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A Few Words Will Do
Contributor(s): Kearns, Lionel (Author)
ISBN: 0889225583     ISBN-13: 9780889225589
Publisher: Talonbooks
OUR PRICE:   $15.26  
Product Type: Paperback
Published: April 2007
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | Canadian
- Poetry | Subjects & Themes - General
Dewey: 811.54
Physical Information: 0.32" H x 6.05" W x 9.02" (0.41 lbs) 128 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Canadian
- Holiday - Christmas
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
These brief but concentrated pieces of literary work seem at first simple in their approach and straightforward in their intent: designed to be read easily and then to be carried away in our memories. As if they were ours. But when one person writes "this is what happened, this is what I remember, this is what I saw, this is what I know," any reader stands in for and thereby becomes the absent "I" or "eye" of that written text. The deconstruction of this inescapable process of language, metaphor, is what preoccupies Lionel Kearns in A Few Words Will Do.

At first, the narrator seems caught up in the mystery of the unfathomably limitless depth of motherly love in the poem "Dorothy"; with the alchemical marriage of time and space in "Lines for Gerri" (and what are to become the recurrent phases "here to then" and "between now and there"); then he proceeds through na ve realist scenes of family life and birth in "With My Daughter" and "Miracle" to find the ongoing wonder of his father's unfathomable actions (and the book's metanarrative) in "Composition." This celebration of apparent meaning at the heart of the ordinary that opens the book is so accomplished it seems unassailable with the tools of deconstruction. The book's centre however turns on a selection of hybrid "open source" virtual prose meditations on chaos, chance and consequence, after which the narrator increasingly begins to address the poem itself as the subject, moving the reader into a position of explicit complicity with the writer, a complicity in which "A Muse" cannot escape the irony of its linguistic shadow, "amuse." There is a materiality to the world over which the greatest abstraction cannot triumph, Kearns proposes here: all abstraction seeks to arrest time; all sentiment seeks to reverse it.