Cruise Control: A Theogony

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

Ken Howe has a knack for finding just the right word, but always one
I’ve never heard before. He does it first in the subtitle of this
collection: a theogony is an account of the genealogy of the gods. I
hesitate to accuse him of showing off, however, because the words he
chooses are usually both apt and evocative. Also, he can spin a metaphor
just as easily without fancy multi-syllabics, as when two houses
“posture like bashful sumo wrestlers.”

Many of the poems are about driving and highways and the places
connected by highways, but they are also about larger meanings of time
and space. Windsor is “an alien vocabulary lost inside a dialect
outstripping the mother tongue” (evoking Churchill’s “riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”), and the road itself builds
“toward plenitude in its one dimension.” In the section called
“Stations of the Highway,” the poems mimic the Christian structure
of reading, exhortation, and prayer, but again on the secular subjects
of time and distance passing, and with quotations from Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road.

Not all the poems in the book take inspiration from the road most
traveled, but they are the strongest in an already strong collection.