An Evening of Canadian Poetry

Thanks to Judy Gordon for this review of an excellent evening of Canadian poetry at Manchester's Anthony Burgess Centre. Though it's never easy to sum up an entire nation in a book, as Zachariah Wells has pointed out, the Modern Canadian Poets anthology by Carcanet (where I've just been lucky enough to spend a week as an intern) is a good introduction to where these three sharp and individual voices are coming from.

Richard Greene, Nyla Matuk, Evan Jones and Sherri Benning

Richard Greene did his best to shift the usual solemnity of British poetry readings by reprimanding our collective lack of a sense of humour and dropping beautifully phrased rude bombs in amongst sharply tender narrative imagery.

Listening to Nyla Matuk's quirky, bejewelled constructions took me to Parisian junk shops. Her poems were tactile and tacky in the mouth, full of moths and bats, sailors, semaphore and chinoiserie - junk modelling an idea of death, 'arbitrarily and momentarily rushing through us'.

Sherri Benning, whose work appears in Michael Schmidt's New Poetries V, has stuck with me. Her richly visual vignettes of lives in Russia and Saskatchewan are film-thick but delicately subtle and moving. When her ten minutes was up I felt like I'd come back from a whole summer of change.