A Visit to the Quattro Books May Book Launch

“Dazzling and Tremendous” are the apt words of Whitman that might be used to describe the most recent Quattro Book Launch event.

There was standing room only last Tuesday night at what are becoming increasingly popular Quattro literary evenings. And rightfully so, since the line-up of readers was perhaps the most exciting in this year’s reading series. No less than five readers took the stage. Each of them was a reader and writer of considerable talent. If any criticism is to be raised it is that the event was on the whole too short.

The venue was back room of “The Supermarket” on Augusta – a bar that fuses an Asian restaurant with a standard trendy licensed establishment and represents the next phase of the probably inexorable Yorkvillization of Kensington market, a lamentable or welcomed development depending on your socio-economic outlook. Indisputably though, on Tuesday night Chantel Lavoie, Leah Murray, Tim Conley, Binnie Brandon and Ken Klonsky saw to it that fine literature has been ensconced in the neighborhood along with high end cheese shops, expensive candle stores and vendors of pricey cultural bric-a-brac. This could be what Marcuse meant by the phrase “ a dialectical union of opposites”.

There were two surprises that night. The first was that there were so many readers from Kingston. Who would have thought suspected that Canada’s former capital would be harboring such poetic talent?

The second surprise, the show-stopper as it were, was the reading of Leah Murray from her experimental novel “Romancing the Buzzard”. The reading came with what seemed a lengthy context placing by a representative of the Quattro editorial board. Such an account is typically annoying to the literary purist who wants the literary work to stand by itself. Having a work’s literary merit explained before the experience of reading or hearing is a sure way substituting literary strength with an ideological crutch. Yet in this case, the work stood up to the peroration it received.

Murray has gone through a terrifying experience. She was held captive by her delusional husband who attempted to brainwash her, indoctrinate her into his paranoid cosmological worldview. The act of writing was no doubt a therapeutic act for her. But she created a truly aesthetic object rather than a personal statement, even listening to a few short paragraphs of this book revealed its merit. Her words created an imaginary landscape reminiscent of the grotesque fantasies of Lautrement. And the sense of self being lost against the irresistible downward tug, drawing madness and the underworld, was similar to that the erosion of self De Nerval made an account of in his short, hallucinatory stories. There was strangeness to her comparisons that were suggestive of the world-turned-in-its-head nature of her experiences. She described “rain drops as big as apples”, and her husband being “rapid fire machine gunned into madness.” Murray made effective use of the experience of synesthesia, describing one sense in terms of another. Her husband himself is described as “one strange sound that never went away.” Something about the always impalpable quality of experience is unlocked by these surprising juxtapositions of different orders of things.

The poetry of Chantel Lavoie had opened the evening. It was clearly the work of an experienced writer. Her new book is entitled “Where the Terror Lies” a homage to the recently deceased Maurice Sendak. She showed the range of her poetic talent by reciting a sonnet that had been written as part of a project she had assigned for her class. It was a convincing anachronism complete with the correct archaic diction. This sonnet reflects her ability as a writer to breathe new life into familiar poetic themes. She takes up material from the Brothers Grimm, from the and from the New Testament. These are mythologies that are in fact every bit as bizarre as those written about by Leah Murray, except they have become familiar to us by constant exposure. Yet Lavoie has reintroduced to use through figurative language and her unique perspective something of the original interest of these mythological patterns. In “Lazarus Opened His Eyes” and “Death and Taxes” we saw our contemporary world being infused with the motifs of our traditional mythology. The ultimate moment of transformation was achieved in an image of the last supper when, as Lavoie wrote, “all that death was sucked out of the air.”

Tim Conley read from his first book of poetry “One False Move”. Like Lavoie he demonstrated his ability with traditional verse forms by reciting a limerick from a collection on the Harper cabinet – a humorous form that was appropriate to its politically satirical intention. Conley’s work was the most difficult of the evening. Of all the other readers that night, his work demanded the most thought and for this reason he was compared to J.L Borges (one of the patron saints of “The New Direction of Time”). Conley’s work does stand up to this comparison, though he himself modestly dismissed it as a wild claim on par with being compared to Tolstoy. But it may be not so meaningful to compare Conley to Borges, but to do something else, something that Borges was himself very concerned with, that is to see Conley’s writing as belonging to a genealogy in which Borges himself is an antecedent, going back perhaps to the Thousand and One Nights and the enigmas of the Book of Genesis. But Conely revealed himself not to be solely concerned with the involutions of myth and literature. He observed that one of his poems was inspired by his observation that we have become far too “used to living at war.” (Or the shocking thesis that our liberalism turns out, contrary to its ideological rhetoric, not to be incompatible with a constant with a constant state of warfare.) He writes of this condition in “Reaction to a Series of Inoculations.” Clearly, Conley is a complex poet who everyone should expect to hear more from in the future. It should be noted that his oratorical skill is considerable and stood out from all the other readers of the evening. He ended his set with the grim observation: “The truest lover of wood is fire.”

Binnie Brandon, Quattro’s best-selling author, was second last in line to read. Hers is the only collection of short stories currently published by Quattro. The selection she read was a short story of a series stories just five hundred words long, a project that she set for herself as a challenge. Her story was a humorous anecdote bringing together the unlikely elements of cherry pits and a beloved uncle’s wake. The story was notable for being convincingly written in the Maritime dialect. This is not an easy task to have carried out.

The last reader for the evening was Ken Klonsky. His reading was accompanied by a henchman who well complemented the compelling dialogue whose subject was a police interrogation. Ascher, the protagonist of Klonsky’s novel “Life Without” was being held for questioning in a police precinct office. By painstaking degrees, the readers revealed Ascher’s progress from a witness being questioned to becoming the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Well rendered were the police tactics of physical and psychological intimidation, a process so effectively carried out as to compromise any chance of Ascher ever receiving a fair trial. It was with this piece of dramatic dialogue that the evening ended. Unfortunately, this is supposed to be the last of Quattro’s book launches for the year. Devotees of poetry can still, fortunately, look forward to the monthly Wordstage gatherings.