Rose DeShaw » Reviews

WHY FAMILY MATTERS (According to Bronson Alcott, his daughter – and me)

Rose — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:46:15 +0000

Just finished, ‘Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott & Her Father,” by John Matteson. At first I was suspicious. The book is footnoted and I suspected it of academia (oh cursed word) but it turned out to be simply scholarly, objective and a great quoter of their work by someone with a close knowledge of who they were.
Thoreau was Louisa’s teacher, Alcott’s friend and lived in their future house on Main Street in Concord. Dabbling with the Transcendentalists has been one of my life areas. Matteson’s take on Fruitlands and the struggle to understand Nature between Father & Daughter bears some resemblance to mine with my father. From start to finish ‘Eden’s Outcasts’ is as engrossing as a good novel. I couldn’t put it down.
This is a picture of my grandmother after whom I am named and her sister, Great Aunt Sarah (Niece Sarah, are you seeing your namesake?). The two old ladies who came as teenagers to the Bellingham Washington area over the mountains in a covered wagon from Kentucky, squabbling with their mother all the way. Dunlaps, they were in those days, mother’s side of the family, believers in every omen and superstition that came down the pike.
I suspect Sarah of chin hairs if not actively sitting for the original witch masks of Halloween while her sister, Roseltha Dunlap Bouck has that ‘don’t-hit-me-I’m-harmless’ smile which she always used just prior to zapping you with a zinger!
But they are family and I’ve just finished reading a compelling tract on how that works out in the long run.

LIBBY PURVES! Understands women feeling trapped

Rose — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:04:43 +0000

Despite one book being unfortunately PINK, Purves lets you into how women feel in mid-family raising. In these novels you’ll get it too. (Free Woman, Casting Off). She shows you how a family operates, what can tear it down, build it up. A modern Dickens but not as long-winded, Purves KNOWS who these women are.

Census articles, this week, give us 63 categories of family by income. Purves takes a more human, colourful, compelling approach.

GOOD BOOKS IN THE HEAT WAVE – A.Lee Martinez!

Rose — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:10:03 +0000

You know I’m a retired bookseller, sometime prison librarian, writer and general raver when I find a writer that does it? I’m fussy and discriminating, not into the F– word being thrown around as an excuse for abandoning excellent writing. I’VE GOT STANDARDS!

Which is where A. Lee Martinez comes in. Whatta dream! He’s holding up well, halfway through Ogres for the next two days when I really, physically need some decent writing to get through work, during the slow bits when everyone’s sitting around waiting and nobody is coming through the door.

Lee’s got monsters nailed down tight, the real scoop on ogres, orcs, vampires, Werewolves, Dwarfs, elves – the entire supernatural rhealm, sure there are physically disgusting bits but whatta bunch of page turners! He’s one of those writers where you keep reading bits out to your significant other or going up to quasi-acquaintances, clutching their sleeves and saying, ‘Lookit THIS!”

Just finished his first, Gil’s All Fright Diner and hoping the characters come back for a sequel. The library has sent me four more, enough for a couple weeks, I hope. Thank heavens he hasn’t stopped writing.

If you’ve got a good book at the end of the day, you can stand anything, Wodehouse said. HOORAY FOR A. LEE MARTINEZ!!
* * *

NOTE ON THE HEAT WAVE -Have you noticed how often discourse tends to throw up song lines? Especially when discussing the weather. I’ll bet all our good classic weather songs stemmed from something somebody said when a lyricist was mulling over some tunes:

“IT’S TOO DARN HOT!’ from Kiss Me Kate, “AIN’T IT AWFUL THE HEAT?” from Brecht, “WE’RE HAVING A HEAT WAVE” from No Business Like Show Business. Which leads me to think the songs that last the longest tend to come from everyday talk. Everywhere you can hear song lyrics from regular people who do not know that their words sing.

Outdoor Artist Bling – Chris Dawber

Rose — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:49:17 +0000

Curly-haired artist, Chris Dawber, has finally gone public with a series of twelve paintings that echo him all over. From his Bear & Jackal Studio outside Kingston, Ontario, Canada, they are compelling themes from his dreams.
A list of the paintings: Sandcranes, Southwest, Sris-Crow, Algonquin Shore, Artic Spring, Fossils, Grandfathers, Gull, Interpretations, Trickster & The Ancestor and Runoff.
‘Interpretations’ make you think Chris must’ve collaborated with Dan Brown. Religious imagery in what seems to be inscribed in solid gold; mystical and many-faceted, this is the sort of work you expect o see under glass with a guard. It has a worshipful air.
‘Grandfathers’ is a stand of tall birches, fencelike at sunset, but never still. Memory is imbedded in them with a certain peace.
‘Sris-Crow’ mates with his ‘Trickster & The Ancestor’ two deeply-moving works bursting with story and metaphor.
‘Fossils’ has a glow as though they were waking from a deep, jewled sleep.
‘Run-off’ feels as though Chris sat down on a riverbank in the cold spring and got his brush out.
‘Gull’ soars, birds from a brush seem to be a specialty here. Flight seems a simple thing here, possible destiny.
‘Sand-cranes’ is my favorite right now. Like stained glass set in waning light, this jeweled imagining is the sort of picture you hope you might someday see.
‘Southwest’ has a true aridity, all the colours true.
‘Algonquin Shore’ gets that fabled area right with the first brushstroke.
‘Arctic Spring’ feels like breakup.
Chris’s work has jewels, glass, found objects, natural history in glint and glimmer. His love for the outdoors is obvious in his attention to the small details of natural life.
This is Dawber’s first time showing his work online. His work speaks to me on many levels. I’m a BIG fan!

12 Days Of Catmus by Flora Jo – Reviewed here

Rose — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:20:12 +0000

Inspired by Erin Hunter

On the first day of cat-mus my mate gave to me

A kit mother sitting in her cave…

12 leader s dying

11 deputies hunting

10 medicine cats healing

9 warriors wounded

8 apprentices eating

7 queens-a-nursing

6 kits-a-feeding

5 elders

4 stone-tellers

3 prey-hunters

2 cave-guards

And a kit-mother sitting in her cave

REVIEW – Rose DeShaw

Flora Jo is a young Metis poet, presently in elementary school. She knows cats, how the mother cat sits and surmises, how she tends her kits. Flora Jo was seeking an update from the traditional English Lords & Ladies jumping about, along with all the now-irrelevant others in Flora Jo’s urban experience. Carefully observing the rhythm of the song, she adds from her own experience, those who people her mind and life.

Fresh images these. The stone-tellers are her own but vivid in their naming. The prey hunters freshen an image we thought we knew. The wounded warriors, the dying leaders speak of a wisdom way beyond Flora Jo’s years on earth. Daughter of an award-winning Aboriginal Poet (Wiles of Girlhood, Mother Time), some of the origin of care of the mother cat goes back to her own experience of being mothered. Such articulation is rare in one so young.

For whom are the deputies hunting? Flora Jo is a west-coast writer, conscious of the Aboriginal culture into which she was born and all the flaws and failures that rise from being part of the two cultures here in Canada.

Flora Jo has freshened The Twelve Days for me forever. I shall read this every Christmas and remember.

Review of ‘Pleasantly Dead’ – Judith Alguire

Rose — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:21:34 +0000

Nowhere is it more true that a book can be like ‘a vacation in the pocket,’ than with PLEASANTLY DEAD by Judith Alguire. (Signature Editions, Doug Whiteway Ed., 185 pp. 2009).
‘The Pleasant’ is the name of an Inn in Ontario Cottage Country, the sort of place that would be packed to the rafters, if it existed. Take the food for example, lush descriptions of all the meals and what those who ate them, thought. (Asparagus crepes, Belgian Waffles, French Roast coffee and cranberry-orange muffins.
The surroundings fit the same vivid description, private cottages all named for trees as well as rooms upstairs in the rambling, well-kept building, where the dipsomaniac, hypochondriac Aunt Pearl stays. Yes, with The Pleasant, its inhabitants are the particular joy.
Oh yes, murder does occur but gently, pleasantly, if you will. While there is a distinct resemblance to Christie on one of her better forays; a romance, admirable eccentrics, no lack of suspects, the flavor is uniquely Alguire’s own.
Innkeeper Rudley and his wife, Margaret, are as oddly assorted a pair as Faulty Towers ever saw. And when Margaret goes missing, the inn is turned upside down.
Alguire has a light, insightful touch with all the little details. The cover indicates this, a red Adirondack chair struck by rays of a setting or rising sun, overlooking a grey lake and a dark shoreline. In the far right corner of the cover are a neat pair of dead feet. A fishing pole leans casually against the chair back, as though the owner had been trying to snag a trout till someone did him in (and stole his shoes).
Aunt Pearl and the Music Hall are memorable as well as very funny. There is a mesmerizing quality to the prose. Among American authors, Alguire is reminiscent of Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Cape Cod series, an author she has never read, according to a recent interview. Among Canadian authors she has no equal though the novel reads more British than U.S.
If you want a book to lift you right out of everyday life and set you down in a fascinating world of suspicious guests, great food and lively events, now that Christie’s dead, you can’t go wrong with Rudley and company. I look forward to many more installments from the inn.

Off Our Rockers & Into Trouble

Rose — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:56:03 +0000

Off Our Rockers and Into Trouble: The Raging Grannies
by Alison Acker
Edition: Paperback
Price: CDN$ 19.95

Availability: In Stock
22 used & new from CDN$ 0.01

‘Off’ Moved, Entertained & Enlightened Me!, Aug 7 2004
Off Our Rockers is the best kind of personal non-fiction. In many ways it qualifies as Chick Lit (the viewpoints are female and outrageous yet highly sympathetic, the adventures non-stop and such a delight to go along on, as a reader and the happenings are memorable). I find myself going back to certain sections in my mind. Simply, it is the story of a group of concerned older women through the eyes of two women, Alison and Betty, who have all the usual urges and surges of their ages and times but know they can make a difference. Fortunately all this happens on the British Columbia coastline where hapless captains of leaky nuclear subs, hopeless heads of legislative security and heinous clear cutters are blatantly abusing their positions,cruising full speed ahead, unthinking about the consequences until some women who have done a great deal of thinking appear. Rather more than a spanner in the works, these are grannies whose songs give a new definition of the word, ’sarcasm.’ The resulting colisions between granny and wanker is most satisfactory in every case. It will make a four star feature film giving Meryl Streep, Barbara Streisand, Maggie from the Potter films, Holly Hunter and that wonderful woman who just starred with Jack Nichols (duh), something in which to sink their teeth (whether or not they are the teeth with which they started life). Most notable is the fact that these actresses are just playing at what these powerful role models are actual living. The 3 pages on how to choose a granny for a gaggle was particularly compelling. It says a lot about what to look for in a long-time friend. Crammed with dignity, respect and rolling around in the woods, ‘Off’ will be shelved as a classic for our grandchildren.

Review of ‘After The Six O’Clock News,’ Kemeny Babineau Poetry Book

Rose — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:51:47 +0000

After The Six O’Clock News,
Kemeny Babineau
Book Thug Publications
Toronto, Ontario 2009
It bears re-reading, this book of poems by Kemeny Babineau’s, ‘After The Six O’clock.’ Some bits just have a sense of rightness to them, that, ‘Of COURSE!’ feeling, like ‘ I care us ich,’ It’s been a long time since I felt the fun of a book like this one. It is like the poems are standing on their heads or moving sidewise. The Six O’clock news illustrates this perfectly with the blah blah blah of the slashes adding poignancy and pattern to the poem. The positioning of every poem is so nuanced and, well, perfect. Like the Krieghoff poem (and how it slides) and the facing page with its page placement, as well. Oh Wow! you want to say, “The meaning in the poem is in the poem and on the poem. I spent quite a bit of time with Yellow Rain, Some Shine. And the puns throughout – that includes the arrangment of the seasonal diet. This book is the first time I have ever read the phrase, ‘jig of jostle,’ which linked in my mind with ‘Hairy Travis and the Ork Drow,’ which, until this writing, I hadn’t connected with a possible boy wizard. I also found ‘pick a stone,’ very moving.
Kemeny is teaching in this book, many courses by example – how to play with a poem, how to design and amuse, how to get serious in a completely new form, how even a few letters on a page in a non-traditional layout can make you understand the answers to questions you hadn’t before thought to ask.
‘After’ is well-bound and in its back-to-front-upsidedness, planned from the beginning to assault expectations, an assault on a word-Everest that makes the mind dance. A whole class can be taught on Suburban Agri-Culture Poem

Review; Looking for Snow Fleas and Other Mysteries

Rose — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:44:46 +0000

Review of Looking for Snow Fleas and Other Mysteries,
(Complete with activities for finding and exploring them)
by Diane Dawber, Borealis Press, Oct, 08, $12.95

For a child, a good book is when a lot of things come together; text, pictures, something challenging but fun to puzzle out and a way to take it with you and walk around with it in your head.

Snow Fleas is all that and more, the latest in a highly-successful line of books to inspire children by a writer who understands children better than they understand themselves. She is absolutely mesmerizing in person when she reads from her series of children’s poetry.

There is not a sound in the room while she reads but then all hands go up and the talk just flies when she begins to ask questions about what they think. From such interaction with children, Dawber has written directly to their deepest interests.

What makes this book particularly special, is not only twenty appealing sound poems but questions and activities to go along with each. While it would be ideal for classroom use, a parent would have a wonderful time going through it together with their own child.

A note about the activities – they are exceptionally ingenious, the sort of thing that doesn’t take special materials or situations: “Make up a script of sounds that would tell someone a race is going on…” or ‘Make a toe-testing event.” Usually very simple, suitable for any age, but imminently doable, or as the headline says, ‘Something Fun to Do!’

The bright pen and ink watercolour drawings continue the fun, especially the dogs on ice featured on page 44. And then, of course, there are the snow fleas themselves, an actual phenomena of nature, though not actually as depicted here, with purple faces, antennae, and tails like sprung slinkies.

Yes, if my own three children were not grown, I would’ve bought every single one of Dawber’s books and used them till they wore out.

Review of Mother Time

Rose — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:08:54 +0000

Mother Time, Joanne Arnott’s sixth book, is as strong on the time as it is on the mothering. (Ronsdale Press, 2007, 139pp, ISBN 978-155380-046-0). ‘Enchantment & Freedom,’ for example:

‘When did the chant begin? How many generations or thousands of years, shaken in the womb to the same damn rhythm…”

Measuring, (“today I have been a good mother…”) releasing, (“wandering off without us”) returning (“an ear tuned to those who walk beside us all the time).

Arnott introduces us to words for the questions we’ve been born with. Even her sections are timed, bearing the dates, where she was when she wrote, starting with the mid-eighties for Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, that now notorious part of Canada. Arnott’s poems give us the work of the world; birthing and rearing, then on to Unmaking the House which made me wish Susannah Moody could’ve had this book as a long winter read: “gather your children, sweep out the house, leave the broom at the threshold and fly.”

The title poem, Mother Time, brilliantly weaves both themes, along with Arnott’s mixed heritage: “sweetgrass hair moss eyes matriarch of clan bends berries folds dried leaf.”

We follow her lead, echo her mind, bodies tracing patterns she enacts, protocol running thick, then thin then thick again, through millennial time.

Small changes weave the old into the new again, braiding youth, maturity, great age, cycling seasons. Now it is fish. Nnow it is digging sticks and roots. Now it is fruit. Now it is home repair and the snowbound truth; dress for a small child, feast for a clan, dancing slippers. tea for a treacherous cough, song for a broken heart, laughter.

She can make each of these things at the proper time, given community, a perceived need and an ear tuned to those who walk beside us all the time.”