Customer Reviews

Anarchive

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People said "MINE" (Collis's previous book) was good, but I paid it no mind, perhaps thinking I had read it already when it came out five years ago. He was no more than a name to me, a Canadian name at that, until this past weekend when a visiting poet pressed this book on me and told me, in bright, soulful tones, that I would love it. Actually Lisa has a pretty good idea of what I will like and won't like so I got home and starting reading it right away. Collis is a very good poet and his book is actually excellent, that's me cutting to the chase.

He takes a very different approach in his poetry, no cutting to the chase, it's more of a meditative, sun-drenched writing apparently inspired by Lorca and other Spanish poets of the period he's writing on. "Anarchive" isn't exactly a novel in verse per se, think of it more as a collection of historically inspired fragments that work and seethe together into a chaotic mass, something like Reznikoff but really a method all his own. The jacket copy cites Jack Spicer as one of Collis' inspirations. Surely it must be the Spicer of BILLY THE KID, for a poem like ANARCHIVE's "Dear Unburied Remains" might almost be some yet unearthed section from BTK: "I did not know/ if I would recover/ but I still tore/ the gun down/ in my mind." The book brings us some of narrative's fascination, the desire to leap from one page to the next just to see what happens ("foreordained by the oligarchical beast," as Melissa Wolsak writes in her blurb, of course we already know the outcome of Spain's Civil War, so what's the *point* of our interest); why expend the energy? That we do so with such glad willingness highlights one of the reasons Collis should be far more celebrated, in this country as well as in his own, than he is at this moment.

Ramon Fernandez is in it too, maybe the same Fernandez we know from Wallace Stevens' famous poem, "The Idea of Order in Key West," in which Stevens addresses him and tries to have his cake and eat it too, explaining later that his Fernandez was not the same Spanish-born Paris-based literary critic who cooperated with Fascists and Nazis during the occupation of France. And yet everyone who read the poem at the time would think that. It's like if I wrote a poem today with a line like "Angelina Jolie, tell me, if you know,/ Why, when the singing ended and we turned/ Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights," etc, then me telling everyone I just thought of the name "Angelina Jolie" to represent a fictional person.

I hope his book wins the Griffin Prize or whatever it's up for.