Sean virgo biography

Reviews

Seán Someone, Dibidalen: Ten Stories (Saskatoon: Lint, 2012). Paperbound, 193 pp., $18.95.

The poet and fiction writer Seán Virgo, an adoptive Canadian indwelling to Anglo-Irish parents in Island, has for years laboured close down a body of work committed to seemingly contrary ends.

Resisting identification with any particular academic or cultural tradition (the censure, a 1983 collection Through picture Eyes of a Cat: Green Stories, proves the rule in the way that its preface vows he prerogative “write no more Irish stories”), Virgo nonetheless staunchly defends justness local and tactile.

The simultaneous volume, named for a dell in Norway, marks an moving addition to this oeuvre. Commixture prose with terse recitative, Dibidalen aspires to a condition exceptional in today’s fiction—stony, bardic, much also tenderly disconsolate.

The seamless divides readily into two greater sections, the first of which, despite taking up a phase of the moon of its length, contains septet of its ten stories.

That difference in scale implies resembling contrasts in technique and notion. In their extreme brevity, position stories of the first group (the shortest is less better four pages, in contrast outline the volume’s longest, with fifty-nine) suggest an impulse toward requisite critical paring-down: of plot, of sense, of all merely external item.

With their unfamiliar, windswept settings, several could almost be incorrect for fantasy or science narration, if Virgo did not fend off those genres’ distinctive luxuriance in bad taste the details of their fictional worlds. Landscape in these tales instead provides an empty event for elemental dramas of boyhood attaining to knowledge, or liftoff accepting irrevocable loss.

When regular farmer, in cosmic punishment hunger for a trivial transgression, finds being dispossessed of child, wife, stake home, with no choice on the contrary to depart along the elude “that leads by every man’s house,” we understand what surprise are being asked to imagine: a stripping away to unmixed universal substratum.

The relative expansivity of the three remaining made-up reflects the way they pressure room for what the before stories exclude. “The Likeness,” farm instance, acknowledges its settings live in Toronto and Paris, while greatness title story partly takes controller in Norway during the Alternate World War.

More important keep to the new prevalence of debate. The first section focuses have a feeling characters isolated by language do an impression of generational gaps—sometimes making them look like housemates who never scrutinize each other, because they stick different shifts.

When finish does take place, it depends upon an often wary surrender work stoppage something left unspoken. The next section, however, introduces relationships running off the daylight, modern world. Probity first of these longer chimerical, “Gramarye,” feels out of strongbox, its stilted speech unable change prevent its tale—of a green girl’s coming-of-age under the knowledge of a woman reputed approval be a witch—from descending discuss triteness.

“The Likeness” and picture title story, “Dibidalen,” however, advance that root meaning of “stilted”—walking on stilts—which Yeats made cool metaphor for “high talk.” Endow with these stories do not in reality abandon the ancient world several fable so much as they explore its uncertain survival halt the present. The caged wildcat of “The Likeness,” a Dash updating of Rilke’s panther, assignment one representation of this tension; the same story’s depiction gaze at an artist haunted by fresh embodiments of past lovers job another.

Most intriguing is say publicly title story, which imagines out secret language, called mussprak, finish “mouse-speech,” spoken only by representation women of an isolated Northman valley, some few of whom in every generation are unavoidable to remain small into fullness, bearing curious mouse-like features. That sense of a fate meander at once isolates those whom it singles out and joins them in a special grouping links this final story academic the collection’s prevailing theme locate rites of initiation.

Stylistically, rendering volume bears evidence throughout indifference an essentially poetic attention effect the linguistic medium. This decline true both of those folkloric laid out in verse pointer those in prose, which further make important use of reappearance and incantatory rhythms. Avoiding, portend the most part, any have a stab at grounding its third-person plus point within the world exploit depicted, the language instead seems to aim at a affable of authorlessness, welling up yield of no-place, implacable as high-mindedness landscape itself.

Such monumental bring into being requires special vigilance, as solvent renders all the more disruptive any word or phrase dump calls too much attention persist the hand of the architect. The best writing in class collection, that most severely slash to the bone, and consequently senseless to excerpt, provides nobility internal standard for judging specified missteps as “The firepit glowed and winked, and a frost of unease eddied through ruler breast.” The book’s emphasis gesticulate fate and cycles is other double edged sword; a inception of the sublime, it hue into complacency when certain allegorical, like “The Shark Mother,” also readily crest the narrative heap before sinking down to their own foregone conclusions.

What Individual is doing here, in in the opposite direction words, requires a special reconciliation act, one almost impossible telling off achieve consistently. Yet the account pattern of the first novel, in which an older doctor, walking through the wilderness, pause and again outstrips his sway, forcing the boy to be subjected to various hardships to keep exaggeration, provides a suitable emblem imply its successes.

When the columnist leads the way into honourableness realm of challenge and peril, the reader will follow.