Where the Rain Ends

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

This book is a title in Thistledown Press’s “New Leaf Editions,”
which publishes first books by emerging authors. The volume’s
offerings are largely prose poems, but I’d prefer to call them
vignettes, or tableaus, or narrative scenes. Klebeck is a Prairie farmer
and a storyteller; he is attracted more by the occasions of life than by
the words that embody them.

The pieces, which clearly have an autobiographical element, span the
period from childhood to parenthood. They use humor, pathos, tragedy,
and irony—from getting caught smoking to side-road sex; from
bush-league hockey to bar brawling; from unemployment-induced crime to
accidental death. Most readers, especially those raised on farms or in
small towns, will recognize their younger selves somewhere in this
collection.

In its often fond, but unsentimentalized, depiction of people working,
playing, fighting, and loving, Klebeck’s work shares a family
resemblance with the poems of Stephen Scriver, especially his wonderful
1980 collection of hockey poems, All Star Poet. The lyrics of
country-folk artist Fred J. Eaglesmith also come to mind.

Thankfully, Klebeck’s vignettes avoid the pretentiousness of much
prose poetry, where the object is, it seems to be as poetically obscure
as prose conventions allow. Yet, his strength being prose, Klebeck’s
persistant avoidance of punctuation becomes irritating, because it
impedes our engagement with the vignette. Perhaps the lack of
punctuation enhances a few pieces, but in most cases conventional
punctuation would allow us to direct our attention more completely to
his subject.