Appreciation …

… Natural Selection | an essay on Carmine Starnino's Dirty Words: Selected Poems by Jim Johnstone - The Manchester Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

An incisive critic, Starnino has positioned himself as a tastemaker who isn’t shy about making value judgements or sharing his poetic sensibilities. His era-defining anthology, The New Canon, made waves when it was published in 2005, and is still the most rigorous compilation of Canadian poetry published in the new century. But Starnino’s work as an editor and critic—borne of a love of the art, and picking up where essayists like Eric Ormsby and David Solway left off—has to some extent coloured the reception of everything else he’s done. This includes his poetry, which has been lauded for its “wit and nuance” (Abby Paige), “relishing puns” (George Elliott Clarke), and being “emotionally compelling” (David Godkin), but has also been judged “boring” (Jacob Bachinger), or worse, in a conspicuous review by Lynn Crosbie, “weak and gutless.” Both the Bachinger and Crosbie quotes come from articles that reference Starnino’s critical practise, illustrating how his work in multiple genres can be conflated, or at least produce bias.