Comp.
A challenging, never imprecise cocktail of alternating line-lengths, swift-moving fragments and tautly spaced stanzas plunges each unit of Davies's poemsDword, phrase, page into the realm of social critique. It is the elegance Davies (Pause Button) brings to this project that sets it apart from similar work; not a line is wasted, not a "blank space" trampled on by ego-driven graphomania: "Yet/ what if there is a perfectly natural/ form, and god wants us to kiss it and talk dirty?" The long central poem, "Karnal Bunt," is a sequence of single-page arrangements hanging, like a Calder mobile, with perfectly opposed word-valences maintaining its delicate tensions. "Untitled Poem from the First Clinton Administration" takes the project a step further, adding a note of heatedness that runs up against Davies's constructivist leanings, and releasing a stream of invective aimed at the NAFTA-flattened globe and its pretensions: "They don't care about the details but fuck with the structure and they'll crush your spine/ A shell of other people/ Reflowered/ Pressed into action/ Figures of demented nostalgia/ With diplomas, credit histories/ Unbridgeable gaps where their eyes should be/ The cramp as such/  Like unanswered mail in a bag of donuts/ The entire earth/ Trembles in the throes of its decision-making process." Though cast from the darker corners of the room, Davies' satire (like that of other sometime Vancouver poets Jeff Derksen and Dan Farrell) is not without remaining light, bursting from the clashes of social contradiction with a still-smoldering utopic urge: "Why be sad?/ Kissinger will die/ before they can upload him." Comp., a pun on a "free ride" and "freshman composition," is one of the best books of poetry to have emerged from the alternative scene in years, and is sure to revive many a reader's faith in the possibilities of poetry to teach, construct, goad, amuse, and, incidentally, survive. (Aug.)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.