Winnipeg Free Press Review

John Toone debut swift, startling

By: Jennifer Still
Winnipeg Free Press – May 24th, 2009

Winnipeg poet John Toone's debut, From Out of Nowhere (Turnstone, 102 pages, $17), has boldly emerged like a call from the shadows of the Fort Rouge bridge: swift, startling and resonant.

This collection of long poems, which mythologizes the prairie-city boy landscape, challenges "the rules of language / and the game" with a cowboy-cum-word-slinger wit, "giving life to the tired / the old / cliché."

Toone's strongest swing is in the line, his linguistic lasso, which he draws with a tight hold on the sublime: "the line is dark the line is bold / and this is where I am at home."

Invigorating and alive to the risk and play of language, "starving for the undivided attention, a vacant lot," Toone's poems seek an attentiveness in form and content: "tell me something / I don't already know / in a different way."

Post date: 2009-11-03 05:00:14 UTC

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