Richard Krueger, a new map [review]

          Richard Krueger’s writing is like ice; it’s hard, cold, 
multifaceted, at times necessarily ugly (those slug-like 
creatures that inch over gutters as winter progresses), at 
times wondrous. The poems are there and not there. They 
catch on your tongue. Even sting. The cover of Krueger's 
a new map of the bird perfectly signals that difficult 
terrain--jittery, wintery, jagged. 

          There is no such thing as authentic poetry but Krueger 
does not put on anyone else’s poetics. He is influenced by 
Prince George and, so, Barry McKinnon but also, I would guess, 
a host of other eclectic experimental poets. Krueger plays with 
a lyrical deck of cards but plays that lyric with a variety of formal 
tricks; he cheats, palms the ace, calls in the pot too soon, and 
hums inappropriate tunes. The innovative forms Krueger adopts 
displays a poetic maturity that comes out of the artistic drive for 
to reinvent the world. These crystalline poems are chiseled finely 
and they can cut, leave a reader bleeding, cursing. The poems 
refuse to allow very much down-time; there are not many 
places for security in subject-matter or tone. When there are 
concrete images, they have to do with place, Prince George and 
region, but only fleetingly—Krueger does not give in to pastoral 
temptations--or language and communication models, which 
don’t lend themselves much to image construction. The first 
section from “the town south of salmon valley” 
exemplifies Krueger’s contemplative narrative stance, 
some of his thematic concerns, and his use of form to 
accentuate and layer meaning:

                    the fence,un
                    -aware,cuts deep

                    into the field,di
                    -viding the textures

                    into slow circles,ha
                    -rsh squares.ideologies

                    into which faith is ke
                    -pt sealed,like churches

                    in towns,towns we pa
                    -ss every second or third

                                      hour / / our

                    town repeats itself in ma
                    -ny indistinguishable locations. (22)

The ‘town south of salmon valley’ is Prince George which 
is quite a bit larger than the hamlet of Salmon Valley; 
Krueger likes to make perspective strange. Like an eccentric 
postmodern poetic Icarus, Krueger enacts a kind of ironic 
failure over and over again:

                     wiper blades
                     per blades wi
                     r blades wipe


                     there’s a permanent poem in my wi
                     ndshield,in that frame,but no matte
                     r how hard i strain,i can’t get wet.th
                     e rain never reaches the page.  (43)

Probably Krueger’s most challenging piece is the long poem 
“the folding season.” Like most of his other work, 
this poem consists of many diverse discourses and the 
discourses fold into each other with a loud grinding sound. 
Nothing is easy; the sections range from a catalogue of fatal 
illness, aboriginal words for seasons, diagrams like fractals, 
html code, reflexive references to the material poem, and 
footnotes on language, animals, and myth. The folds erase 
the page and all that is left is pure agency, the motion through: 
“(every word is true.it is only their / meanings which are false)” (104). 

          One of the distinctive devices Krueger uses is his collapse of 
the spaces around commas and periods. The effect of this is to compress 
and force a recognition of signs irrespective of spatial cues. It sets 
the easy visuals of text on a page off-kilter. Krueger is a twitchy, angular 
fellow and his poems match his physicality eerily. Whenever I talk to him, 
language always seems off-kilter. This is true for most great artists I 
think—a necessary unease to the work, a falling away, or a sudden 
shatter:

              navelmaybe we’ve got it all wrongmaybethe drumlin
                    is not a convex bump
               on the face of the earthmaybeit’s concave

               maybe we’re on the inside,looking out  (63)

Krueger is a prolific chapbook maker--look for his newer productions 
A_box_full_of_clouds and Aries. What makes these books
even more exciting is the fact that it is part of a much larger book that 
Krueger is assembling. Its working title is The Monotony of Fatal 
Accidents and all of Canada should be looking for that one. A new 
map indeed.