo of meanings.

This is exactly what you are going to experience in O Cadoiro, for O Cadoiro is a trip to the twilight zone of poetry. Let me caution you, brave reader. Do not enter O Cadoiro without beginning your reading at p. 133 titled in lieu of postscript where Mouré informs you that:

My crux or crossing: to lean into time's fissure to play with and resorb the language of lyric from a time when the poetry of Western Europe first broke free from ecclesiastical modes of praise and epic modes of heroic glory. The poems of the medieval Iberian songbooks written in Galician-Portuguese, set aside God and history to turn toward…another human.

You are then directed to the actual postscript which you will find on Anansi's website and where you will find this:

Reading is already ever a wandering and in Lisboa, Olispoa, port of Odysseus, I entered the cancioneiros. The "fingerprints" of these books, their inscription, their orthography, their graphemes, took hold of me; how I loved the movements and jointings of the lines

With Derrida's Mal d'archive and Foucault's Archéologie du savoir echoing in me, I let the poems' so-called secondary effects absorb me - the many aspects of the poems eliminated by modernizing transcribers who diverge and alter them in their effort to make "content," "regularities of form," the "author's intent" appear. I began to recognize that the idea of an "original" poem is ever-elusive, the original exceeds our grasp always.

It was in the second section of the book that I began to feel anger after reading: "O que me ocurreu paseando por Olispoa"(28) and then having the rest of the page written in what I assumed was Galician-Portuguese. And it was after reading "written upon an erasure rriam/written upon an erasure gran poder/eu ... sazon written upon an erasure" (72) that I began to visualize Mouré dressed in a form-fitting black leather bustier. But then, when I thought that I had finally come to the promised land of an actual translation "[B]y mine own self I know the power/Love has, over those it holds within its power./for it brings me such anguish just to live./for so much calls forth my desire." (92) only to find a 'ribbon' concealing the lower half that I walked away shaking my head. Only to stop abruptly and return realizing what Mouré had achieved.

She had taken a medieval objet d'art and translated it into a contemporary objet d'art and along the way I had become the voyeur watching her disassemble and assemble language and falling into the process of translation - a brilliant stratagem to make one appreciate and understand the nature of language while at the same time dethroning English as the pre-eminent one. I then went back to the book and saw that beauty that had been there only buried beneath the frustration and discomfort that Dopp had warned me to beware of now revealed once the frustration had given way to light.