Book Review: Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Moure, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah

Reading Poets Talk is like overhearing an interesting conversation in a café: you eat up the discussion, but you also want to jump in and ask your own questions. The poets would be fascinating tablemates: diverse in terms of sexuality and race, they are united by how they understand language\u27s relation to social power structures, and how they challenge the rules of language to subvert or expose other, often implicit, social rules. They\u27re also united by what I\u27ll call, not condescendingly, generationality: they\u27re established writers with long personal and political histories. The result is a collection of interviews that are engaged and illuminating, but also marked with a nostalgia that in some cases creates the impression of a poetic energy located in the past