Dog Sleeps: Irritated Text

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

Monty Reid has impressive credentials—a 1994 Governor General’s
Literary Award nomination and 11 books—but his latest effort, neither
poetry nor prose, is not very accessible to the average reader.

Five separate chronicles begin with an existential vision of the static
life called “Against Travel.” Reid is more successful when he leaves
this anguish to ponder humankind’s relationship to the landscape in
“Writing on Stone,” and, drawing on his background in palaeontology,
creates some spectacular imagery: “the discoloured rock, salts
leaching out of it, a crystalline fuzz along its vertical fractures,
water percolating self-consciously through a monument it has created for
itself.”

“Blizzard Walks,” with its skewed haiku/abstract/couplet effect, is
the most boldly poetic contribution. The title story focuses on a dog
who nibbles women’s underpants, until it dies of a debilitating
disease. The final story, whimsically titled “Last Time I Talked to a
Major American Poet,” portrays the scatological angst of collecting a
toothbrush that has been flushed down a toilet. Reid wields a mean
metaphor, but somehow his talents seem misdirected in this work.