A Few Words Will Do

By Lionel Kearns

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889225583
• ISBN13: 9780889225589
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 5 to 15 years

Customer Reviews

Reviewed by Michelle Boucher-Ladd

Whenever I think about Canadian Poets only a few seem to come to mind, there's Margaret Atwood, James Reaney, Phyllis Webb, and did I mention Margaret Atwood. Until recently I am ashamed to admit that my spectrum of Canadian poets has been far too narrow. However, having read several new collections from Talonbooks this summer, I am struck by how very talented and wide a Canadian Literary Scene there is. One collection of poetry that I have enjoyed is Lionel Kearns' A Few Words Will Do. Kearns has a steady energy that seems to electrify his poetry, almost as if the poems are plugged into some kind of current. His poetic forms vary. Some have iambic meter, some are concrete, while others are free verse. They all seem to say see what I can do! I love the crazy alliteration in the poem Omen. It is such fun to read aloud. I think my favorite line is this: I proffered the pittance of poetry in the paltry pit of poverty for the profligate prophets of profanity. I also love the last lines: I heard the last voice begin the first verse with the word choice: Oh Women! O Men! The last half of Kearns' book has poems about poems, most of which say "this poem is" or "this poem does." While these poems are witty and a showcase Kearns' talent, what I remember about them after I close the book is that they are poems demonstrating poetry. The best poems in the collection are at the front of the book and are full of crisp images, snapshots of life, and a taste of now. I particularly like Definition. Standing here on the wharf this cold January morning, I watch a family of wood ducks swim by and disappear with little inaudible plops, then reemerge. in shimmering horizontal halos. Perfection is being totally adequate at any given moment. I have known perfection in your presence. Don't expect perfection to last. It is always now. When I look up two hawks are turning, turning, high in a distant sky. For me, I love this dangerous sense of it is always now, the divinity of ducks, that perfection can happen at any given moment, and that there is a certain foreboding circling the future. This is lovely poetry.