Davie
Street Translations, Daniel Zomparelli
2012,
Talonbooks, Vancouver BC
$16.95,
978-0-88922-683-8, 86 pages
reviewed by rob mclennan
It’s 2 a.m., when attentions
are erect and the chance for new
play
dwindles as the club empties out.
It’s
hard on the brain to get off the
things
you want to do, but with the
right
bad intentions, the right moment
comes
with the wrong guy. So it has
come to this
so it has cum to this. Call me
up
on the line, and meet me late
at
night, lusting, hungry and hung –
retell the same old tale, same old
tail
and find yourself on a familiar
bed
just remember that the walk of
shame
taste different when it’s not the same.
When you’re the one to blame.
Ain’t that a shame.
Vancouver poet and editor Daniel Zomparelli’s first trade poetry collection, Davie Street Translations (Talonbooks, 2012) is a self-described documentary collage-sketch of “gay male culture in Vancouver,” focusing specifically in one neighbourhood. The poems, including with graffiti-type sketches, rely on a quick movement, cutting a wide swath through the map of culture, as a love song to a segment of Vancouver life and culture not often discussed in poetry. There is a roughness here that appeals, but one that could have been tighter, a looseness that works well for some poems but not others. Still, Zomparelli’s Davie Street Translations adds to a poetic description of the city, setting himself along such other current and former Vancouver writers as Sachiko Murakami, George Bowering, Meredith Quartermain, George Stanley, Oana Avasilichioaei, Daphne Marlatt and Shannon Stewart. What is it about Vancouver that compels such overt poetic descriptions and tributes?
There is a lyric twist here that staggers, and
shatters. And the tightness of the two poem sequence “A Part of Your World” is
quite startling, reminiscent of the complex lyric gymnastics of
Ottawa-turned-Toronto poet Marcus McCann, with other threads as echoes of the
gym poems in Vancouver poet Mark Cochrane’s second trade collection, Change
Room (Talonbooks, 2000). The title of the
collection isn’t mere decoration or boast, but a declaration, as his poems
translate the rough quality of downtown life, as he writes to open “A Part of
Your World”: “Fins for feet when you know you are something / more. I would
be beautiful, I would be beautiful.”
Born
in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives
in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2011, and his most recent
titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep, (Obvious
Epiphanies, 2012), grief notes: (BlazeVOX
[books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks,
2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second
novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs
above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com).
He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the
University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and
other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com