Book Title:  Surreal Estate:  13 Canadian poets under the influence (poetry)

Author:  Stuart Ross, editor

Publishing Company:  The Mercury Press

Year:  2004

# of Pages: 169

ISBN #:  1-55128-109-0 

$17.95 Canada

$14.95 U.S. 

3 ˝ Stars 

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner 

Poet, fiction writer, and editor Stuart Ross “pulls together a small but wildly varied community of writers” whose work has been influenced by surrealism.  “Surrealism,” Ross writes, “is a dirty word these days, forbidden on the backs of poetry books,” but this collection provides a delightful, thoughtful alternative to the mainstream of poetry. 

Included in the selection are works by Gil Adamson, Tara Azzopardi, Gary Barwin, Daniel F. Bradley, Alice Burdick, Kevin Connolly, William A. Davison, Beatriz Hausner, Mark Laba, Lance La Rocque, Lillian Necakov, Steve Venright, and Ross himself. 

Among the treats inside are these lines from Gil Adamson's “Vapour Trail”:   

I am a reckless drive into the dark

where no tank lasts long enough

where no message can reach home

where none of this counts at all;  

these from Kevin Connolly's “Repossession”:   

When they board up the hobby shop

only the moon notices—and the stationary

conductor waving in a train no longer

circling the village, but caught forever

in a chilly tunnel two peaks

north of the cheerless alpine church; 

and this, from William A. Davison's, “At Night”: “At night I am visited by beings who eat human hair.” 

Ross has also included a brief biography and statement from each poet, and these are as entertaining and insightful as the works themselves.   

This is a thinking anthology, “a catalogue of the crazed things the unconscious mind can conjure up.”