Bookworm, no. 142
Emily Mernin reviews Michael Ondaatje’s “The Distance of a Shout.” Arthur Dennyson Hamdani on “Saving Toronto,” edited by Anne Golden and Ken Greenberg. A cover artist Q&A. Inside the April issue.
Dark Thoughts
The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems
Michael Ondaatje
McClelland & Stewart
240 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
“Tonight I am alone with dogs and lightning,” says the speaker of “Farre Off” as he walks by a field. There are other sources of illumination: the moon, the barn. But the pasture remains in the shadows, and the cattle lurk out of view. Cloaked in an expansive murkiness, he lets his thoughts wander to the poems of Thomas Campion and Sir Thomas Wyatt. The partial absence of light, somehow, facilitates vision.
With The Distance of a Shout, Michael Ondaatje casts off the need for brightness and the clarity it might bring. Instead, he tells a story of darkness and the inner voice that endures it. Comprising pieces from five decades of writing, his memoir-in-poems is shrouded in a haze, indistinct and unstable. An airplane cabin is “half-dark”; a lover is remembered in “a rented car / in blackness”; “the hum of light” is lost during a power outage in Sri Lanka; a meditation on death is bound up in “our altering love, our moonless faith.” When the sun does appear, it blinds and distorts. The “pitch-white / sky” threatens to “ignite” one speaker and renders grass into “meaninglessness.”
Like a photograph, Ondaatje’s sensitive work develops in dark surroundings. Throughout the book, which is loosely chronological (though original publication dates are noticeably absent), the poet takes shape and hones his sense of self. This is perhaps most apparent in an excerpt from “Tin Roof.” The speaker knows the “geography of this room” so well that he could “rise in the dark,” find his desk, and “write without light.”
—Emily Mernin
Ford on Super Duty
Saving Toronto: 10 City Builders Tell Us How
Edited by Anne Golden and Ken Greenberg
Dundurn Press
232 pages, softcover and ebook
In 2018, Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, announced cuts to the number of Toronto wards, from forty-seven to twenty-five. The move “handcuffed our city’s ability to fund needed programs” and “make decisions,” writes the councillor Josh Matlow in Saving Toronto, which features ten urban experts who address underfunding, the housing crisis, unreliable transit, the climate crisis, and loneliness. They all point fingers at the premier’s micromanagement.
But Ford is not the sole reason for “Toronto’s downward spiral,” as the co-editor Anne Golden puts it. She guides readers through the city’s history, from its Hogtown days (so called for its meat-packing industry) to the present, when Donald Trump’s tariffs and rhetoric have undermined the “social cohesion in the cultural mosaic city-region.” The municipal finance expert Enid Slack elaborates on why potholes don’t get fixed and water mains break, despite a balanced budget: “The fiscal health of Toronto may have been achieved at the expense of the overall health.” Matti Siemiatycki, a geography and planning professor at the University of Toronto, argues that “lower-density, car-oriented land-use patterns wove high rates of driving and car-centric politics into the fabric of the region,” which have hindered public transit, pedestrian safety, and biking. Tim Gray, the executive director of Environmental Defence, touches on a similar subject. Building homes on farmland and natural areas increases emissions and depletes soil that can grow food.
The Alliance for a Liveable Ontario’s Franz Hartmann underscores the tension: “Provincial actions have only made the crisis worse.” In the conclusion, the urbanist and co-editor Ken Greenberg compares improving Toronto with “improvising in jazz.” Only through adaptation, conversation, and community can change begin. “Think of the tragedy of the privatization of Ontario Place,” he writes. “The city is not just a business, and we are not just consumers; we are citizens.”
—Arthur Dennyson Hamdani
Cover Artist Q&A: Blair Kelly and Tom Chitty
Given our split run this month, we asked our two cover artists to ask each other questions.
Tom Chitty: How did you find your concept?
Blair Kelly: The editor mentioned April showers, and I kept thinking about things that happen when it rains—like worms appearing. Then the idea of an urban bird mom out collecting food for her babies came to mind.
T.C.: What kind of bird are they? And are they very big, or is the bicycle very small?
B.K.: The bird is not a specific type but a combination of species from my imagination, based on shapes I gravitate toward. And it’s definitely a small bicycle.
T.C.: Speaking of birds, how will the Blue Jays get on this season?
B.K.: Pretty good, I hope. I must admit, I’m a horrible fan, as I only watch if they make it to the World Series, but that shouldn’t be a problem this year!
T.C.: Who is your favourite Muppet and why?
B.K.: I love Animal, because he’s wild and a great drummer.
Blair Kelly: What was your inspiration for your illustration?
Tom Chitty: The editor mentioned April Fool’s. This prompted me to look up the Fool tarot card. It’s described as symbolic of new beginnings, which felt perfect for spring.
B.K.: Were you creative as a child, and did that lead to your career?
T.C.: I certainly drew a lot. I had a bit of a circuitous route to cartoons and illustrations, but “drawing pictures” for my job was always something I wanted to do.
B.K.: Did moving from the United Kingdom to Canada influence your work?
T.C.: The simple answer is yes. I made prints in Toronto after a few years of wandering around the art markets here and wishing I had a booth. My work featured cartoonish characters, which prompted a few customers to ask if I’d ever submitted to The New Yorker. Eventually I did, and fortunately it paid off.
B.K.: What do you do in your spare time?
T.C.: I’ve always played soccer, and I’m still at it—even though it makes my knees and hamstrings grumpy these days. My friends in the U.K. will tear me apart for not calling it football, by the way.
Inside the April Issue
“A marvellous writer, although unheralded in his lifetime, a tempestuous personality prone to bodily vices, yet a devoted brother, caring for siblings dying of wickedly infectious tuberculosis, Keats seemed the perfect literary subtext for a Roman holiday with my sisters.” Sandra Martin goes to Rome.
Andrew Torry reviews Cheryl Thompson’s Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897.
“I feel an acidic validation, having now read to the end. I see how, in certain ways, nothing has changed: the consolidation of wealth by a greedy, entitled few; the government-backed quick-buck schemes dependent on land theft that spoils water and air and soil.” Laurie D. Graham finally gets around to Helen Potrebenko’s No Streets of Gold: A Social History of Ukrainians in Alberta.
And much more!
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