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Phyllis Webb. Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose The Writer as Critic Series. NeWest Press 1995-156. $15-95
Phyllis Webb's Nothing But Brush Strokes is the fifth book in a new series called The Writer as Critic, published by NeWest Press under the general editorship of Smaro Kamboureli. I have always wondered why there seemed to be so few good books on Canadian poetics. By collecting the essays of noted poets, this series solves that absence, and does so wonderfully. Nothing But Brush Strokes is an extraordinary book.
Webb's essays read like intimate conversations. She writes as though she were imagining her reader in the same room, overhearing her thoughts as she sits brooding, telling herself: 'Phyllis, lay it on the line.' In fact, she begins her preface with the disarming invitation: 'May I have the pleasure of your company?' Listening in, we marvel at the subtlety of this original mind spinning ideas like spiders' silk. There is a wonderful inventiveness, trickster-like and quixotic, to her thought, and she is always loath to over-explain, so that her insights dazzle like flashes of silver caught in the net. One keeps reading compulsively. In an age when criticism has been seduced by self- satisfied abstractions, she returns us to the pleasure of language.
Although the essays range from 1971 to 1995, they are not organized chronologically. The collection begins with a piece called 'The Drover's Wife - Again,' first published in New Zealand in 1992, and we...