sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Literary Criticism
November 2001
224 pages
ISBN 0-88984-226-4
$22.95
Facsimiles of Time
Eric Ormsby
Eric Ormsby is a poet who writes prose that is both graceful and hard-headed.
With an outspoken contempt for cant and literary persiflage,
Ormsby ranges over a surprising array of writers and literatures.
Each essay involves a new and sometimes startling viewpoint, whether on Hart
Crane's homosexuality and its effect on his poems or the
strange and twisted,
yet redeeming, place which Shakespeare held in his own family history. From
American and Canadian poetry to Classical Arabic literature
Ormsby brings a fresh slant and incisive
expression to his prose.
What was Franz Kafka doing at a ski resort in the last years of his life
and what did he do there besides tobogganing? Everyone knows that Jorge Luis Borges
was bookish, but did you know he was bloodthirsty as well?
How is Pat Lowther's posthumous reputation as a poet connected
with the brutal circumstances of her murder? These and other mysteries
are explored in the 17 elegant essays that make up Eric Ormby's new book.
`From the heights of a sand dune in the desert to the achievements of
Hart Crane and the minutae of a letter by Marianne Moore, Ormsby presents
us with a world that is always fresh, and continually fascinating.' `Most of these essays are really book reviews, by they are hardly
standard newspaper fare: they are long and intellectually robust pieces,
most of which originally appeared in The New Criterion. Nevertheless,
their primary purpose is evaluative, and as such they often reveal more
about a particular edition or translator than they do about the writers
who are their ostensible subjects. The finest piece in Facsimiles of
Time, though, is more personal than scholarly: "The Place of
Shakespeare in a House of Pain," an unforgettable memoir of Ormsby's
childhood in a dysfunctional Florida matriarchy, in which memorization
of Shakespeare's works was considered a prime social duty. The Bard's
language entered the daily speech of the family, and vitriolic arguments
were peppered with cutting tags from the plays. This bizarre marriage of
language and family goes a long way toward explaining the remarkable
qualities of Ormsby's poetry, but it also makes for a fantastic
conclusion to this fascinating and rigorously intelligent collection.' `Always, with Ormsby, things come down to the primacy of the word -- the
sounds which shape and give ultimate authority. This is refreshing. It's
sophisticated yet not done in a complex or over-technical way. It helps
to eliminate the general and abstract at the same time as it shows the
way such things can and do transform the ordinary into something
greater, more permanent, able, through the shaping, to encompass and
embody experience. It's admirable criticism and scholarship, certainly,
but with the added dimensions of a poet's working knowledge, of fluent
multilingual abilities, and a determined search for the almost
sacramental autonomy of word and form. It's a heady brew.' `Ormsby is one of the most talented poets writing in the English
language at this time - that is to say, not one of the hundreds of
fine poets writing, or one of the finest Canadian poets - but one of a
handful of the best meditative poets writing in the English language.' `[Ormsby] is a most excellent poet, resonant and delicately
exact with words and objects. Ormsby's reverent attention to things
as they are lights up every page with a glow.' `... his poems afford the rare pleasure of listening to a polished
yet deeply humane sensibility respond, in language of exhilarating
verve, to whatever it seizes on or despairs of.'
-- Ian Ferrier, Montreal Review of Books
--Jack Illingworth, amazon.ca
-- Chris Wiseman, Books in Canada
-- Norman Doidge, Books in Canada
-- John Updike
-- Ben Downing, The New Criterion
