Literary Review of Canada June 2022

Kelly Baron is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto and the publisher of the literary magazine The Puritan. Kelvin Browne is the executive director of the Gardiner Museum, in Toronto. Susan Crean is the author of several books, including The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr and Finding Mr. Wong. Patrice Dutil founded the Literary Review of Canada in 1991. Keith Garebian has just published two poetry collections, Finger to Finger and In the Bowl of My Eye. Tomas Hachard wrote the novel City in Flames, due out this fall. Rose Hendrie is the magazine’s associate editor. Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University. Gayatri Kumar reads and writes in Toronto. David Macfarlane is the award-winning author of several books. His latest is Likeness: Fathers, Sons, a Portrait. Sandra Martin wrote…

THIS JANUARY, archeologists in northwest Spain credited a badger with digging up a stash of ancient coins, minted in faraway places like Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Lyons, and Rome. Around the same time, not to be outdone by a burrowing animal operating in the dark, an amateur sleuth with a metal detector found a Henry III gold penny on a farm near Devon, England. He went on to sell it at auction for L540,000. Then, this spring, a puppy lagotto romagnolo, a breed generally known for hunting truffles, went on his very first walk with his new family in a field near the Irish Sea. The little guy promptly sniffed out fifteen sovereign coins, likely from the nineteenth century and worth L6,000 (about enough to buy one kilogram of the elusive white…

RE: Special Temporary Measures by Dominique Clément (May) INTERESTINGLY, DOMINIQUE CLÉMENT POINTS OUT that historians and other scholars have generally viewed a government’s resort to emergency powers in Canada critically, while the public has generally been supportive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to which the Emergencies Act is explicitly subject, provides a practical test for assessing whether limitations of rights and freedoms “can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” An important part of any assessment would be to scrutinize the regulations made under an emergency statute to see whether they could meet the Charter test. As far as I can see, scholars, as well as journalists and filmmakers, have seldom examined such regulations closely. At whom were the exceptional powers addressed? To whom was special authority granted? For…

IN RECENT DECADES, THE GLOBAL BATTLE for democracy has produced numerous brave, heroic leaders — Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa in Poland, Nelson Mandela in South Africa — who have overcome enormous odds to defeat dictators and lead their countries into freedom. Until this year, Ukraine had not produced such a leader. It’s not that Ukraine fell to autocracy after gaining independence in 1991. Indeed, it became one of the freest and most competitive countries of the former Soviet Union. While post-Communist Russia has been led only by Boris Yeltsin and his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, power in Kyiv has traded hands four times through open and democratic elections. Ukraine has hosted a healthy and contentious media, robust opposition, and strong protections for minority rights. Most recently, in 2019, Volodymyr…

Deadly Neighbours: A Tale of Colonialism, Cattle Feuds, Murder and Vigilantes in the Far West Chad Reimer Caitlin Press 234 pages, softcover LOCATED IN DOWNTOWN MONTGOMERY, not far from the Alabama State Capitol, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in April 2018, to honour thousands of victims of racially motivated lynchings. At the centre of the large hilltop site, 800 weathered steel columns fill the air, representing every individual county in the United States where a “racial terror lynching took place” between 1877 and 1950. The names of victims are engraved on these columns, each the size of a man. Elsewhere, hundreds of Mason jars are filled with dirt from where assassinations are known to have occurred. “It is not a conventional museum,” the New York Timesreported several years ago. “It is…

Stories I Might Regret Telling You Martha Wainwright Random House Canada 256 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook MARTHA WAINWRIGHT HAS ONE of the most expressive, distinctive voices in the pop music pantheon. In it you can hear echoes of her famous parents, the performers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, and hints of her brother, Rufus, the crooner, but its beauty has an unpolished aspect all its own, one that can surprise with its raw edge. If only the singer’s narrative voice were so singular. In her slim memoir, Wainwright does get raw, dishing enough surface dirt to keep rubberneckers engaged. Despite the ample sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, though, Stories I Might Regret Telling You is more bluntly revealing than reflective. Her candour and conversational style are appealing, but there’s a faint yet…