Making a way through these texts will both challenge and reward their readers CHARLES O. HARTMAN suggests that a poem is an act of attention. And attention can assume widely various faces, as the books of poems that are now finding their places on helves across the country attest. Attention to the details of the world (or worlds) we inhabit or construct, attention to the subleties of articulation, of craft, attention to the materiality of language. Patrick O`Connell, in his first book, Hoping for Angels (Turnstone, 79 pages, $8.95 paper), attends to characters living on the margins of society, characters most of us seldom encounter. His portraits are moving, powerful, daring, often seasoned with black humour: you who contrive to be nothing succeed and win a bottle of cheap brandy ("The Blue Man Wins a Prize") This is writing with integrity and sinew. And, in spite of bleakness that is never denied, this is writing that would never subscribe to despair: 1 tell you Enlightenment is easy some days all you have to do is put your shoes on ("Joy Will Find a Way") O`Connell works his short lines with great dexterity, but is equally adept at the lyric paragraph: "A Memory of Winter" contains some of the most exquisite writing in the book. Mary Howes, in Vanity Shades (Red Deer College Press, 95 pages, $8.95 paper), presses incisiveness toward incision. Poem as cut: watch yrself in sink mirror lift the hair from the left side of yr face yr eye is gone spite something out of yr mouth yr teeth are gone my god this will take major reconstructive surgery years to repair glass eye too (shifting) Howes`s vision and language are hard-hitting and unsentimental. And she ranges over the daily/nightly terrors of nursing: one poem explains the procedure for preparing and transporting a body to the morgue, another describes the cancerous decay of a young model, another the care of a terminally ill old man. She tackles also the daily/nightly terrors of living in a world that is cool, raw, often violent, wielding her humour like a scalpel, and scanning the (social) body with an unflinching eye. Of the three sections in Susan Glickman`s new book, Henry Moore`s Sheep and Other Poems (Signal/Vehicule, 88 pages, $9.95 paper), the first and third are perhaps the more academic: "Henry Moore`s Sheep," which explores Moore`s growing fascination with the sheep grazing on his estate, explores also Glickman`s reading of the disparity between Moore`s sheep and his sculptures of women; "Camera Obscura" investigates the lives and work of various scientists engaged in developing the camera. The former is fascinating, though I don`t read Moores women as Glickman does; the latter I find strained in voice. The poems in the middle section, "Driving Home," are more personal in tone, and assume a distinctive energy. In this section, Glickman addresses - with an arresting mixture of sincerity and surprise - the power that informs the domestic, tracing the complicated and subtle strands that comprise a narrative of home: We like driving home with the groceries. That`s what home is, basically - the place you put your groceries. A trivial observation with far-reaching implications. Including the groceries, including the driving home. ("Driving Home, V: Groceries") These poems, though crippled somewhat by weak line breaks and a tendency toward overdetermined language, reveal an I who is alert and attentive and aware. The poems in Transient Light (Mercury, 128 pages, $11.95 paper), Steven Smith`s third major collection, are almost photographic in their intensity, their play of light and shadow. Still life: static animation -"beyond scrawny trees / sky presses water`s solid skin" ("Frozen Lakefront. 1911 "). Smith presses hard on the short line in these poems, gives it precision, edge, even delicacy. An eye is at work here, an eye that admits its role in constructing and framing the (trans) fixed moment. Smith`s strategy in pairing sections of the book "Paris 19254963" / "Paris 1988" and "Toronto 18964973 / "Toronto 1987-1988" - yields some wonderful surprises: partner poems speak toward the same subject or setting from different historical positions, and almost incidentally comment upon one another. Sixty intervening years, for instance, turn the couple who stare out into the street in 1928 ("A Window on Quai Voltaire. 1928") toward the light of the room ("A Window on Quai Voltaire. 1988"). Moments caught become visitations. And everything shifts in transient light: you move slowly toward the frame`s limit with effort your feet scuff chestnut leaves you edge the branching arch, the doorway of light & shadow of memory shimmering ("The Tuileries in the Afternoon. 1988") Wayne Keon`s style of telling in Sweetgrass 11 (Mercury, 128 pages, $11.95 paper) is considerably different from Smith`s: the poems that work best in this collection draw heavily on an oral tradition; they tell rather than picture. This may be one of the gifts of Keon`s Ojibway heritage. And he captures the drollness of vernacular delivery without sacrificing the story-telling: hah! despair wouldn`t have the nerve to come waltzin through the door here it would be devoured whole in one fat gulp ("i`m not in charge of this ritual") The strongest poems in Sweetgrass 11 move toward a speaking of the magic that adheres to (inheres in) the world, and resist collapsing into sentimentality. For the most part, they succeed. Though some of the poems here are thin, and too many draw on the four-beat line and regular rhyme (and prescribed language) of country or pop lyrics: "take my anguish / take the air / make it into / my despair" ("howlin at the moon!`). Still, Keon has insight and energy and a sense of humour: "I never would have left that poem / written by a brit / for you" ("just one nite"). It`s not hard to believe that bill bissett won the 1990 Milton Acorn People`s Poet Award: the poems in his new book, hard 2 beleev (Talonbooks, 139 pages, $11.95 paper) offer that attractive mix of accessibility and audacity that engage an audience. bissett could be our (Canadian, late 20th-century) answer to e.e. cummings, with his mad engagement with language that encompasses creative spelling, experiments with typography (some of these poems are almost concrete), and a resolute insistence on vernacular voicings. bissett, too, writes with savage wit - one inscription of a strong social conscience - and still, finally, gravitates toward the lyric moment of spellbound wonder: peopul crawling ovr th ice flows dew yu remembr how we held each othr undr th chattring treez wer they acorn walnut n th squirrels gathring th books we placd in our libraree shelvs ("swans ar flying ow th orchestra~`) The poems in hard 2 beleev aren`t difficult. They are often funny, sometimes moving. And bissett`s quirky, "naive" line drawings are one of the book`s unexpected treasures. Jeff Derksen and Dorothy Trujillo Lusk both press language further than bissett. And in a quite different way. This work - in the "language poetry" stream - draws attention to, and subverts, the elaborate models in place in language that speak the world for us. Perhaps in spite of us. And this, I think, is what makes "language poetry" exciting: it dares to make problematic the structures buried in language that have come to seem natural. The lines that might coalesce to make story are suddenly frustrated, overcharged, unconnectable. The position of a subject - articulating the object through that intervening verb - becomes untenable except as an elaborate (if necessary) construction. Even the logic of syntax is thwarted. The way through the text becomes tenuous, confused, difficult; the way through also becomes surprising and spicy. Several of the poems in Lusk`s Redactive (Talonbooks, 63 pages, $9.95 paper) show the grittiness of this new voice, an uncompromising speaking toward a world that lives partly in language, partly out of it: Bordering on this to narrow some rail planner`s point is the PCB repository. And the water a battery of difficulties. Electing to distrust place renders unto this a civic wad unconscious even by exaggeration .... So I do worse than shut up. 1 remain to be seen. ("Oral Tragedy") Though some of these poems become so "redacted" as to approach unreadability, the obstructions of a narrative impulse often work well for Lusk; "This Story," and its gloss, "Hysteria," are particularly engaging, and rife with intelligent and incisive readings of world/word: "Evaporation into separates another from this, its so-called subject & why wonder, why not ask?" Jeff Derksen`s poetic effects in Down Time (Talonbooks, 80 pages, $9,95 paper) derive more pointedly from dislocations of syntax. Meaning, or at least significance, migrates into the cracks: Like a lurch but seen in nature promorphic to stack the meeting. Linking eye to tree is not a handshake and despite leaving I isolate in a position inappropriate to voice. Take a neurological day off. Copula attribute of adding. (Solace") This disjunctive style is hardly random. Or it could be random (or easy or tricky) in the hands of inexperienced or uncommitted writers. In Derksen`s writing, though, the fractured, problematic texture of the language speaks compellingly about the challenge of being human/humane in a technologically and politically over-determined work world. His work, like Lusk`s, demands patience and willingness: explorations into the materiality of language make for challenging reading. Challenging reading. Perhaps that is one way to speak toward the wealth and variety of poetry published by these small Canadian presses just now. All this evidence: there are writers still paying attention, paying close and serious attention, and inviting or requiring us as readers to do the same.