a golden egg (?)

Winnipeg in Words

From Out of Nowhere by John Toone
Reviewed by: Rhiannon Rogstad
The Goose – Issue 6 Fall 2009
A Journal of Literature, Environment & Culture in Canada

The first glance at John Toone’s collection of poems warrants a small shiver—the form with which he writes looks as barren as the Canadian plain in winter. Sparse is a word that comes to mind, or thin and bare. But, like the Canadian plain in winter, there is a power in the simple presentation of characters and scenes, and the intrepid reader will find the same sort of harsh beauty to be found in a winter windstorm. Toone takes old clichés, washed up caricatures of cowboys, especially, to illustrate his bleak and dismal prairie. As land is cleared for development, titles change hands, and men who worked the land are forced to find jobs in the city, Toone questions whether we can find the kind of meaning in an office building that we once found on a farm.

There are moments when Toone’s insight is so fresh and new regarding things that have always been written about that it raises the hair on your arms. His innovative wordplay and use of a staggered structure make you consider the weight of each word carefully. In the section titled “the urban cowboy,” especially, Toone demands we consider the contradiction of a cowboy in town—how can he truly fit into the structured business of the city or how can he truly understand the power of the natural world? He is, by definition, a soul trapped between the two worlds and, as Toone writes, “bordering on / instable, insecure.” Toone delights in taking worn metaphors and turns of phrase and reusing them in many ways. He unmasks their power to show their banal meaning underneath, uses them in a different sort of situation to give them new meaning, or dismantles them, which in effect deconstructs them so much as to render them silly and ineffective, as they of course are, upon close scrutiny.

There are other moments, however, when Toone’s form is distracting and disconnected, and the reader wonders whether he is attempting to show the jarring differences between the prairie and the city or if he has not managed to illustrate the ways in which they do, in fact, blend together. Though the prairie is a place of such immense space as to allow a similar space in a poem, the spaces are at times too large for a coherent idea to emerge, even upon a second reading. Perhaps this is intentional—the dizzying spaces at the edges of “civilized” Winnipeg are, to be sure, at odds with the city, but there is also something attractive about the structure that the city offers that is lacking in Toone’s collection. At times his lines are just a seeming string of words on top of words, and while the words themselves are heavily weighted, their relationship to one another is somewhat muddied.

Regardless, the reader who tackles this book ought to be ready for a challenge to his or her notion of spaces, both urban and rural; and, the rewards found in conquering the blanks must be not unlike the rewards one must have felt upon wandering into the prairie, homesteading, and conquering the brutal natural forces that are a constant reminder of the frailty of human nature. Toone’s often wry commentary on the contradictions of prairie life is delivered at a precise and measured pace, and a reader willing to slow his usual bustle will find much richness in the carefully selected lexicon of Toone’s landscape. His poems demand that you not get ahead of yourself, just as the landscape he writes of asks you to plan ahead, consider your surroundings, acknowledge your limitations. The natural world is both friend and foe, and in Toone’s poems, even “friend and foe” are to be questioned.


RHIANNON ROGSTAD is an American in Canada. She holds an MA from the University of Idaho and iscurrently a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. Originally from Seattle, Washington, she presently lives in London with her husband and two small sons.

Post date: 2010-02-01 04:31:04 UTC

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