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Arleen Pare's second collection of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books), won the Governor General's Award for English poetry in 2014. It explores the geography and history of the area between the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers that includes the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and a Trappist monastery.
Born and raised in Montreal, Pare received Sociology, History and Social Work degrees from McGill University, then moved to Vancouver where she worked in bureaucratic office situations for two decades. She received a Master's degree in Adult Education from UBC, and a Master's of Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, where she now lives.
As a manager of a large corporation becomes more oppressed by the bureaucratic nature of her work, Frances, the protagonist in Arleen Pare's "mixed genre novel" Paper Trail (NeWest, 2007), has regular conversations with the ghost of Franz Kafka; she learns that she appears as a character in a manuscript he is writing; she inexplicably hears Leider music; and she starts to lose small body parts. Written halfway between poetry and prose, Paper Trail questions the rat race work ethic many of us adhere to, more often out of necessity than choice. In 2008, Pare won the fifth annual City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for Paper Trail. Acting Mayor Dean Fortin and Brian Butler presented her with a cheque for $5,000. Paper Trail was also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize for Poetry.
Set in the 1970s and '80s, Leaving Now (Caitlin, 2012) is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love another woman. A mother finds herself on the verge of a life altering decision. Are her children old enough to get by with less of her? She wonders if she did enough, was there enough. While facing this decision she meets Gudrun, an old woman who appears and disappears in the kitchen and seems to have stepped right out of the pages of Women Who Run With the Wolves. Gudrun has a need to tell her own story about children and leaving. Pare smooths out hidden questions with phrases that have enough tenderness to wrap around the heart and give it an extra little pump. Leaving Now contains only what is essential.
Pare writes: "No one cried that morning, sitting still and staring. No one said I'm sorry, no one yelled, no one smashed the table with a fist, no one hit out, no one called a lawyer, no one called the grandparents, nobody swore or cursed, nobody threw a vase or a rolling pin, nobody threw a fit, nobody ran to the knife drawer, no one stomped to their room, nobody slammed a door, no one plugged their fingers in their ears, no one said how dare you, no one screamed, no one said how sad. Only the table between us. The clock over the fridge. Finally they said, Can we go now and play with Davey? Their eyes studying the oilcloth. Yes, I said, but come back in twenty minutes, before I have to go. Already I had less right to ask, but I asked them anyway, to come back so I could kiss them good-bye, hold them in that kitchen, that was our kitchen, before I opened the sliding door and walked away."
In the book-length poem The Girls with Stone Faces (Brick Books, 2017) Pare writes about the cohabitating Canadian artists Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Pare takes readers on a tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Pare looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and love.
Earle Street (Talonbooks, 2020) focuses on a specific street and a specific tree growing there to explore streets and urban living. The collection of poetry is in four sections - each of which differently considers the poet's home street in a specific way: as a river, as an arboretum, as a window, and lastly as a whole world.
Arleen Pare's seventh title, First (Brick Books $22.95) documents the search for her first best friend using prose poem narrative. Pare also explores other "firsts" such as realizing she is part of a cosmos. All this is done through a process of remembering what fellow poet Fred Wah more precisely describes as "cracks of memory" that are "heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire."
Pare has published work in several anthologies and publications, including Geist, CV II, and This Side of West. She co-edited Portfolio Milieu 2004.
BOOKS:
Paper Trail (NeWest, 2007) $19.95 978-1-897126-13-4
Leaving Now (Caitlin, 2012) $18.95 978-1-894759-74-8
Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books, 2014) $20 978-1-926829-87-6
He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin, 2015) $18 978-1927575925
The Girls with Stone Faces (Brick Books, 2017) $20 978-1-77131-464-0
Earle Street (Talonbooks, 2020) $$16.95 978-1-77201-250-7
First (Brick Books, 2021) $22.95 9781771315425
Time Out of Time (Dagger Editions, 2022) $20 978-1-77386-079-4
[BCBW 2022] "Fiction"
Time Out of Time
by Arleen Paré (Caitlin $20)
•
After Villon by Roger Farr
(New Star $16)
Review by Brett Josef Grubisic
The aphorism “Poetry is philosophy in evening-wear” appears midway through Arleen Paré’s latest poetry collection, Time Out of Time.
The idea, courtesy of Ontario artist Kevin Heslop, is provocative, as it points out the serious side of poetry as well as the genre’s affinity for aesthetic finery.
In the case of the new poetry collections by Victoria’s Paré and Gabriola Island’s Roger Farr, “evening-wear” takes the form of pensive and inquisitive volumes singing with reverence for two special but dead poets. Their volumes are meditations on poetic heritage and forebears—with each poet paying homage to the works, lives, and accomplishments of literary influences and inspirations. As cerebral and eulogistic as that might sound, happily, Paré’s Time Out of Time and Farr’s After Villon are also playful, funny, heartfelt and stimulating.
Farr’s new poems could strike a casual reader as impossibly avant-garde. Dada-adjacent lines—such as “queer: when that muttnik cries prang! PRANG!,” “National aqua chattis are gross mooses,” and “Funcanny Valley what a face the MLA has”—are like conceptual evening-wear: perhaps made for appreciation by the cognoscenti but difficult to anyone else.
Give it time, though, honestly. Acclimate by reading through Farr’s slim volume more than once. And pay close attention to the footnotes: informative, clever and wry, they’re invaluable little tour guides that communicate in standard English.
Farr’s muse, Francois Villon was a legendary poet born in Paris around 1431 who died under mysterious (and, in fact, unknown) circumstances at thirty-two. In his time, Villon was known as a thief, wanderer, bard, inmate, subversive, provocateur and gang member. He challenged literary conventions, and he scattered slang, codes and wordplay throughout in his poems. “You use words to communicate ideas to certain people, while deceiving others,” Farr writes. With innovative verse, Villon sketched the rogues, outliers and criminals of the Parisian subculture. He addressed poetic staples too: love and heartache, old age and death, lost ideals and regrets.
Farr translates Villon and composes à la Villon (and, in the poem “Compario,” he offers ten different translations—including one by Google Translate—of a single quatrain of Villon’s). The pieces in After Villon imagine backdrops: a note beneath the four stanzas of “Ballad of Erotic Misery” adds, “The soundtrack to this ballad consisted of rumbling coal carts, screaming fishmongers and chestnut vendors, church bells, horse and donkeys and pigs and dogs. It would be considered Romantic to suggest it was first presented at a tavern, in front of an ex-lover’s house, in court, or perhaps a bath house.”
In poems like “Ballad for Friends, With Benefits,” “All Standard Language Shall Be Fried,” and “Ballad of Counter-truths,” Farr repurposes Villon’s poetic tropes for twenty-first century realities while managing to meld the disparate eras too. (Are 2022 and 1444 that different? The irreverent list of “Counter-truths”—which mocks “universal knowledge and the spooks of Truth, Law, and Fidelity”—mimics Villon’s style and outlook but is applicable right here, right now for readers to attach to local circumstances.)
In “Five Ballads in Jargon,” a feat of syllables and rhymes, Farr revisits poems “sometimes attributed to Villon” and thought to be composed in 1455 during the trial of the gang he was associated with. In these pieces, which “probably hummed for a century & a half before they were transcribed by ear,” Farr discerns coded warnings for friends and accomplices to steer clear of the authorities.
Arleen Paré’s relationship to a predecessor has fewer complications. Time Out of Time was written in “praise and celebration” of Etel Adnan (1925–2021). Born in Lebanon, Adnan worked as a journalist and professor alongside her partner, Simone Fattal, in a handful of countries after obtaining a philosophy degree in France.
For Paré, reading Time (Adnan’s 2019 collection of poems) amounted to “love at first page.” Paré writes, slyly, “my wife doesn’t mind she knows / I have fallen in love with an arrant ideal.” A record of “long-distance affection,” the elegant and spare Time Out of Time describes a poet enthralled by another lesbian artist, “haunted” by her phrases and infatuated with their beauty. In the poem “Etel Adnan 3,” the poet shouts out her willingness to “get lost once again / or forever / in your words,” while “Etel Adnan 9” celebrates the profundity of Adnan’s economical poems: “does brevity not bear / its fair share / of depth.”
Whether she addresses weather (rain that’s “insistent as pins”), wonderment (“the world is a staggering place”), the “freaky fragility” of the planet, social invisibility, the blessing of a long romantic partnership, or aging and death (“is there anything that does not lead in this dreamy direction”), Paré ties her observations to Adnan’s poetry. In effect, she creates a dialogue—a dazzling exchange of heady ideas—between souls that never met in real life but really ought to have.
After Villon: 9781554201877
Time Out of Time: 9781773860794
Brett Josef Grubisic has published fivenovels including The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck. He resides on Salt Spring Island.
[BCBW 2022]
Born and raised in Montreal, Pare received Sociology, History and Social Work degrees from McGill University, then moved to Vancouver where she worked in bureaucratic office situations for two decades. She received a Master's degree in Adult Education from UBC, and a Master's of Creative Writing from the University of Victoria, where she now lives.
As a manager of a large corporation becomes more oppressed by the bureaucratic nature of her work, Frances, the protagonist in Arleen Pare's "mixed genre novel" Paper Trail (NeWest, 2007), has regular conversations with the ghost of Franz Kafka; she learns that she appears as a character in a manuscript he is writing; she inexplicably hears Leider music; and she starts to lose small body parts. Written halfway between poetry and prose, Paper Trail questions the rat race work ethic many of us adhere to, more often out of necessity than choice. In 2008, Pare won the fifth annual City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for Paper Trail. Acting Mayor Dean Fortin and Brian Butler presented her with a cheque for $5,000. Paper Trail was also nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize for Poetry.
Set in the 1970s and '80s, Leaving Now (Caitlin, 2012) is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love another woman. A mother finds herself on the verge of a life altering decision. Are her children old enough to get by with less of her? She wonders if she did enough, was there enough. While facing this decision she meets Gudrun, an old woman who appears and disappears in the kitchen and seems to have stepped right out of the pages of Women Who Run With the Wolves. Gudrun has a need to tell her own story about children and leaving. Pare smooths out hidden questions with phrases that have enough tenderness to wrap around the heart and give it an extra little pump. Leaving Now contains only what is essential.
Pare writes: "No one cried that morning, sitting still and staring. No one said I'm sorry, no one yelled, no one smashed the table with a fist, no one hit out, no one called a lawyer, no one called the grandparents, nobody swore or cursed, nobody threw a vase or a rolling pin, nobody threw a fit, nobody ran to the knife drawer, no one stomped to their room, nobody slammed a door, no one plugged their fingers in their ears, no one said how dare you, no one screamed, no one said how sad. Only the table between us. The clock over the fridge. Finally they said, Can we go now and play with Davey? Their eyes studying the oilcloth. Yes, I said, but come back in twenty minutes, before I have to go. Already I had less right to ask, but I asked them anyway, to come back so I could kiss them good-bye, hold them in that kitchen, that was our kitchen, before I opened the sliding door and walked away."
In the book-length poem The Girls with Stone Faces (Brick Books, 2017) Pare writes about the cohabitating Canadian artists Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Pare takes readers on a tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Pare looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and love.
Earle Street (Talonbooks, 2020) focuses on a specific street and a specific tree growing there to explore streets and urban living. The collection of poetry is in four sections - each of which differently considers the poet's home street in a specific way: as a river, as an arboretum, as a window, and lastly as a whole world.
Arleen Pare's seventh title, First (Brick Books $22.95) documents the search for her first best friend using prose poem narrative. Pare also explores other "firsts" such as realizing she is part of a cosmos. All this is done through a process of remembering what fellow poet Fred Wah more precisely describes as "cracks of memory" that are "heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire."
Pare has published work in several anthologies and publications, including Geist, CV II, and This Side of West. She co-edited Portfolio Milieu 2004.
BOOKS:
Paper Trail (NeWest, 2007) $19.95 978-1-897126-13-4
Leaving Now (Caitlin, 2012) $18.95 978-1-894759-74-8
Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books, 2014) $20 978-1-926829-87-6
He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin, 2015) $18 978-1927575925
The Girls with Stone Faces (Brick Books, 2017) $20 978-1-77131-464-0
Earle Street (Talonbooks, 2020) $$16.95 978-1-77201-250-7
First (Brick Books, 2021) $22.95 9781771315425
Time Out of Time (Dagger Editions, 2022) $20 978-1-77386-079-4
[BCBW 2022] "Fiction"
Time Out of Time
by Arleen Paré (Caitlin $20)
•
After Villon by Roger Farr
(New Star $16)
Review by Brett Josef Grubisic
The aphorism “Poetry is philosophy in evening-wear” appears midway through Arleen Paré’s latest poetry collection, Time Out of Time.
The idea, courtesy of Ontario artist Kevin Heslop, is provocative, as it points out the serious side of poetry as well as the genre’s affinity for aesthetic finery.
In the case of the new poetry collections by Victoria’s Paré and Gabriola Island’s Roger Farr, “evening-wear” takes the form of pensive and inquisitive volumes singing with reverence for two special but dead poets. Their volumes are meditations on poetic heritage and forebears—with each poet paying homage to the works, lives, and accomplishments of literary influences and inspirations. As cerebral and eulogistic as that might sound, happily, Paré’s Time Out of Time and Farr’s After Villon are also playful, funny, heartfelt and stimulating.
Farr’s new poems could strike a casual reader as impossibly avant-garde. Dada-adjacent lines—such as “queer: when that muttnik cries prang! PRANG!,” “National aqua chattis are gross mooses,” and “Funcanny Valley what a face the MLA has”—are like conceptual evening-wear: perhaps made for appreciation by the cognoscenti but difficult to anyone else.
Give it time, though, honestly. Acclimate by reading through Farr’s slim volume more than once. And pay close attention to the footnotes: informative, clever and wry, they’re invaluable little tour guides that communicate in standard English.
Farr’s muse, Francois Villon was a legendary poet born in Paris around 1431 who died under mysterious (and, in fact, unknown) circumstances at thirty-two. In his time, Villon was known as a thief, wanderer, bard, inmate, subversive, provocateur and gang member. He challenged literary conventions, and he scattered slang, codes and wordplay throughout in his poems. “You use words to communicate ideas to certain people, while deceiving others,” Farr writes. With innovative verse, Villon sketched the rogues, outliers and criminals of the Parisian subculture. He addressed poetic staples too: love and heartache, old age and death, lost ideals and regrets.
Farr translates Villon and composes à la Villon (and, in the poem “Compario,” he offers ten different translations—including one by Google Translate—of a single quatrain of Villon’s). The pieces in After Villon imagine backdrops: a note beneath the four stanzas of “Ballad of Erotic Misery” adds, “The soundtrack to this ballad consisted of rumbling coal carts, screaming fishmongers and chestnut vendors, church bells, horse and donkeys and pigs and dogs. It would be considered Romantic to suggest it was first presented at a tavern, in front of an ex-lover’s house, in court, or perhaps a bath house.”
In poems like “Ballad for Friends, With Benefits,” “All Standard Language Shall Be Fried,” and “Ballad of Counter-truths,” Farr repurposes Villon’s poetic tropes for twenty-first century realities while managing to meld the disparate eras too. (Are 2022 and 1444 that different? The irreverent list of “Counter-truths”—which mocks “universal knowledge and the spooks of Truth, Law, and Fidelity”—mimics Villon’s style and outlook but is applicable right here, right now for readers to attach to local circumstances.)
In “Five Ballads in Jargon,” a feat of syllables and rhymes, Farr revisits poems “sometimes attributed to Villon” and thought to be composed in 1455 during the trial of the gang he was associated with. In these pieces, which “probably hummed for a century & a half before they were transcribed by ear,” Farr discerns coded warnings for friends and accomplices to steer clear of the authorities.
Arleen Paré’s relationship to a predecessor has fewer complications. Time Out of Time was written in “praise and celebration” of Etel Adnan (1925–2021). Born in Lebanon, Adnan worked as a journalist and professor alongside her partner, Simone Fattal, in a handful of countries after obtaining a philosophy degree in France.
For Paré, reading Time (Adnan’s 2019 collection of poems) amounted to “love at first page.” Paré writes, slyly, “my wife doesn’t mind she knows / I have fallen in love with an arrant ideal.” A record of “long-distance affection,” the elegant and spare Time Out of Time describes a poet enthralled by another lesbian artist, “haunted” by her phrases and infatuated with their beauty. In the poem “Etel Adnan 3,” the poet shouts out her willingness to “get lost once again / or forever / in your words,” while “Etel Adnan 9” celebrates the profundity of Adnan’s economical poems: “does brevity not bear / its fair share / of depth.”
Whether she addresses weather (rain that’s “insistent as pins”), wonderment (“the world is a staggering place”), the “freaky fragility” of the planet, social invisibility, the blessing of a long romantic partnership, or aging and death (“is there anything that does not lead in this dreamy direction”), Paré ties her observations to Adnan’s poetry. In effect, she creates a dialogue—a dazzling exchange of heady ideas—between souls that never met in real life but really ought to have.
After Villon: 9781554201877
Time Out of Time: 9781773860794
Brett Josef Grubisic has published fivenovels including The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck. He resides on Salt Spring Island.
[BCBW 2022]
