sewn paper
e-mail the Poet
March 2005
96 pages
ISBN 0-88984-263-9
$14.95
Hot Poppies
Leon Rooke`Everything from her mouth / I wrote down in a blue book.'
So begins Hot Poppies, a collection of poems by Leon
Rooke, that grand master of the vocal jag and lyrical
roar. Those who know Rooke's fiction -- the Governor
General's award-winning novel Shakespeare's Dog,
for example -- will expect his first published poems
to be rife with surreal flourishes, blazing language,
sex, death, dogs and justice. All of these things are
to be found in this blue book. So are Jasper Johns, (Lord) B,
Princess Di, Lassie, Mahalia Jackson and John Cage.
Hot Poppies is a riotous, extravagant
book, fresh from the hot-house, but it is also seductive and subversive. Five-line
love lyrics, full of epigrammatic spark, intersperse
vitriolic satires on American electoral antics. Britney Spears
goes to war with the squirrels, `hefty as flying
raccoons,' and James Tate's condemned man talks hurricanes
and death row dinners with his warden. Rooke writes poetry with the glitter-seeking
eye of a magpie, discovering unsettling beauties in his
hoard of cultural detritus and post-millennial dread.
`These unexpected poems, from fiction-master Leon Rooke,
are full of swerves and rages, sudden stillnesses and the grit
of real compassion. Their colloquialism rearranges
your mind. Both love and anger have hope at their heart; among
other things, these poems want to waken that
hope.' `If you are a fan of Rooke's fiction, you'll likely
enjoy his poetry. Much as Don Coles seemed to spring
fully formed into the late genius of a life-long novelist,
Rooke has arrived with a ``first'' book of uncommon skill and voice. ... Hot
Poppies is a very impressive debut.' `Don't suspend disbelief. Don't arrest it, curtail it, or
unfrock it. Disbelief is in the fine print scratched at
the bottom of Leon Rooke's literary contract. ... If
we relinquish anything
to read Rooke, it should be sobriety.' `Rooke's language is a riotous, tumultuous force of nature.' `Frugal. Parsimonious. Tight. Meagre. In one sense
or another all of these words suggest the opposite
of generous. None apply to the writing or the comportment of Leon Rooke.' `He's a writer with a black belt in portraying the small
daily tragedies that break bones and leave no
visible wounds.' `Rooke's voice is that of a Southern Gothic storyteller
(he was born and raised in North Carolina) sucking on a
postmodern lozenge. He is not a writer who has worked to
recreate his surroundings or his youth, but rather has
roamed widely through social classes, literary forms,
and imaginative spaces.'
-- Anne Michaels
-- George Murray, the Globe and Mail
-- Quill and Quire
-- Publishers Weekly
-- Harry Vandervlist, FFWD (Calgary)
-- Russell Banks
-- Nathan Whitlock, Quill and Quire
