Open Set: A Tree Anthology

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

This anthology marks the tenth anniversary of Ottawa’s Tree reading
series. As the editor explains in her note, “Tree has presented a vast
array of talent: celebrated authors, fine local writers, new voices, and
of course the wild cards.” This collection attempts to reflect that
range; consequently its 29 contributors follow no common pattern. There
is great poetic variety, with works differing widely in form, subject
matter, and quality.

A current poetic trend is prose poetry. Four of the writers here
represent the range of the genre: from lyric or meditational
observations, where poetic use of language pushes at the boundaries of
prose (and makes us wonder at times “why prose?”), to vignettes,
which are virtually short stories. Renata Macleod is the most
interesting of the four; her quirky humor has a surrealistic quality
reminiscent of Larsen’s The Far Side cartoons.

While there are other stylistically avant-garde pieces—concrete poems
and “discontinuous” compositions—most of the anthology is fairly
conventional, within the free-verse tradition. Inevitably in endeavors
such as Open Set, which introduce us to many new poets, only a few stand
out. Here, for example, Anne Acco writes intensely out of her Native
heritage: she could enhance her narrative and declamatory strength,
however, by learning from Marianne Bluger the power of the image:
“vivid roses / not mindless on the trellis.” Laurence Hutchman, too,
can arrest us with his words: “This is the moment, the resumption of
music / when the moon parts her curtain, / and logic is a fence /
following the slope of hills.”

There are some good things, then, among a lot of ephemera. Rather like
a reading series, perhaps.