Ian Rae. From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada

Ian Rae. From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2008. 388 pages. $85.00. The poet's novel holds a rather liminal position in Canadian literature; in some ways, it has helped to shape the Canadian canon, as poet's novels by Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, Leonard Cohen, and others are regularly taught in English departments across the country. These texts helped to substantiate postmodernism in CanLit, providing an alternative in Canadian fiction to the realist tradition epitomized by Hugh MacLennan and carried on by Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, and a great many other Canadian fiction writers. On the other hand, the poet's novel has also come under considerable attack in recent years, with critics such as David Solway and Stephen Henighan attacking the poet's novel as lacking in structure, as needlessly metaphorical, and as overly fragmented. In his careful study of poet's novels in Canada, Ian Rae works to discount these attacks by arguing two intertwined points: that critics of the poet's novels have unfairly viewed the texts according to the conventions of realist fiction and that Canadian poet-novelists have crafted a distinct style of literature with its own subtle set of conventions.