Paperback - 100 pages (February 2004)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.ca
Here are
some of the quirky tidbits that Brian Rigg's first book of poetry, A
False Paradise, adds to the staid skewer of Canadian contemporary
poetry: fornicating felines, cold-footed insects, fly-ridden domiciles,
toad orators, whacked-out spiders, and IQ-deficient fish.
Those flavours, combined with the human rot that festers at the core of A False Paradise, make for a pungent and emotive collection.
"Blue Window Story" invokes the spectre of a physically depleted mother, and "In Dark June" seethes with love lost: "I'm hard against the night you died, that wicked bullet weaving its way into your chest / minutes after I talked to you."
"Tiger Lily" is an ecstasy-fuelled ode to a drag queen, but there's no bliss--chemical or otherwise--in works like "Night Blossoms," a sad tale of ass peddlers who "fell from grace in / out-of-order washroom stalls."
Rigg packs a powerful first-person delivery seasoned with searing quips from the periphery, as in "Africville," which excavates some dirty Canadian history: "pipes carried the white man's waste / to our shores and we were glad to / have their dumpsites at our doorsteps."
Fraught with hellish realities, Rigg's A False Paradise is no place for fools.
--Sigcino Moyo
