Lent has also published critical articles on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Thomas DeQuincey, Wyndham Lewis, Tom Wayman, Kristjana Gunnars, Mavis Gallant, Dennis Brutus and Wilfred Watson.
(with honors), 1969, M.A., 1971, where he was a student of Sheila Watson,[2] Lent pursued doctoral studies at York University, 1971–75, including field work in British Columbia, on Malcolm Lowry and Spatial Form.
The term solid relates to the Cubist-influenced geometric structure, an insight prompted by the epigraph from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's Du Cubisme (1912).
The relationship between words and painting, tied to the acoustic suggestion in the volume's title, stress the poet's inter-related concerns with a totality of experience.
In subsequent writing (Frieze and The Face in the Garden), Lent loosens his aesthetic through the application of lessons taken from Joseph Frank's concept, spatial form, as well as its deconstructive developments—in particular the emphasis on space/place.
[8] Yet Vasius is critical of what he perceives to be "some poems [that] are so self-centred they leave a fleeting impression that Lent is translating experience into poetry" (110) rather than vice versa.
Elizabeth St. Jacques, in Freelance, sees the work as the story of Peter Bendy, wherein "Boredom [...] has become his companion enemy that follows him on the long search to find his own 'face in the garden' of life" (38).
[13] St. Jacques faults the weakness of Bendy's character, the prose stories, that "come across as mini-lectures" and applauds the poetry, where "Lent allows his sensitivity and calm spirit to surface" (38).
[14] John Le Blanc's review is the most considered, though readers are likely to find room for argument with his conclusion: "[T]he shift to poetry in the last third of the work [exchanges] an analyzing consciousness [with] a verse that, in its imagistic terseness, is more coldly remote than engagingly elemental" (180).
The injection of a jazzy structure forcefully creates a three-dimensional literary space, perhaps at the expense of character, while in Black Horses, Cobalt Suns and Home (a poetic broadsheet, 2003), the poet opens out to societal concerns.
The reviews are plentiful and consistently positive for Monet's Garden, Lent's major prose achievement prior to the publication of So It Won't Go Away.
Allan Brown perceptively parallels Monet's Garden "both of intention and general effect, to his poetry collection Wood Lake Music".
Thematically, Brown observes: "There is some sadness in the new book with its tactful yet poignant descriptions of the ravages of alcoholism and the uncertain emotional relationships of an over-extended family.
[18] Harrison misses the point with respect to the Roof sequence when he suggests their deletion, "abstract meditations that add little to the portrait of the family" (113); however, he rightly notes that "[t]hese autobiographically influenced stories suffer somewhat from John Lent's controlling consciousness, evident in the similarity of characters [...]" (113).
Based on revisions to a "sonnet cycle" completed in 1995, this chapbook contains the original twelve poems reworked as ten free verse lyrics, with a reflective "prologue".
Lent sees the horses as a metaphor for human (dis)connectedness: "hooves thundering through the reader's veins, racing over the planet with a passion that is out of us, sometimes turned against itself, sadly".
The second metaphor, also foregrounded in the title, is the representation of place: "In the summer here in the Okanagan [...] there is a shade of cobalt blue that can be so intense it's overwhelming, and you get this gold and silver of the sun shredding it, shattering it, burnishing it, as it goes down."
The interconnection of the horses moving out to meet the in-coming sun creates a crease, a physical epiphany that assures humanity is in the right place.
So It Won't Go Away, the follow-up to Monet's Garden, dazzles with its open, looser structure, inviting the reader—as do each of Lent's works by different means—to an engaged participation in text and in life.
Devastating critiques of late capitalism, with an attendant and demonstrable human agency, bring the writer's aesthetic, calmly, quietly, forcefully to fruition.
"[24] While Sandborn offers a thematic overview: "The book works both as a straightforward story of family pain, addiction, love and redemption, and as a highly intelligent meditation on the process of writing itself.
"[26] Steven W. Beattie, in his National Post review of the novel has caught its place in Lent's oeuvre: "If So It Won't Go Away is a series of distinct riffs and trills, The Path to Ardroe more closely resembles a symphony, with a number of different movements circling around a central theme.