Treble [Paperback]

Evelyn Lau's Treble disappointed me. Having read only her memoirs, I had high expectations: her prose is hard-hitting and effective. For the most part, Treble was filled with unsurprising, pedestrian narrative poems. As they are needlessly long, I won't quote any in full, but here's a fairly typical example, "The Sinking Houses":

It was only a landscape painting,
tucked away in the back of the gallery-
a green peninsula scattered with houses,
a boat drifting in blue water.
But there were no boundaries
anywhere in this reflected world,
no gardens or fences or shielding trees
between the houses that were sinking
as if into quicksand, their tiny doors opening
onto darkness, the people gone.
I wanted to tell you a story
about the people with no boundaries,
to see the pain on your face like a flame
that burns neighbourhoods down,
but instead I told you about the dwarf
trapped inside the littlest orange house,
condemned to live alone forever.
We walked laughing out of the gallery . . .

Narrative poetry, I'll admit, is not my cup of tea, but I can appreciate it when it's done well. And by "well" I mean that it contains a vocabulary that is not anemic, has purpose, and still contains some powerful (or at least useful) metaphors and images. In "The Sinking Houses", the narrative jumps around too much; there is no clear context for Lau's descriptions or for details such as "the dwarf / trapped inside the littlest orange house, / condemned to live alone forever." It might be unfair to compare Lau to Ted Hughes, but for a fine example of narrative poetry the late Hughes' Birthday Letters instantly leaps to mind. The opening lines from Hughes's "The Rag Rug" demonstrated the difference I'm speaking of:

Somebody had made one. You admired it.
So you began to make your rag rug.
You needed to do it. Played on by lightnings
You needed an earth. Maybe. Or needed
To pull something out of yourself-
Some tapeworm of the psyche.

The clarity and urgency of these lines is the standard for which more Canadian poets, when writing narrative poetry, should aim. Side-stepping the charge that he was relying on the well-known tragic aspects of his life to evince emotion, Hughes creates the remarkable metaphor of a "tapeworm of the psyche", a powerful line of poetry that I don't think will ever leave me. The disjointed, all-over-the-map quality of Lau's poem contains nothing as memorable.
Many of Lau's poems are too melodramatic for my taste. Poems like "The Corn Maze" come with language that scores high on the histrionic scale: "other couples / stumbled in defeat. They crushed past us / in the heat." Still, Lau, like Laird, can write a decent line, such as in "Domesticity No2", where she writes about a face "folded in on itself, / an origami of anger." That's a brilliant image. But it's too bad she chokes the rest of her poems with unnecessary verbiage. Even the title of the book curls back to bite her: treble, in Britain, means something that is multiplied by three. And for me, there is certainly three times too much in these poems by way of explanation and irrelevant details.
One of Lau's more successful poems, "Migraine", works because she focuses her language. The poem develops slowly, methodically, as a migraine does, and-in contrast to so many of her other poems-logically. This creates a paradoxical tension because migraines have no relation to logic. Here's roughly the first half:

The aura is a rumour
of thunder in the distance,
building into a storm
that rattles the shutters
and the beads of the chandelier
before punching a hole
in the load bearing wall.

The tap of construction
through the double-glazed windows
splinters your skull.
A forty-watt bulb blazes
like an eclipse on your retina.

The language verges on meteorological cliche, but then Lau punches through with the unexpected "hole/ in the load bearing wall."And rather than inserting insignificant details in the next stanza, she continues, appropriately, with the more interesting language of construction. This poem is far more effective than "The Sinking Houses." I even like her ending: "Finally the surrender / to drugged sleep . . . in the absence of feeling, / an angels' chorus." I don't know exactly what that means, but somehow it's evocative enough to land on this side of comprehension and I continue to puzzle over it.
Ian LeTourneau (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

From internationally acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling writer Evelyn Lau comes her first collection of poetry in 10 years. Treble is everything we expect of Lau: it is precise, elegant, honest and powerful. It is also Lau's most mature work of poetry by far, exploring relationships between men and women with depth, empathy and a sensitive precision that is breathtaking and new. Lau explores "how people relate to each other, the things they reveal and the things they hide, their struggle for love and their spurning of it."

Evelyn Lau's first poetry collection, You Are Not Who You Claim (1990) won the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Prize; her second, Oedipal Dreams (1992), was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, making Lau the youngest person ever nominated for this prestigious prize (she was 20). Her poetry was selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry. Lau is also renowned as a prose writer. Her autobiographical Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid was published when she was 18 to worldwide acclaim. Over 100,000 copies have sold in Canada alone, and the book was published in 11 other territories. Her searing and arresting fiction--Fresh Girls and Other Stories, Choose Me and the novel Other Women--has been sold in the U.S. and around the world.