Gordon Phinn reviews Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (2025) and Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Seaboard Reader

Gordon Phinn provides a first review of Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (2025) and a new review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Seaboard Review. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader and Karl Jirgens reviewed such over at The Typescript. You can see Phinn's original review here.

Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (Above/Ground Press, 1879/2015)

Chapbooks: As outlined in Eli MacLaren’s Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks (McGill-Queens 2021), these diminutive pamphlets have been a low profile but integral element of CanLit for decades. Between 1925 and 1962 Ryerson Press produced over 200. Since the 70/80’s the genre has, with the advent of copy machines, blossomed. Heck, I’ve done about a dozen myself. In its now expansive corral, new work is led out of the barn by poets and prose stylists trying out experiments in form and expression that might not otherwise see the light of day. Once not always so easy to acquire, the digital age, with all its websites, podcasts, and Substacks, has simplified the task. One can observe a wide selection as they canter around the exercise yard, finding their new legs and admirers. One seemingly inexhaustible source is Rob Mclennan’s Above/Ground press, and if I’m not mistaken, his stable has at least 600 residents. Mind you, I’m a past master at being mistaken.

Allow me to remedy whatever lack you may feel by introducing a couple of new contenders, each with a unique and valuable contribution to make. Jamie Sharpe, a Comox BC writer with five books to his credit, has uncovered a long neglected 19th century Quebecois poet, Eudore Evanturel, whose only book, Premieres Poesies from 1879, was not well received by the critics of the day and the disappointment led him to retire and relocate to Lowell, Massachusetts.

In his preface Sharpe reveals that on encountering Evanturel’s work he felt confronted with “a misplaced heirloom, a finely etched reliquary of longing, wit and restraint” and that his approach was “not archival but sympathetic”, and his use of “succinct English cadence” was to “allow the poems to exist without the velvet rope and museum glass.” In this he has succeeded admirably, allowing the shelved sentiments to breathe freely. Many of the verses are tantalizingly brief, some approaching the remote elevation of the haiku:

Village at Noon

Whitewashed walls lean
Under noon’s sunlight.  A lone bicycle
Collapsed by the door.  Somewhere:
Laughter, a  saucepan clatter.
The village slow and bright.
A midday lull in a world
Kept small.
To My Reader

Hold these words close, like a flower
Pressed, preserved, between pages.
Let it oblige your fingers to turn into
Glints of quiet contemplations waiting
For your own heart to finish them.
One hopes for more translations and research on this buried treasure.

Lives Of Dead Poets by Penn Kemp (Above/Ground Press 2025)

Penn Kemp has been regarded as something of an iconoclast and trailblazer for fifty odd years, the composer of thirty plus books of poetry and prose, seven plays and several daring, and dare I say seductive, experiments in sound poetry. If you suspect that there are boundaries that yet require breaking then Penn has already been there, joyously deconstructing. In this chapbook, she fondly recalls the lives and work of contemporaries who have shifted their focus to that universe next door. Let me say: she knocks and gains entry.

Gwen MacEwen, Robert Creeley, Robert Hogg, bp nicol, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, Robert Kroetsch, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades & Ellen S. Jaffe: all are evoked, praised, loved and grieved. Her heart is in the right place and her aim is true.

One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones

The sound of voices
I wish I could hear, voices
now dissolved to ether, to

the vagaries of memory, lost in
translation.  What’s that?

How could such
presence disintegrate?

How could so much 
wisdom evaporate with
the body’s decay?

A chasm awaits 
Across the great 
division.

As the poets fall into their tradition,
our beloved dead are more intimate
now than they ever could be in the flesh.

Only their poetry can still convey
intimations of immortality, subtle slips
we grasp as truth, not knowing for sure

what is real, what is fantasy and false,
what lies somewhere in between as true.

Only their poems can transcribe
mysterium tremendum – where they’ve gone.
Their words embodied on the page,

For me.                                               For you.