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Poetry/Prose Reviews & Features

Response to TIME OUT OF MIND

These poems, and the eloquent essay that precedes them, are bittersweet, outraged, heroic, surprised, witty, sensuous, occasionally surreal, generous, tender, broken hearted. Poems of middle age, mourning the loss of a mother to slow dementia, fiercely resisting the downward spiral of amnesia. A beautiful book, a necessary book, a grand shout at the hubris of modern medicine, that claims to protect us from physical pain while multiplying the diseases of the spirit. The poems startle us into clarity, the discovery of pure love, "coming into fullness at the end/of the season." - Di Brandt

WELL VERSED: Ken Babstock collection requires a double take
What's On Winnipeg, September 24, 2006

The title of Brandon writer Laurie Block's collection Time Out of Mind (Oolichan, 120 pages, $18) may or may not have been borrowed from Bob Dylan, but it works in two ways: to evoke memory in general, and to speak of his experience of his mother's dementia.

Many of these poems evoke dislocation, focusing on an individual alienated not only from others but also from the self. "There are no visible signs of grace/ as she bangs against the mystery/ of matter and the limits of medicine," he writes in Slap. The loss of meaning in the mother's life represents a general loss of meaning: what is life for, if this is what it comes to?

Block uses line breaks and punctuation to great effect, producing either the momentum of rage or the faltering steps of a wanderer.

The condition of being out of one's mind also evokes its opposite, being mindful, and it is towards this state that the speaker in Block's collection moves. What saves him is love.

"Without love how would I be here/ to see the day dying how would I notice/ the golden light" he writes in Smudge, the ambiguity produced by the lack of punctuation reinforcing love's life-giving power. Though the collection opens with death, it closes optimistically, looking to a future that is seen clearly.

CV2: Contemporary Verse 2 Interview
Volume 28, Issue No. 3, Winter 2006

Block's work has won prizes and has appeared in journals across Canada. While perhaps for now he is most famous in these Prairie parts, I am confident that his new book imminent from Oolichan, Time Out Of Mind, will do much to change that. Laurie's first book, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas (Muses Company) is a unique collection in that Laurie wrote the poems in Spanish and then translated them into English. Time Out Of Mind is informed by the revelations that came from his experience of his mother's illness and subsequent death.

Read more, download the PDF version of this interview. (Right click and choose "Save Link As" to download this file)

Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas
Reviewed for Prairie Fire by John Cunningham, 2000

In Foreign Graces, Laurie Block provides his readers with a moveable feast - a sumptuous banquet, in fact - of beautiful words blended together into the rich sauce of poetry. Moveable in the sense that Mr. Block moves between the two worlds of Canadian English and Chilean Spanish in this bilingual edition, with Block providing his own translations. Although this results in only twenty poems - making this more of a Tapas than an entrée - each is exquisite and well worth reading.