Cruelty to Fabulous Animals

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Gary Barwin offers experimental fare in this collection of poetry and
prose-poems. Traditionalists should look elsewhere. Here is a different
territory, a surrealist dreamtime. “st catharines ontario is a city of
gods,” he says, or “you were sitting on the lost beaches of the
english language.” But is this absurd new world as stuffy in its
refusal to punctuate as the actual tyranny of a semicolon? Images come
fast, with the jumble of a kaleidoscope, and the reader either submits
to the chaos, rolling with the flow, or gives up: “the nucleus is like
a fist. this is the trombone. the spit valve. like an oyster. the hairs
over his lip. forty-five indians, children’s teepees. not a list.”
Quixotic and disjointed words and concepts blur the thin line between
insanity, with its absence of order, and genius, with its ordered
absence. “my soul is a red fire wrapped in the olive flesh ... all
around me I hear a faint music as of stars ascending in a universe of
gin.” With such abandon, it seems unnecessary to wonder about the
spelling in a question from a waiter in Bermuda, “would sir care to
see our desert trolly?” With a strong musical background, Barwin has
been described as being a performer as well as a poet. Quite possibly
these sound poems need to be read aloud to be best appreciated.