Chapter 15 Toronto in Type
680 Words
Any talk about local literature begins and ends with the same tomes: In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. Time for something new? Here are ten titles for all tastes.
• From Allan Gardens to the (Metropolitan) Zoo, Lynn Crosbie's Alphabet City is a suite of poems that offers an intensely personal geography. Look for it in her collection Queen Rat.
• Hugh Garner's 1950 Cabbagetown is a gritty narrative about being down and out at Dundas and Sherbourne.
• Moody Food, a novel by Ray Robertson, is both an anthem and elegy to rock 'n' roll. Local boy Bill Hansen meets charismatic southerner Thomas Graham and together they take a wild, drug-fueled ride through 1960s Yorkville.
• Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring, infused with Caribbean folklore, visits a future Toronto where only the poor, the powerless, and the predators remain after the wealthy have fled to a safe suburban outer circle. It won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, and it climaxes with a supernatural duel atop the CN Tower.
• King Leary by Paul Quarrington is a novel about the life and times of Percival Leary, an old-time star player for the Toronto Maple Leaves (note that spelling: this must be fiction). This odd, heartbreaking hockey tale won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987.
• In Guy Gavriel Kay's Tolkienesque The Summer Tree, a party of unwitting adventurers vanishes from the middle of Philosopher's Walk right into a world of wizards and enchantment. It's the first book in Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, which also includes The Wandering Fire and The Darkest Road.
• Tough breaks and heartaches are the daily fare of the Nine Men Who laughed, Austin Clarke's bitter story collection about West Indian immigrants trying to beat the odds.
• Acting Detective William Murdoch investigates a grisly murder in which his estranged father is the prime suspect in author Maureen Jennings' let loose the Dogs. Set in Victorian Toronto, these moody mysteries are as authentic as they are engaging. This is the fourth book in the series that includes Under the Dragon's Tail, Except the Dying, and Poor Tom is Cold.
• Daniel Jones's posthumously published The People One Knows is an almost-autobiographical assembly of vignettes set in the early 80's Queen West arts scene.
• Take a ride around the old Canadian National Exhibition with Wild Mouse. Three stories by Derek McCormack and five poems by Chris Chambers feature a freak, a carny, and a Ferris wheel. Silly and sad in the way good nostalgia should be, the book also has great black-and-white photos.
CIVIC TONGUE
In 2001, Dennis Lee became our city's first-ever Poet Laureate. Best known for his children's verses Alligator Pie and Jelly Belly, Lee has also written a handful of adult works. Civil Elegies and Other Poems, which won the Governor General's Award in 1972, is deeply rooted in Toronto. Poems in the book include
"Brunswick Avenue" and "High Park,
by Grenadier Pond." After his official
appointment, Lee told reporters he's
not going to start figuring out rhymes
for "budget crisis."
A REAL NUT Milton Acorn truly lived the life of the poet. Born in Charlottetown, P.E.I., the cigar-chomping, working-class writer lived all over the country. His time in Toronto was not without incident. Like the summer of 1962, when he tried to read his poems aloud in Allan Gardens and was ticketed by a plainclothes cop. We're not too clear on what the actual charge was, but Acorn returned with friends the next week and read again. Again, he was ticketed. This scene repeated itself every weekend that summer, with the press capturing the whole free speech fiasco.
Through most of the 1970s, Acorn lived and worked in a room at the down-at-the-heels Waverley Hotel at College and Spadina. Actually, he lived in many rooms. Seems Acorn was convinced the RCMP, suspicious of his left-wing political views, was bugging his room, so he constantly moved around in
the hotel to keep
the spies at bay.
- Writer
