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The Voluptuous Gardener: The Collected Art and Writing of Joe Rosenblatt 1973-1996

by Joe Rosenblatt

The Voluptuous Gardener by 1976 Governor-General’s Award-winning poet Joe Rosenblatt does not live up to the hyped controversy already surrounding it. Before it could go to press at the Winnipeg printer that publisher Beach Holme had contracted, the printer refused the job because of a certain image titled “Demonic Sex.” Such a dramatic move would seem to guarantee explicitness, but the image in question is about as sexually tantalizing as a bowl of fruit. Look hard and you might be able to make out from the many ink-drawn lines and squiggles a multicoloured beast and reclining woman. Anything demonic has to come from the viewer’s own creative juices.

What The Voluptuous Gardener does live up to is the poet’s equally gifted talent as a visual artist. Rosenblatt is best known for his quirky surrealism, his sense of rhythm and imagery. His poems are almost always funny, wry, smarmy, and self-assured; as if the poet plucks the right words out of thin air and lays them out in perfect structure. His drawings appear to be just as effortless and original. It is hard to come up with a comparable other. He is like animator Peter Max of Yellow Submarine fame, but looser, linear in the same way John Lennon’s drawings are, but denser, similar to Monty Python cartoons, but not quite. They are from an imagined world that comes right out of Rosenblatt’s head, and from his adored cats, his love for cigarettes, and his Vancouver Island garden in Qualicum Beach.

The book mixes drawings with poetry and despite Rosenblatt’s comment that his pictures don’t relate to any given poem, they are natural companions. He writes about frogs and also draws them, bare-assed and sitting on lily pads. He devotes many poems to cats, likewise whiskered felines, paws, and triangular-shaped ears appear everywhere in his sketches. The Voluptuous Gardener is beautifully original and lyrical. All that’s missing is music.

 

Reviewer: Catherine Osborne

Publisher: zz Beach Holme

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 184 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-88878-371-X

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 1997-1

Categories: Art, Music & Pop Culture