Learning to Breathe

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

This volume of poems has three sections: “Another Hansel and Gretel
Story,” with an emphasis on the disturbing sexual fantasies of
children; “The World According to Reuter,” with an emphasis on
brutality and torture in various nations (chiefly Third World); and
“The Rule of Gravity,” which begins with a series of poems about the
Clifford Olson killings and concludes at a more homely level, with the
author writing about his wife and children and his life in Vancouver.

As is evident, the author (in common with many of humankind) is drawn
to the darker side of life, to violence and torture—and, I would
guess, more out of morbid fascination than any stirrings of social
conscience, although from the poems it is hard to tell. All of which has
nothing to do with the merit of the poetry, and Stevenson is a very
talented poet indeed. In choosing the right words, he has a precise
command of language, and if his themes tend to be inherently dramatic,
he approaches them from a revealing, often ironic perspective. Writing
of skulls in “The Killing Fields of Uganda”: “So white we can pick
them up / like seashells on a pleasant beach at home, / or hold them by
their hollow orbits / and admire them like objets d’art— //
expensive vases, say. Even admire / their heft and weight the way / we
admire a new bowling ball, / the way it travels down a lane.” Not
exactly pretty imagery (or not in context), but certainly powerful.