A Mysterious Humming Noise

Poetry. Howard White says, "Some poets try to capture rare butterflies in their writing. The things I go after are more like houseflies." The comparison does him no favours but it is true inasmuch as his writing is notably unpretentious and concerned with common and everyday realities. That is, if your everyday realities include such things as sinking docks, driving bulldozers, arguing about sand, baseball, pouring without a funnel, dancing in the street, thought guns, coition, brain farts, not sending sympathy cards, not shooting your father, and sea otters. In this book he also writes quite a bit about writing, not so much the kind of personal writing he does in this book so much as that which he has done as an "accidental chronicler" in his work as a memoirist and publisher. It's hard to read a White poem without cracking a half-smile, and if there is one thing that holds his remarkable mental meandering together it is humour. You can see why they gave him the Leacock Medal: he seems incapable of writing a line that humour doesn't sneak into.