The Stars as Seen from This Particular Angle of Night: An Anthology of Speculative Verse

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Boasting a foreword, an introduction, a preface by Phyllis Gotlieb, and
an afterword by James Morrow, The Stars as Seen from this Particular
Angle of Night asserts the importance of both speculative verse and the
examples to be found in its pages. There are some fine, delightful, and
intriguing poems here, but it’s perhaps too easy to claim too much for
them. Although generally a Canadian production, the anthology includes
poems from Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and the United
States—poems that travel all over the maps of science fiction,
fantasy, and horror. If there is a problem, it’s that many of the
poems don’t do much more with the tropes of these genres than
concentrate them, most often by doing little more than alluding to the
narratives from which they emerge.

Many of the poems strike me as too ordinary in their language, not
making the strange at all, let alone defamiliarizing the familiar as
poetry itself is supposed to do. Editor Sandra Kasturi says she
“wanted to show that poetry itself can be easily accessible and still
multi-layered,” and on the whole the works gathered here achieve the
former if not always the latter. Some of the best ones, like Gotlieb’s
“ms & mr frankenstein” or John Tranter’s darkly witty “The
Creature from the Black Lagoon,” play off well-known stories or films.

As an introduction to speculative verse and an entertainingly diverse
set of examples of it, The Stars as Seen from this Particular Angle of
Night will prove useful in school and other libraries. It should also
please science fiction fans, who will find enough mystery, other worlds,
and fantastic possibilities to start a thousand novels.