“Laurie MacFayden’s White Shirt is the sort of garment that appeals
and reveals far more than it conceals. Love, longing, loss and desire
drip and swirl like the poet’s own Pollock-inspired cover art. Simple strategies
work well here: the Tower-of-Babel adjectival pileup that describes
one babelicious mouth in ‘dear life’ leads into other catalogues
and accumulations throughout the book. Once in a while,
as in ‘the knowing,’ the lusty shout turns reflective and insightful.”— Alberta Views Arts & Culture Issue, December 2010
(the one with Robert Kroetsch on the cover!)
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Beneath the White Shirt: Passion, tenderness, vivid colour
Lovely review of White Shirt from George Elliott Clarke
in Sunday’s Halifax Chronicle Herald:
“White Shirt announces itself with stunning cover art by MacFayden herself. The cover art, Allegra, its violent lashings and splatters of paint, testifies to MacFayden’s sensibility: Her work is ejaculations, vivid, colourful, clashing, all indelibly marking the white page. Her first poem, my date with jackson pollock, is explicit about this esthetic: “i want the spatter! but he’s / cleaned himself up / i want loose fields, / vigorous lines, angry smears!”(Come to think of it, MacFayden’s cover painting also recalls the black, yellow, red explosion that is the cover for Irving Layton’s poetry book Fornalutx. She also seems to share his admirable frankness.)”
Clarke continues: “There’s mucho — even macho — passion here. There’s tenderness, too, as when the poet recalls an exhilarating day riding 10-speeds with a girlfriend, the twain, “just grinning like hell and knowing that, oh man, we are best friends, we are invisible,
we are invincible, we are fifteen.”
“White Shirt is a fine collection — especially recommended for readers who usually ignore poetry.”
UPDATE: White Shirt was recently long-listed for the Alberta Readers Choice Awards.
I’ll be reading from it on Saturday, Dec. 4 at the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Book Lover’s Christmas Sale, Stanley Milner Library (downtown Edmonton), 2:30 p.m.
5 minutes avec chemise blanche
on the nightstand:
outliers by malcolm gladwell; left hook by george bowering
on the iPod:
david gray; emmylou harris; the supremes; abba; kd lang; the fugitives; justin rutledge; kate rusby; laura love; rufus wainwright
what white shirt had for breakfast:
egg, potato, spinach & red bean burrito; two coffees with homo milk
SAY WORD / SAY WHAT?:
‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry.’
~ Emily Dickinson
cufflinks of the week:
garlic grilled cheese sandwich at cafe mosaic; raving poets open-mic at the kasbar (wednesday) jocko benoit at greenwoods’ bookshoppe (thursday).
spatherdab 