Continuations

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

Continuations is a collaboration between two accomplished poets that
began in November 2000 with each poet “[c]omposing alternating
six-line passages on a nearly daily basis.” Each of the book’s 25
chapters contains between 18 and 23 of these six-line stanzas.

The untitled chapters and the six-line stanzas are organized
intuitively and associatively. The tenuous unity of these lines,
stanzas, and chapters is skilfully forged through careful attention to
sound, diction, juxtaposition of words, line breaks, and layout. For
example, in Chapter 3, the poets write: “‘sunday in the park’
while george / painted (out) the land’s scape / escaping land into
oil’s whims / wanting or waiting upon / vision’s vindication / to
play toward what’s seen as scene … how brightly oil’s pall /
denotes punk beauty / as a young saint sin(g)s a loud.” Chapter 10
contains the lines, “slippery as the brush lifted / from bare canvas
as Monte / Ste-Victoire lifts / across not off the surface / tension of
the eye / s knowledge of blue bluing further.”

In Continuations, Barbour and Murphy have successfully forged a
cohesive style with which to express their diverse interests and
perspectives.