Scoptocratic

Shannon Hengen is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

The title describes government or rule by looking. Not surprisingly,
visual imagery pervades in these proselike poems, and an obvious debt to
film techniques and theory is evident in sections titled “Unrealized
Scenarios: Treatment for a Film Script” and “Cine Poem.” At the
heart of the narrative is a love triangle of shifting contours,
certainly illicit and probably involving a daughter seeing her father
“in the company of a lady.”

Shaw, a member of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver and a
visual artist, favors language play and aural as well as visual imagery.
In “Close to Naked,” the language play recommends that the poem be
spoken rather than read: “She wondered an inrage of outroar. An
apparent orphan. A blouse, abuse, a pose, aroused, something on
paper.” Earlier in the same poem, however, obscurity overtakes
playfulness and renders the lines inscrutable: “He is to french. Just
[a]s a rolled futon is a sleep cache.”

The author is nevertheless capable of producing simple and efficient
aural imagery, as in “Opening Shot”: “Two men sit drinking
martinis. The music stops at some heightened moment, the clink of the
glasses and simultaneous sips. ... Other shots can include shimmering
glasses, drags of cigarettes ... laughter.” But obscurity is more
often the rule than the exception. Informed by psychoanalytic theory,
the complex narrative takes on aspects of a kind of talking cure, which
to the reader seems as impenetrable as a dream.