Catherine Owen

I am a poet/essayist who has published in Canadian and International magazines like The Fiddlehead, ARC, and The Salzburg Review. I have eight books to my credit, the latest from presses such as Wolsak and Wynn, Anvil and Mansfield. My work has been nominated for the Gerald Lampert, BC Book Prize and CBC Literary awards. Since obtaining my Masters degree in English in 2001, I've tutored, edited and freelance written for a range of diverse contracts, including the magazines Alternative Trends and Walking Canvas. Along with all the Reading & Writing topics, my interests include tattooing, dance, modern art, classical/metal music, medieval history, photography, mental health, reproductive and drug issues, as well as travel, birds and other environmental concerns.

A Review of An ABC of Belly Work by Peter Richardson

Peter Richardson’s second collection of poems rides a baggage-car across the terrain of fatherhood, history, nature’s tenacity and even the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Whether or not the subject matter grips you, however, you’ll still, as with the poems of Ken Babstock or Mark Cochrane, experience a re-invigoration of language and its often-neglected music. The first half of the book steers strongly through a disconnected farrago of twentieth century landscapes. In the title poem, Richardson describes a scene at Mirabel Airport in 1980 featuring the “German Sixth Army” who “saw pianos burning in plazas/now watching an animated desert bird/as hail raps our windowsills in June.” The incongruities erupting from both temporal and seasonal shifts are finely and disturbingly detailed. His most lucid pieces emerge from his explorations of late-in-life fatherhood. In “Coracle” he unflinchingly records the sight of his daughter’s placenta “roiling out in a prolonged dollop…the veined nubbled pup tent,” while in “Packet” his account of rocking his child to sleep resonates due to the eloquent words Richardson has selected to convey an infant’s ominous fragility – “I hold her there a while/cantilevered over the parquetry/abeyant.” Only his tendency to stretch metaphors to the absurd, as in his comparison, in the same poem, of his daughter to a “drunk,” settling into the company of men “at long trestle tables/at a snowy railhead whose hostelries/teem with pale camp courtesans” weakens the initial gasp of the image.

The pieces that attend to the small, generally unacknowledged damages to the natural world are also potent. “Siberian Elms Below the Metropolitain Autoroute” awakens one to urbanity’s effect on trees whose twigs are “shiny with busted car-stereo tapes.” Another piece, “From the Suburban Book of Sightings,” recounts the lengths a city dweller must go when “living beside a highway” to witness that rare “red-crested insectivore/whose body clambers sideways.” Richardson’s poems are frequently limned with a subtle humour that proves effective in the juxtaposition of his conversation about misrouted suitcases and the exigencies of a vasectomy in “Standby,” but can fall off the conveyer belt in such doggerel-style rhymes as when in “That Summer,” the cushions that are “worse/for wear looked as though/an elephant had sat there.” Often the poems, especially in the occasionally abstract second half of the book with its historical scenarios and de-contextualized lineages, felt as if they were on the verge of greater revelation but shied away, their endings limping in the descriptive instead of the epiphanic. Yet Richardson’s obvious ear for the textures and timbres of language, whether in using daring Dennis Lee- type words such as “kerflooeyed” or “lollygagging,” or in one of the last pieces, “He Considers Protected Witnesses” which carves clear, uncluttered imperatives: “I’ll take the steady twilight of Chez Bebert…I’ll stick to my one-room sublet by a railyard,” makes “An ABC of Belly Work” settle deep in the gut from its runway rich with sounds.