Literary Review of Canada January/February 2022

YEARS AGO, ON A STINT IN THE WORLD of corporate communications, I did some editorial work for a major pension plan. One brisk morning in January, I rode an elevator up a tower in downtown Toronto to kick off the project with several key executives. And although she would not be intimately involved with the details of the job, my boss rode along. A fly on the boardroom wall would have said that she contributed very little to the meeting; she barely said a word. But her presence was felt in the five or ten minutes it took us to get from the reception area to our seats. I watched in awe as she exchanged effortless small talk with our hosts and telegraphed enthusiasm for the conversation we were about to…

RE: And Change We Did by Joyce Wayne (December) Joyce Wayne’s riveting essay about her leftist youth was outstanding; I couldn’t put it down. The piece was all the more interesting for her reassessment of those times and her willingness to judge her past in a way so few of us are ready to do. It reminded me of the late Tony Judt’s wondering about his own past, how he had thought the 1968 student protests in Paris were so important, only to realize later that he had somehow overlooked the significance of the invasion of Czechoslovakia that same year. Antanas Sileika Toronto RE: My Brave Companion by Grant Hayter-Menzies (December) a very poignant and touching essay in the new Literary Review of Canada that will both touch your heart and make you cry. The Well-Read Naturalist…

Oh, would some Power the gift give us To see ourselves as others see us! — Robert Burns WHEN YOU WALK OUT OF THE Scottish Event Campus and travel west down the Clyde toward the Atlantic Ocean, passing the sleek menagerie of Glasgow’s revitalized waterfront and the fading remnants of the industry and empire and desolation that followed in their wake, you will eventually come upon the mouth of Gare Loch, on which sits a naval base known as Faslane, the home of Trident, Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Stretching before you, in the sublime beauty of the Scottish Highlands, will be some of Europe’s most pristine wilderness, while behind you sits a storied city that lives in the constant shadow of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, a silent but ever-present reminder that human…

A disappointed spire inside a squareof shrivelled walls. We’d come from school, mouthingmnemonic chants and math class rosarieswhose permanence snuffed to smoke, surprised by ruin.We’d seen it from the road a dozen times,but only now could tell it was a church.A cricket litany dispersed, embarrassedlike we’d caught the choir, so long disused,still in the middle of something. Walls stood firmbut inside there was only grass. Unechoing,unctionless, innocent of itself,as places are, a place persisted there,amenable, it seemed, to something new.But silent now, and we too coy to sing. Alastair Morrison is studying medicine at McMaster University.…

Wild Roses Are Worth It: Reimagining the Alberta Advantage Kevin Van Tighem Rocky Mountain Books 288 pages, softcover ALBERTANS ARE KEENLY AWARE OF our reputation. We are undertaxed pipeline fanatics who drive pickups, vote Conservative, and care less about climate change than about stopping Ottawa from stealing our oil money. This half-truth persists, in part, because even we sometimes see our largest industry as a stand‑in for Alberta itself. But the land existed before the fossil fuel craze, as it did before the agrarian projects that initially drove European settlement. With Wild Roses Are Worth It, Kevin Van Tighem insists that Alberta’s ecosystems should receive at least as much consideration in policy debates and the public imagination as its economy. One would be forgiven for cringing at the book’s title. Is this…

Crisis in Canada’s Policing: Why Change Is So Hard, and How We Can Get Real Reform in Our Police Forces John Sewell, with Christopher J. Williams James Lorimer & Company 224 pages, softcover and ebook ANYONE WHO TAKES A PRINCIPLED stand on a matter of public debate is bound to make enemies, and it would be an understatement to say John Sewell made some among the police during his time on Toronto City Council, which culminated with a short stint as mayor from 1978 to 1980. The police union hurled homophobic slurs at him for defending gay rights, labelled him a “cop hater” for criticizing law enforcement killings, and published a cartoon of a uniformed officer discarding his body in a garbage can when he lost his re-election bid. In other…