Notes from Source: You can never leave the mind quickly enough,” Anne Carson says in her introduction to Short Talks. This is a handsome, slim, vertical book, a mischievous book, a short book of very short pieces that seems large in scope and implication. “Early one morning words were missing,” are the first words of the introduction. We are told how the narrator questioned three old women working in their field and copied down in 53 fascicles everything they said. “The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story.” Fascicle — instalment, according to the OED — is from the Latin fasciculus, diminutive of fascis, the plural of which, fasces, is a bundle of rods — emblems of authority — carried before the high magistrate by one who executes sentence on offenders. The new words, these fascicles, must have been deemed dangerous, for they were taken up by men and locked in a crate. So now, with care, the narrator “talks.” Each title proclaims its text’s brevity and connection with the human voice. Messages overlap – – to confuse the men? There’s comedy and tragedy, sharp detail, lovely images. There’s a calling on historical figures. To authenticate? To ground? To broaden the field? We are presented with Aristotle, Seurat, Gertrude Stein, Prokofiev, Ovid, Parmenides, Braque, Brigitte Bardot, Kafka, Van Gogh, Camille Claudel, Mona Lisa, Rembrandt, Sylvia Plath, Madame Bovary, Milton, Noah, the Brontes, Dr Deyman, Emily Dickinson, Dostoyevski, Hlderlin, and asked what are they about? what do they want? Their petulant cameos in these pages seem light in inverse proportion to their heavy reputations.

Further Notes: Place: Fredericton Publisher: University of New Brunswick