sewn paper
POETRY / Canadian
October 2006
96 pages
ISBN 0-88984-277-9
EAN 978-0-88984-277-9
$16.95

e-mail the Author

Search by Title

Search by Author

Alumni

To order

Order Direct

Black Velvet Elvis

J. D. Black

The King himself puts in a cameo appearance at a rural Quebec Gas-Bar de la Nuit where the glowing ends of several dozen cigarettes counterpoint an urgent bass line to the syncopated doo-wap of several tens of thousands of fireflies.


In this brilliant and unusual first book of poems, J. D. Black salutes The King not only with the occasional electric guitar but with stranger and more delicate melodies as well, a few strummed out on the dulcimer, others twanged along the nerves. Black reveals himself as a master of difficult forms extending from rondeaux and villanelles to mischievous haiku. But it would be mistaken to see him merely as a skilled traditionalist. Amid the high polish of the poems rough surprises abound. The menacing redneck Len surfaces in several `vignettes', his beery but robust visage scarcely contained by the strict sonnets through which he elbows. In these sly poems, Len, resplendent in his white Cadillac or cursing the `sumbitch stepdaddy' of his squeeze, contrasts sharply with the sad diminished figure of Elvis, moping in a Quebec `Gas-Bar de la Nuit'. Black moves expertly from witty light verse to elegies as graceful as they are moving. In `Last Train Out' the sense of loss of a Holocaust survivor is evoked through an abandoned stamp album. In `Canis Lupus', the wolf hidden inside the dog is unleashed. This is a dazzling collection of superb craft and subtle mischief by a poet whose work has for too long remained a private delight.


The King grins down from the gas station wall,
benignant presence over the cash register
blessing villagers and passing travellers
through cracked, grime-mottled, grease-streaked glass.

With this, his title poem, J. D. Black sets the tone, often ironic but never cynical, in this remarkable collection. In a broad range of topics, styles, and forms, all handled with impressive skill, Black explores facets of life ranging from the natural world, to human nature. Using forms, both lyrical and narrative, and approaches both idealistic and brutally realistic, he reflects life in all its manifestations. What is particularly gratifying, because it is so rare in poetry collections, is the clarity, the accessibility of Black's poems. The subtlety, the brilliance, lies in the astonishing insights and the conviction of truth to reality which inform every poem. The reader's reaction to each is, `Yes, right, that's exactly the way it is.' This conformance with reality is abetted by his very effective use of rhyme and metre, unfortunately rare commodities in modern verse.

In the title poem, he blends wry social comment with biography, and myth, all informed by a melancholy sense of failure and loss. A series of `Vignettes of Len', snapshots of a squalid thug contrast dramatically with a lovely testament to the onset of Spring, and with a haunting elegy to a disappearing god of the forest, the wolf. The dark humour of a hapless factory worker losing an arm to the machine is followed by a description of stew, so vivid that one can taste it. And a Venetian glass-blower anticipating cuckoldry. And a Good Friday poem of Judas. This collection is truly dazzling in its range and uniform excellence. It signals the arrival on the literary scene of a formidable talent.

 



A native Montrealer, J. D. Black came late to poetry -- so late his juvenalia might be seen as the product of his second childhood. Someone has said that a poet's early works are about other poetry and the later works about the early works. Given his first influences -- Johnny Jellybean, Miss Ellen of Romper Room, Sarah Binks and Adrian Mole's Baz -- and his abysmal ignorance of contemporary developments, there may be some reservations about his later production. After stints as a railway service worker, heavy equipment operator and golf-course greenskeeper (among other things), he settled on a career working in libraries, where his attempts to absorb literature by osmosis have proved fruitless. He is currently honing his poetic technique so that he may attempt country-and-western and Broadway lyrics.
 

PQL Home   |    To Order   |    Order Direct   |    Search by Author   |    Search by Title

Contents © 2006 The Porcupine's Quill, Inc. - Updated: 19 August 2007 by Tim Inkster
The Porcupine's Quill, 68 Main Street, Erin, Ontario CANADA N0B 1T0
Telephone (519) 833-9158   Fax (519) 833-9845  e-mail pql@sentex.net

The Porcupine's Quill would like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council
and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The financial support
of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)
is also gratefully acknowledged. Thanks, also, to the Government of Ontario
through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Publisher's Tax Credit
(OBPTC) programme and the Ontario Book Initiative.

The Porcupine's Quill is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production
of our books is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village.

We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid.
The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.