Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red should shake up the tight little universe of contemporary poetry. Her novel is a very modern epic in supple, energetic verse. It blasts off from Greek and South American tradition and recounts the early years of as poignant a monster as any teenager ever was.

Carson, a Professor of Classics at McGill and at Berkeley, has won important awards for her previous essays and poetry. Those include a volume with the imprimatur of James Laughlin of New Directions, who founded that legendary publishing house with the blessing of Ezra Pound -- another epic poet rooted in the classics. In Autobiography of Red, Carson starts with a famous, mostly lost epic poem by the Greek lyricist Stesichoros. Interpolating from those shards, she builds the story of Geryon. In the original, Geryon was a red, multi-limbed, winged creature killed by Herakles for his famous red cattle. Both are teenagers in Autobiography. Geryon has wings; Herakles is still a killer.

They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they
    recognized each other like italics.
Geryon was going into the Bus Depot
one Friday night about three a.m. to get
    change to call home. Herakles stepped off
the bus from New Mexico and Geryon
came fast around the corner of the platform
    and there it was one of those moments
that is the opposite of blindness.

The resulting love tale-cum-road movie is handled with a philosopher's intense playfulness. In Inferno, Dante gave the name Geryon to a monster who conveyed him into the depths. Here, it's Herakles whose hometown is Hades; Geryon is an intense learner, not a betrayer. He's also a photographer.

His brothers and sisters in every age are those lonely teens for whom art, past and present, offers a redeeming vision of beauty and truth.

Autobiography holds elegiac touches but maintains an epic momentum. Carson's verse is full of dactyls without any sing-song and with more than an echo of the four-syllable, three-stress foot called the epitrite. Her lines propel the reader and the story forward to South America. Here, Geryon finds himself in a high region of Peru where, legend has it, humans who were thrown into the volcano occasionally returned transformed -- immortal, winged and wise.

The author, who studies volcanoes as well as the classics, has endowed her hero with profound reticence and acute feeling. We are left hankering for more. In Carson's words, we "want to see you use those wings."

by Vivian Lewin

Crossing the Gulf, Oolichan Books, 1998, $15.95, by Keith Harrison, PhD'72.

People in transition populate Crossing the Gulf, Keith Harrison's appropriately titled collection of ten short stories. The tran-sitions are both physical (cars, boats and airports appear frequently) as well as psychological. How to cope with impending death? Ancient longings? Diminished love? Fortunately, although the situations are, broadly speaking, familiar fodder for the genre, the stories themselves are unique: Harrison's attention to place, his deft hand with characters, and his distinctly sympathetic authorial voice set these works apart from the pack.

Take, for instance, "Nanaimo, France." In an attempt to acclimatize himself for a vacation in France, Ken, the story's main character, recreates Parisian life in the Vancouver Island pulp-mill town of Nanaimo, rising and working according to Parisian time and custom. The story becomes not so much about Ken's preparation for his trip as an exploration of the creative process, making gold from lead, Paris from pulp: the City of Lights becomes an imaginative state that flourishes in the midst of the mundane.

The most compelling story in the collection is the novella-length "Colour Bodies" (from chromo soma), the unlikely account of a clone acquiring sentience and identity.

In a dystopian world ruled by a genetically defined elite, one of the "spare parts" is abducted and given life. The story is good science fiction, extrapolating from the oft-ignored ethical quandaries haunting the Human Genome Project. However, its primary appeal, like that of the other stories in the collection, lies in Harrison's ability to create characters who respond to challenges in ways that, while not always successful or even admirable, are recognizably human in their complexity and ambiguity. Thus we can't help but be engaged by them, even if on occasion we don't particularly like them. And that, above all, is the sign of a good story-teller at work.

Patrick McDonagh

Playgrounds, Justin Time Records, 1998, $19.95, by Joel Miller, BMus'93.

McGill News readers may remember us telling them of the Joel Miller Quintet, winners of the 1997 du Maurier Grand Jazz Award, last Fall. The award is given each year at the Montreal Jazz Festival to a Canadian group, and one of the perks is a recording contract with Justin Time Records. In a city where jazz musicians are treated like divine messengers 12 days out of the year and would likely do better as squeegee kids the rest of the time, the Grand Jazz Award is an important means of promoting new Canadian talent, and Miller is the real thing.

The resulting CD, Playgrounds, expands on Miller's quintet format for many of the tunes, though regular sidemen Tilden Webb, MMus'97, Kevin Coady, BMus'94, Joe Sullivan and Brian Hurley are still on board. Instrumentation is a tad unusual in places, something Miller obviously takes some delight in: pianist Webb has dragged a Fender Rhodes electric piano out of the '70s closet for a few tunes, viola is not your standard jazz axe, and a couple of violins are thrown in for good measure. What could be a rag-tag setup, how-ever, comes off smooth and fresh, thanks to Miller's thoughtful arrangements and the players' willingness to follow him. Trumpet player and McGill instructor Sullivan in particular is a joy to listen to, a warm and melodic player, compelling without unnecessary flash.

Indeed, while Miller's own tenor and soprano sax playing never falters, it's his compositions and arrangements -- all the songs on this CD are his own -- that shine here. Miller's influences range from folk flatpicking legend Doc Watson to sax giant Wayne Shorter and beyond.

The ballad "Through Winter Together," with textures that occasionally recall Gil Evans's work with Miles Davis, also manages to dabble in Steve Reich-like minimalism from a string trio backup. Other more standard tunes like "Cobra" (a lot more fun than the stand-up rollercoaster at the La Ronde amusement park to which it refers) and "Party" allow the players to stretch beyond the arrangements and simply blow over the dead-on rhythm section of Coady, Hurley and Webb. Miller is rather brave, though, to place the large ensemble piece "Stoner" -- replete with fuzz guitar, synthesizer, aforementioned Rhodes, and goofy group "rap" -- as the opening track. It doesn't set the tone for what is an otherwise fine listening experience.

Andrew Mullins