Barry Clegg’s Poems: A Rare Spectacle and The Beginning of Time

I always take a look on the authors’ table at the WEN breakfast meeting. After leafing through Barry Clegg’s first volume of poems, A Rare Spectacle, I trotted over to him and said,” I want to buy your book. I just read one of your poems and I know exactly what you mean.”

This was a rare experience for me. Not a habitual reader of poetry, I usually find myself more puzzled than enlightened if I venture into that genre. “What are you getting at?” I would like to ask the author. But if a poem needs explanation, either the reader or the poet has failed. Feeling that the failure must be mine, I tend to avoid poetry.

Barry Clegg offers welcome success. All the poems in his two collections tell me something on first reading. He uses familiar experience—encounters with sparrows or city noise or old friends or his own right hand. He has a long memory for the experience of childhood, and an acute sense of the experience of aging; these I know well.

But second and third readings reward even more than the first. It is in these that I enjoy Clegg’s playfulness and humour, appreciate the depth of his love for humankind, for music, and for the life of the mind. The ordinary is lifted up, turned over, illuminated. He takes sly pokes at us writers too. Try reading “Overbosity” or “Typso” in A Rare Spectacle without seeing something of yourself.

Writing poetry is often called an exercise in distillation, in concentrating the essence of experience is just a few telling words. In both A Rare Spectacle and The Beginning of Time Barry Clegg has produced a fine vintage, to mix the metaphor. A hearty brew. A quality libation.

Isobel Raven

February, 2015

Love Triangle : a novel in terza rima and 160 sonnets
by Ben Antao
Cinnamon Teal Publishing, Goa , India, 2014
“Lust between a lesbian and a heterosexual married man leads to untold grief in this modern story of a love triangle” – from the back cover.
Love Triangle
Ben Antao set himself a formidable challenge. Who writes terza rime these days? My last encounter came years ago with Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Ben maintains the form (aba bcb cdc) through 19 Cantos (83 pages) of iambic pentameter.
The story itself is strongly told. A weekend of passion described in sufficient detail that I am wondering who among my friends I might re-gift with this book. What really gave me pause though was how he dealt with the aftermath of those events. The scope and the ramifications to the lives of the couple and their significant others after that weekend is written in disciplined rhyme with a startling depth of insight.
Of the 160 sonnets, I have only read 20 or so. I tried reading them in sequence but found that though they are listed by theme, they are not best read that way. I will randomly savour them all in time. For now though, I suggest that the book is well worth the purchase for the Love Triangle.
Read in January 2015,
Report by Gayle Dzis.

A Ghost of a Flapper, December 3, 2014
By
Braz Menezes
Virginia’s Ghost (Kindle Edition)
I have always felt nervous in the presence of ghosts. Virginia’s Ghost was no different. I took courage from Author Caroline Kaiser as she led me into the auction house, introduced me to the lead character Virginia Blythe, and then left me, and I didn’t even notice. I was completely absorbed. Virginia is a somewhat nervous character, suspicious of almost everyone, but unlike some of the other employees of Auctioneers Gable & Co, she is a kind sympathetic person, and the perfect protagonist. She made me feel completely at home as I followed her effortlessly. She knew every nook and corner of the auction house. To the layperson, these places may appear as dumps for an assortment of other people’s discarded or distressed assets; just one step away from the scrapyard or landfill. But Virginia changed my mind. She even knew the 200 or so porcelain and ceramic figurines by their first names, as if they were all friends on a FB group. The author does an excellent job of describing ‘the innards’ and functioning of the vast ‘downstairs’ area in the basement, a perfect setting for a mystery story. Early on Virginia meets the ghost for the first time — a woman dressed like a flapper, who is happy speaking at a short distance, but disappears into a wisp of smoke just as Virginia tries to get closer, to know her.
A nervous Virginia shares her ghost experience cautiously with her different work colleagues, all of who are interesting characters, if somewhat hypocritical and dysfunctional as a team. They appear in and out of the story, adding snippets of gossip, rumour and innuendo. The plot thickens and reaches a climax when the overpowering, Brian Gable III boss, an alcohol addict and bully, discovers some very valuable porcelain antiques are missing just before an important sale event. Virginia is held responsible for finding the items, or else. I will leave the rest of the story for the reader to discover.
The author Caroline Kaiser has enriched the setting for Virginia’s Ghost enormously and very credibly, with her previous first-hand experience working in an auction house. Her current expertise as a fine editor results in a book that is beautifully written, meticulously edited, easy to read, informative and entertaining. I have no hesitation recommending it to readers and allocating it a 5 star rating.

Book Review by John Ambury

VIRGINIA’S GHOST
Caroline Kaiser

298 pages, paper, perfect-bound
Lavaliere Press, Toronto
© 2014, the author
ISBN 978-09938137

Caroline Kaiser has taken on the challenge of interweaving a present-day murder mystery with events from many decades earlier. She proves herself up to the challenge, and then some!

The contemporary protagonist is narrator Virginia Blythe, an antiques specialist at a prestigious Toronto auction house. Kaiser draws on her experience in that field to give depth and realism to both the sometimes-eerie setting and Virginia’s mostly-unconventional co-workers.

The voice from the 1920s is that of Constance Pendleton, the eligible and socially-striving daughter of a moneyed Rosedale family. We access her story through her long-lost diary, which her ghost brings to Virginia’s rapt attention. Even though Constance is thinking of becoming a novelist, her prose comes off as rather too constructed and descriptive for a personal diary; a few entries in, however, the reader happily goes along for the sake of absorbing such a vivid picture of Constance, her times, and her emotional tribulations.

A mysterious death at the auction house (complicated by the disappearance of some valuable pieces), and the darkening events in Constance’s past life, unfold together. Refreshingly, both narratives include old-fashioned romantic yearning but no sexual gymnastics. Complications abound; suspense builds. Wraith-like Constance appears as a guiding hand at opportune moments. The eventual resolutions to both threads are satisfying, but not simplistic.

Kaiser’s writing is well-crafted and careful (as befits a professional editor), but is neither pretentious nor affected. She develops the totally credible plots with the skill of a much more experienced novelist. Her many characters are deftly sketched, mainly through their actions and interactions and revealing snippets of their back-stories.

Virginia’s Ghost will readily engage your mind and probably your heart. It is not earth-shatteringly profound in either sphere, but it’s not meant to be. It’s a well-written tale and a rewarding read (ideally by a cozy evening fire) — filled with atmosphere and movement and interesting people. And mystery!