The Real Made Up.

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Stephen Brockwell’s The Real Made Up is a concept-driven work. He has worked in information technology, and it is natural that he likes to use tape recorded dialogue and voice recognition software in some of these poems. He also employed coin tosses to select words from the Oxford Canadian Dictionary—words used as a basis for some of the poems.

Much of the work is presented as monologues by invented characters: among them, the hunter, Bill McGillivray; the self-styled redneck, Mark Bradley; and the photography buff, Joanne. The characters reveal themselves, but these are not monologues by Robert Browning. Least interesting is Karikura, a kind of poor man’s Yoda whose wisdom barely rises above village-idiot level. The limitation of many of the poems is their extensive mimicry of banal speech. He does it very well, but the results are still banal, though sometimes elements of humour or pathos in the stories make them worth reading.

The best poem is the long and pungent description of making wild grape wine following Al Purdy’s methods: the poem is really about Purdy’s idiosyncratic poetry. The French describe the unique qualities of a vineyard—bestowed by soil and climate—as a terroir. Brockwell understands Purdy’s terroir very well. The poem is handcrafted, very tasty vin de pays.