Breath Dances Between Them

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

M.T. Kelly’s first book of stories will not surprise regular readers
of his work. In part, this is because three of these 10 tales are
excerpts from his 1980 novel The More Loving One. Yet it is also because
these stories encompass his usual, vital concerns: the North, Canada’s
Natives, urban North America, and the sex war.

It is clear that Kelly wishes to be Canada’s most poetic prose
stylist since Clark Blaise. He is only partially successful. True, only
a jaded reader could fail to be charmed by “Below, the lake rippled.
Light blew in sheets” and “Translucent chips of dry skin clung to
her lips, and her breath was dry, sulphurous as her tongue.”
Sometimes, however, the writing seems strained (“Talking, the
exaggeration, made it something that couldn’t happen to them, like two
menopausal women meeting and sharing the fact of someone else’s cancer
on a bus”) and peculiar (“His smile was amused, almost pathetic with
secrecy”). Each story also suffers from a certain thinness. Still,
Kelly’s collection should be read, if only for such sentences as
“Breath danced between them like wind over the earth, and they were
safe and happy, all the way to the Arctic Sea.”