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1270 Scofflaw & the corn-fed media

Scofflaw
by Garry Thomas Morse

Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2021
$18.00 / 9781772141726

Reviewed by Danny Peart

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Scofflaw has been described as a long poem, a playful exploration of Indigenous-Settler relations and globalized pressures. The long poem is divided into 14 poems, to give us a breather in between, in a paperback edition of 72 pages.

The title character, Scofflaw, is introduced early in the collection:

Calls himself Scofflaw
                        with a voice that cracks into that
            insectile
                        rasp through rushes, you hear
                                    through centuries of sheer innovation.

Under the title NO – BRAINER Scofflaw remarks:

            He’s got none too high an opinion of our whole
            Freaking deal.
                                    Nothing’s to be made
                                                out of turf that won’t
                                                                                    till.

…or Scofflaw’s contrary claim: pre

occupation

Winnipeg-based Kwakwaka’wakw poet Garry Thomas Morse

The reader must pay attention to every line. We don’t have any idea where Garry Morse will take us from one page to the next. At one moment he’ll bring up climate change and the next:

Quit lollygagging, Scofflaw.
You’ll put the little ones off their feed.
He then kicks lectern aside
rails against corn-fed media
for calling prairie grasses
uncultivated
                        “farmland”

Morse is adept at slipping in literary references. Nabokov is strangely present, and a line to Gordon Lightfoot with:

            Leave behind the windmills of your
mind, Scofflaw.

Al Purdy’s poem Say the Names is referenced:

Slay the names slay the names

And later,

Say the names
say the names, Scofflaw roars

Morse reaches a long way back to the 1800s for Wordsworth’s

I wandered lonely as a cloud

Though he revises it to:

Wander lonely as a social bearing cloud

Near the end of the long poem, Morse writes:

To keep the legend of Scofflaw alive
on many a used serviette
before he trips
                        off the grid
leaving us high & dry
in another
            HIATUS.

Garry Thomas Morse

And thus we do not know if we will read of Scofflaw again.

I can tell you that the writer’s muse given here is quite striking:

falling short of
hyperbole attributable to the latest Muse in wide
                                    cycling pants trammelling character arc
under that tread worse for wear in need of repair
before she can be tossed up into minor
                        constellation.

I will not tell you that I was able to understand everything that Garry Morse is writing in this distinctive collection, but he had me paying attention and every page was asking for my best focus as a reader of poetry.

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Danny Peart

Danny Peart has published three books of poetry and stories: Ruined By Love (2012), Stark Naked in a Laundromat: The Port Dalhousie Stories (2016), and Another Mountain to Climb (2017), all published by Milagro Press. He lives in Vancouver. Editor’s note: Danny Peart has also reviewed books by George Bowering & George Stanley and Patrick Friesen for The Ormsby Review, and his book Another Mountain to Climb was reviewed here by Isabella Wang.

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The Ormsby Review. More Books. More Reviews. More Often.

Publisher and Editor: Richard Mackie

The Ormsby Review is a journal service for in-depth coverage of BC books and authors. The Advisory Board consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Cole Harris, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Provincial Government Patron since September 2018: Creative BC

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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