Ossuaries by Dionne Brand

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW Verse Dionne Brand. Ossuaries. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 2010. 124 pages. Can$18.99 / $15.50. isbn978-0 7710-1734-6 Throughout her poetry, Dionne Brand merges a questioning, pas sionate, often lonely sensibilitywith a commitment to political activism and justice for historical and recent wrongs. As titles such as Primitive Offensiveand No Language IsNeutral suggest, her earliest poetry some times lacked subtlety,but her most recent book-length poems, Thirsty, Inventory, and now Ossuaries, pow erfully combine reflection, inven tive diction, insight into the flows of global politics, and concern for the wounds borne by individuals. Less explicitly topical than Inven tory's brave and electrifying assess ment of the miasmatic new cen tury, Ossuaries crosses diverse times and spaces to portray a world riven by violence perpetrated on grand and minute scales: "some damage I had expected, but no one / expects the violence of glances, of offices, / of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors." As this pas sage suggests, Brand is attuned to the rhythms of daily life and the ambivalence that accompanies rou tine. Her poetry records a struggle between desires and the sense that, even iffulfilled,desire must yield to yet more unsettled searching: "how to say Iwish for permanence, / then I cast itoff as dullness, stupidity, / then wish again for certainty." Ossuaries is replete with enig matic and haunting passages that reflecton the fragile quality of the present: "detonations, bullets, / there is theamber frissonof charged particles, / gravitational force so extravagant it is silence itself." The formof thispoem is well suited toan era of both creative and destructive globalization and its new experi ence of time and space. Dispensing almost entirely with periods and resorting to strategic uses of the comma, Ossuaries is both gloriously and maddeningly paratactic, enforc ing connections between objects, ideas, sensations, and actions with out explicitly indicatingwhat those connections might be. Such enforced intimacy is a pulse that propels the reader through the poem: "the spiked municipalities rationed their handouts / of freebread, freebicy cles, free bracelets / free sugars, free plastics, free razor blades, / free bul lets, free coverings, free enclosures, / free fences, free, free, absolutely free freeness." This subtle shift from 701World Literature Today the excesses of freedom?imagined as more and more stuff without the hindrance of responsibility?to the constrictions of enclosure typifies Dionne Brand at her best: impas sioned politics and imaginative,pas sionate poetry. Jim Hannan LeMoyne College Cuerpo plural:Antologia de lapoesia hispanoamericana contempor?nea. Gustavo Guerrero, ed. Valencia / Madrid. Pre-Textos / Instituto Cer vantes. 2010. 616 pages + dvd. 25. isbn978-84-92913-17-6 Gustavo Guerrero's anthology of Latin American poetry includes fif ty-seven poets fromnineteen Latin American countries and, curiously, one from the United States. This selection aims to present theworks of a new generation of poets born between 1959 and 1979. While a number of these poets began pub lishing as early as the 1980s and today range between thirty and fifty years of age, all now have many col lections ofpoetry to theircredit and have achieved recognition, not only in theirrespective countries but also internationally. In his lengthy yet lucid intro duction, Guerrero indicates that the point ofdeparture forthisanthology is the generational kinship that this group ofpoets enjoys.He points out that these poets share the legacy of Latin American modernism, led by Rub?n Dario in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the experi mental works of theLatin American avant-garde period of the 1920s and '30s,aswell as thediverse social and political impulses of thepoetry pub lished in the 1960s and '70s.While thisnewer generation ofpoets rarely pays direct tribute to any of these traditions, their ownlives have wit- fl^^^Hjf^^^HKi? J^^^?I?????^^K? nessed othermore recent historical turning points, such asthe fall oftheH^^^^^^^^^^^Hf^^^HHS^I^^^I Berlin Wall, the attacks of September B^^^^^^^^^^^H^^^HHHH|[^H l and the impactof theInternetand the digital age?which is saythat H^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HHH^^^HH they arethe H^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H^^h^^^^I andpostmodern values. Theirfl^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HHHH^^^H attitudes express "una vocaci?n des- 9H mitificadora radical, desacralizadora HHHHHHHHH y antianacr?nica," which gives little BflB credence to conception prof?tica HHH|||^^^H|HH|||| del poeta ni en su trascendencia

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