Some Dance (Hugh Maclennan Poetry Series)

"To be able to pry apart: / this is object, this is subject / even though (confusion begins) / he can be both. Difficult then / to stand at the mirror and reflect: / I am this. This is what I am." Some Dance is a meditation on stories, the intersection of stories, of things made up, of things imagined, and of things lived - perhaps. Tricks played by memory, scrambling events from life with fiction, are a constant. Ricardo Sternberg seeks a fixed point from which to understand the world, but finds no resolution save for another poem. Everything is in flux, unstable, and leads to unexpected places: a commune in the 1960s, a drunken doctor who deals in contraband, a palm reader, a classroom visited by Jesus, a dance in a darkened kitchen. A lively collection that turns towards the commonplace, classical, and strange, Some Dance masterfully balances serious thought, big ideas, and good humour through surprising, elegant, and colloquial expressions.