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Crystal Methods
Christian Bök Crystallography. Coach House $17.95
Mark Laba Dummy Spit. Mercury P $14.95
Peter Culley Hammertown. New Star $16.00
Due to the commercial and critical success of Christian Bök's Eunoia, Coach House Books has issued a revised version of the poet's 1994 collection, Crystallography. Bök explains in an afterword to this handsome volume that Crystallography is "a pataphysical encyclopaedia that misreads the language of poetics through the conceits of geology." Following in the footsteps of his pataphysical Canadian forebears, Bök combines Christopher Dewdney's scientific vocabulary with Steve McCaffrey's theory-mindedness and bp Nichol's orthographic obsessions, which might appear to be a fatal poetic strategy, but Bök has the craftsmanship to pull it off.
A lengthy epigram from M.C. Escher's The Regular Divisions of the Plane provides a useful clue to Bök's method. Escher wrote his treatise to demonstrate that visual motifs can be repeated to suggest infinite movement, instead of formal stasis. Inspired by the tiles and architecture of Moorish Spain, Escher had been experimenting with repetitions of contiguous, interlocking forms when he broke from tradition and began using asymmetrical, organic forms. He discovered techniques of rotation, translation, and mirroring that enabled such repetition, but he did not understand his own method until his brother, a geology professor, explained that he was really working in the field of crystallography. Escher used the insights of crystallography to theorize his discoveries and create his later, more famous artworks.
Equally cryptic, Bök twists and turns a few...