Dancing Visions

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

Dancing Visions is a rather unwieldy anthology of 37 poets who have published poetry with Thistledown Press at some point in its ten-year history. The collection, compiled by Allan Fannie and Patrick O’Rourke, therefore celebratively marks an anniversary. Given this rather arbitrary premise, the results are perhaps predictable. The entire spectrum of poetic possibilities seems to be present in one form or another: from excessive epithet (Don Polson’s “spilling plenteous seed upon the cool earth”) and “right” or rather “progressive” sentiments (such as Monty Reid on “Amnesty International”) to the genuine authority of voice present in Patrick Lane’s verse or in the delightfully Donneian compounding of sex and insect bite in Dennis Cooley’s “The Mosquitoe.” In other words, everything is here, bad, middling, and good: the clichés of Dillow’s “Winter Walking,” witty insight inflated into a poem (by Jim Green, or in J.D. Fry’s “The First Crocuses”), or the surprisingly sharp edges of Leona Gom’s outwardly tame and domestic subjects (“Aprons,” “Separations”). Perhaps it is that sudden highlighting of a distinctive voice and style that marks the value of anthologies. The reader begins to prize discipline, restraint, invention, and intelligence when he encounters them, and he values the poets who exhibit such qualities (feeling himself their discoverer); he also begins to scorn in secret the trite, false, pretentious, or tediously minimalist style practised by so many others. Reading a book like Dancing Visions represents an opportunity to educate one’s poetic sensibility, and on that basis, it is enjoyable.