Awash in Detail

The Antigonish Review is a literary journal supported by St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Within the pages of the Winter 2010 edition of this eclectic Canadian journal the curious reader will find the work of 23 poets along with six short stories, four book reviews, a translation, and an essay on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. The vast majority of the contributors are Canadian.

Co-editors Gerald Trites and Jeanette Lyons, along with the rest of the editorial staff, deserve a nod for selecting and arranging the contents of Number 160 in a thoughtful manner. The first piece is a poem by David Day that slyly lures the reader into journal. “La Mare Aux Songes” is a poem littered with references: Alexander, Ozymandias, Pagliacci, et cetera, but at its core is a poem pondering humanity’s legacy. It opens with a poignant epigraph, “Dodo—Extinct 1680/ Raphus cucullatus—Mauritius” and contains lines like, “It is impossible to stave off thoughts/ Of our own eventual eclipse/ How will we be seen: tragic or comic?/ Hubristic or an evolutionary mistake?” Based on the language and imagery of the poem, it could go either way. Humans must dig for bones to see the Dodo, yet the extinct bird and the human skeleton found near it bear foolish, enigmatic grins.

Carrie Shipper’s poem exemplifies one of the strengths of many of the pieces found in The Antigonish Review: a dexterous attention to detail. In this case, it’s paid to language. Her mouthful of a poem, “Elizabeth King Explains Why Pupil, Her One-Half Life-Size Sculpture, Is a Self-Portrait,” is heavy on alliteration (“To disarm unease, deconstruct/ dismay.”) which makes it flow and begs to be read aloud. This smoothness is fitting given the poem deals with a sculpture in relation the artist’s own self-image.

Taking a decidedly different, but still extremely detailed, approach is Warren Heiti in his prose poem “Tennessee Waltz.” In it Heiti brings characters from Greek mythology into the American South. The imagery is beautifully delicate, especially in his description of Agriope (Eurydice): "Agriope wears a hay-coloured cotton dress and an abalone bracelet. The/ summer has scattered freckles on her cheeks./ She clasps Orpheus’ hand/ as she would a dragonfly, carefully."

Heiti’s descriptions are aesthetically pleasing, yes, but they are also the driving force of the poem, the harbingers of contemplation. It’s difficult to not read something like “She feels her heart, the arm of her heart in/ her arm, the hand of her heart in his hand” over and over again. It is also through his descriptions that Heiti is able transport the mythical characters into a completely different world, suggesting, perhaps, that we are not as separate from Myth as we might imagine.

The first of the fiction pieces, Tellmond Richter’s “New Zealand Trip,” is a character study above anything else. Nothing really “happens” in the typical sense, but that isn’t to say the story is flat or boring. On the contrary, Richter’s portrayal of Smith, his everyman protagonist, is what makes the story interesting. Besides having a generic name, Smith also has a generic job. The story follows the life insurance salesman as he nervously awaits his trip to New Zealand, a trip he won at work. That Smith doesn’t like his job is made plainly obvious by the tone, “While listening to prospects telling him to get lost or drop dead, he looked at pictures, visualized himself on the Milford Trek.”

Smith has a similar dysfunctional relationship with his wife, with whom he doesn’t seem to fit, “whatever turned him on turned her off.” He is unhappy with their sex life and half-heartedly follows her along the church despite misgivings and derision. Despite his anxiety regarding his trip and his lack of expectation in “getting lucky,” he and his wife do make love and the story closes with Smith entering a peaceful sleep.