The first poem in Rue The Day, by poet, professor, and former Winnipegger Tanis MacDonald, sets the thematic and linguistic stage for the entire collection. Anchoress tells of a woman confined to a too-small cell, her body contorted, her language reduced to a grim smirk.

MacDonald confirmed that Rue the Day (Turnstone Press), a book about grief, anger, and love, is a challenging work.

"It's supposed to be a bumpy ride," she tells Uptown. "I wanted to write a difficult book. When poetry is easy to read, it's forgettable. It's an uncomfortable book for sure, but I wanted that."

As a student of English literature, MacDonald had been studying the elegy form, or memorials for the dead. (Think Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Walt Whitman's lament on the death of Abraham Lincoln, O Captain!, or Elton John's Candle in the Wind. OK, maybe not that last one.)

"What's interesting about the elegy is that it promises consolation," MacDonald says. "It lures us."

But the poet, with her thorny language and words snapped out of shape, doesn't give her readers happy endings.

"I wanted to write a series of elegies," she says. "I wanted the promise of consolation, but consolation never arrives."

...

Blue, the last film by the late British filmmaker Derek Jarman, is just that. For most of its running time, the screen is filled solely with a deep, heavenly blue, supplemented with voices, music, and ambient sound. Released in 1993, when the filmmaker was blind and dying of AIDS, Blue is Jarman's own elegy. It's an audacious film, in keeping with the boldness of Jarman's other work.

The film is the inspiration for Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (Signature Editions) by Keith Garebian.

The poet traces Jarman's life from the grimness of boarding school to the repression of Thatcherite England. One section of the book is devoted to Jarman's idiosyncratic, cinematic triumphs: Sebastiane, Caravaggio, The Last of England, and, my favourite, Edward II. Jarman, the dazzling iconoclast, mashed up religion, politics, and (gay) sex.

Keith Garebian has created an innovative introduction to a great filmmaker, his work, and his world.

...

In my roundup of the Manitoba Book Awards a while back, I neglected to include the winner of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Writer. My apologies to dramatist Carolyn Gray, author of The Elmwood Visitation, and my congratulations as well.