Home
O Lust How Magnificent Your Artifacts
For prose a well-made book is enough to satisfy us. We do not feel the same twinge of disappointment when we acknowledge that all novelists are not: Margaret Laurences as we do when we read a batch of poets and encounter: nobody even remotely resembling a Henry Vaughan or a T.S. Eliot.
Still, we do keep on reading with: interest poetry that is at least well done, poetry that observes the world and records the feelings of those who inhabit it, for the sense that we are getting a close view, down among the grasses and the mosses, of what life for most people' really is.'
Such modest poetry is rarely published by major publishers, who find it necessary for their reputation to avoid anything merely tentative. All but one of the 10 volumes I have been reading are published by small presses; the odd one out is avowedly self-published.
The self-publisher among my 10, Tim Lander, set out to engage my attention and did by calling himself "B.C.'s lowest rapscalion of 'a self-publishing poet," the implication being that self-publishing poets never get noticed. What he doesn't seem to realize is that most of the small presses that get noticed are in fact poets publishing, themselves and their friends.
His O Lust How Magnificent Your Artifacts (Lander, 217 Irwin St. Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 4X4), is a series of meditations on the role of eroticism in art and civilization, both curious and polished. Despite his eagerness to be read, Lander has not supplied a price for his book.
- excerpt from review by George Woodcock, BCBW 1989.
Still, we do keep on reading with: interest poetry that is at least well done, poetry that observes the world and records the feelings of those who inhabit it, for the sense that we are getting a close view, down among the grasses and the mosses, of what life for most people' really is.'
Such modest poetry is rarely published by major publishers, who find it necessary for their reputation to avoid anything merely tentative. All but one of the 10 volumes I have been reading are published by small presses; the odd one out is avowedly self-published.
The self-publisher among my 10, Tim Lander, set out to engage my attention and did by calling himself "B.C.'s lowest rapscalion of 'a self-publishing poet," the implication being that self-publishing poets never get noticed. What he doesn't seem to realize is that most of the small presses that get noticed are in fact poets publishing, themselves and their friends.
His O Lust How Magnificent Your Artifacts (Lander, 217 Irwin St. Nanaimo, B.C. V9R 4X4), is a series of meditations on the role of eroticism in art and civilization, both curious and polished. Despite his eagerness to be read, Lander has not supplied a price for his book.
- excerpt from review by George Woodcock, BCBW 1989.
Submitted on October 11, 2004 in By David.
