What Remains: Anne Simpson's Loop

In a review in a recent issue of The Fiddlehead, M. Travis Lane praises Anne Simpson's second poetry collection Loop--the winner of the 2004 Griffin Prize for poetry--as a key document in the re-emergence of a Canadian formalism. McNeilly, however, comments that he is uncomfortable in the rather reactionary reading of the book, which suggests that such formalism marks a latter-day refusal of the "old-fashioned hippie connotations" of free verse and open form, and he finds very little evidence of any such refusal in the poems themselves. Further, he says that Simpson's poetry, despite appearances, remains gestural rather than expressive, dwelling on and in the impedances of language, those recalcitrant moments at which the all-too-human need for meaning gets thwarted and rebuffed.