Search Procedures

Eugenia Sojka teaches English at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Although a feast for those who relish language-focused texts, Erin
Mouré’s collection of poems may appear difficult and enigmatic to
readers who are accustomed to traditional expressive writing.

As the book’s title suggests, Mouré is concerned not with
prescriptive writing but with writing as a process of discovery, of
finding a form through a dialogue with language itself as well as with
multiple genres and modes of writing. Mouré aims to “unsettle some of
the readers’ predispositions.” In several poems, traditional
language structures disintegrate (“Memory

Penitence/Contamination Eglise”). Others exper-iment with type, font
(“The Purpose of Skin”), and spacing. Some of the poems are
multilingual (“Search Procedures, or Lake This”).

The visual character of Mouré’s writing, reflective of her interest
in the synesthetic qualities of language, is strengthened by the
inclusion of drawings and various graphic signs (“Dream of the
Towns,” “The Little Smoky Rivers,” “Search Procedures”).
Alphabetic writing that induces standardized, desensualized reading is
discarded in favor of the picto-ideo-phono-graphic features of language.
Like other language-focused writers, Mouré believes that political
structures are informed and supported by particular verbal structures
that, when questioned and dismantled, open a space for social
transformation.

Mouré is one of the most interesting and intellectually demanding
avant-garde writers working in Canada today.