Monty Reid at the TREE Reading Series, Ottawa

On Tuesday, August 14, 2007, poet Monty Reid will be the featured reader at the Tree Reading Series.

Widely published as a poet and essayist, Monty Reid has produced a substantial volume of literary work, including: The Life of Riley (Thistledown Press, 1981), These Lawns (Red Deer College Press, 1990), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1995), Dog Sleeps (NeWest Press, 1993) and Flat Side (Red Deer College Press, 1998), Crawlspace (House of Anansi, 1993), and Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006). He has won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry three times and is also a three-time Governor General's Award nominee. He spent nearly twenty years working at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, in the heart of the Alberta badlands, before moving to the Ottawa area in 1999 to work at the Canadian Museum of Nature.

Tree Readings are every second and fourth Tuesday of the month at the Royal Oak II Pub at 161 Laurier Avenue East in Sandy Hill. Open-set commences at 8:00 p.m., with featured reader to follow. Admission is free. For more information, please contact Dean Steadman at 613-749-3773 or mail to: dean.steadman@treereadingseries.ca.

The Tree Reading Series gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Ottawa.

some more chaudiere news...

You probably already saw the review in the Ottawa X-Press of our Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers; anthology contributor Ian Roy reads at the Factory Reading Series this Thursday, July 19 at the Ottawa Art Gallery with Toronto writer Sharon Harris. rob mclennan [The Ottawa City Project] and Nicholas Lea [Everything is movies] read together at the Carleton Tavern before they both leave town on Saturday, July 28; Monty Reid [Disappointment Island] features at the TREE Reading Series on August 11.

some upcoming Chaudiere author activity

John Lavery [Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers], Alexandra Leggat & the Max Middle Sound Project [Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets] at the Grey Borders Reading Series, the Merchant Ale House, St. Catharines, Ontario, 7:30pm, 10 July 2007; 12 July 2007, readings by: Michael Basinski, Don Metz, John Lavery & the Max Middle Sound Project at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street, Buffalo NY, hosted by kevin thurston, 7pm, 12 July 2007. info: kevin.thurston@gmail.com ; Emily Falvey [Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers] reads as part of a "new Ottawa voices" feature at the TREE Reading Series, Ottawa, 8pm, 10 July 2007.

review of Nicholas Lea's Everything is Movies by Jesse Ferguson

Everything is Movies is a rollicking and elastic first collection, and it announces Lea as a voice to listen for. These poems evince a magpie curiosity, building linguistic nests from all things shiny, be they junk in the gutter or the jewels of literature and philosophy. Lea gathers and loves these fragments of nature, thought and emotion because, as A.M. Klein wrote, "until it has been praised, that part / has not been." Implicit in many of Lea's poems is that all things are connected, though not in the sense that they are the same and equivalent (which would render cataloguing needless), and not in the sense of any specific religious view, though Lea borrows at will from various mythologies. He, like Whitman, seeks to tease out the connections between things, to celebrate synchronicity and the unexpected harmony that arises if we will only listen "when the car alarm medley'd" (in the poem "Song Writhing").

These poems are by turns reverent and irreverent; they delve into the arcane of metaphysics, and then they disarm with confessional passages, self-deprecation and hammy comedy. In "Unnatural Speeds," for instance, the speaker speculates:

during all this the ice is melting.
A gradual melting that must relate
to time — so — time is melting, or,
melting is time. The inflection is
unclear. Hoped you could clarify, get back
to me.

First, there's no brainy sobriquet for it. Nothing so cute.

There is a double-gesture in many of the most memorable of Lea's poems both toward and away from any totalizing philosophy. We must ask with the speaker of "Crowded Out" whether "the world is more than dishes and / miscarriages, you know … don't // believe Nietzsche. What's he ever / done for the garden?"

Lea achieves most when he develops fewer images with greater detail, taking the time to connect each to the next by means of a rough sense of settling, or adherence to theme. Through greater coherence, poems such as "Aquifer" and "Unnatural Speeds" become more memorable. His poems ramble incorrigibly; they ask you if you want a beer; they ask you if you want a pillow fight; they ask you your thoughts on the ontological significance of couch springs. Above all, they are funny and smart, yet they let you in on all the in-jokes.

originally appeared in Matrix #77; reviewed by Jesse Ferguson