Versions Of North

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G P Lainsbury's "Versions of North" attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avant-garde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification. Lainsbury borrows from a wide variety of sources, filtering them through the grid of a disenchanted idealism, taking to heart the cyberpunk declaration that "information wants to be free". Lainsbury uses the page as physical space: a long line creeps into the margin, and margins float about without justification reflecting a desire to mix and confuse games, to play many simultaneously, to use the vice of poetry to pay homage to the virtue of science. He exploits a phantasmagorical lexicon that aggregates literary, philosophical and scientific avant-gardism, and challenges the reader to participate in the construction of a provisional space for effect. "Versions of North" engages with the environment of northern British Columbia; it is the manifestation of the poet's desire to create a cosmopolitan art in a place that modernity sometimes seems to have skipped right over.