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The Fat Lady Struck Dumb

by David Waltner-Toews

In The Fat Lady Struck Dumb, his sixth book of poems, David Waltner-Toews convicts himself of “the crime” identified in one of his cheerfully reflective poems: “that a man can still be amateur.” Fortunately Waltner-Toews is the best kind of amateur: accomplished and respectful of his craft.

For the widely travelled Kitchener, Ontario, veterinary epidemiologist and environmental consultant, verse is a vehicle for insights found at airports, on a Kathmandu street, or on a late-evening stroll. Waltner-Toews’s poetic voice unites a working knowledge of human triumphs and debacles with a chastened yet ultimately hopeful perspective on the planet’s – if not humanity’s – future. It is hope, after all, that “strikes the fat lady dumb” and postpones the ending of earth’s unfolding opera.

His best poems see a playfully erudite vocabulary at work in pared down, supple lines. Even reflections on such sobering themes as the tendency of human cleverness to create its own ever more fatal backlash rarely preclude a lick of humour. Waltner-Toews can be cheeky in both his politics and his choice of titles. From Seamus Heaney he pilfers the title “Death of a Naturalist.” Later he helps himself to Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.” In the latter poem Stevens’ cockatoo becomes a stern roadside crow glimpsed on the way to church. The crow then morphs into a stern feminist priest who silences the speaker. To him the “brave new heaven” she proclaims just looks like a “songless desert” afflicted by “chronic poetry shortages,/lineups for a scrap of humour.”

In its closing pages the volume teeters toward self-indulgence, with a few poems too narrowly addressed to friends and family. As well, poems such as “John Donne Meets Chaos Theory” try a little too hard to program sparks of wit and fancy from the collision of science and poetry. Overall, though, this is an appealing, worldly, and thoughtful collection.

 

Reviewer: Harry Vandervlist

Publisher: Brick Books

DETAILS

Price: $14

Page Count: 128 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894078-12-8

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2000-12

Categories: Poetry

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