The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh covers the range of love, loss and learning that have made rob mclennan one of the most exciting young poets in Canada. The language of the poems, though thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this work—from the seventeenth century platonist mystics to what his companions on the poetry trail were writing at last night’s soirée, a crowd of voices, asides, references, allusions and whispers is constantly pushing and expanding his line forward. marvellously self-taught in the school of poets, mclennan’s work is refreshingly free of pretence and category. The impressive and exhaustive range of poets and writers with whom he has learned is simply there, in his work-present, in the current text, not absent in some far, or even near, distant past. This is the work of a young man who has paid his dues and done his homework. There is also a kind of subtle humour here, born of the care with which mclennan keeps his lines clear of the dead-ends of self-consciousness, allowing the language to free itself from the page, and to be heard as well as read.
