"Reibetanz is a highly skilled poet whose work and influences are in many respects formalist.
Reibetanz's work is rich with echoes of the high modernists (Auden, Eliot, and Yeats) and yet is
also rooted firmly in daily, present experience. He is one of perhaps only a handful of Canadian
poets who know how to articulate convincingly the seriousness of life through the quiet intensity
of poetic gestures."
 Cynthia Messenger, Essays on Canadian Writing
"Discovering a John Reibetanz poem is like entering a myth. The details are richly palpable, the
lines full of fascinating and fiercely intelligent twists. But Transformations goes deeper as you
realise that he means to change your perceptions, that in his hands language and imagery are
power tools, the very shape of reality shifting."
Barry Dempster
"John Reibetanz has gone about quietly for the past twenty-five years writing some of the best
poetry in the country… engaging extended narratives that are like sizeable palaces of ramifying
interior spaces. And metaphor is the binding element at every turn."
Jeffrey Donaldson, "Letters in Canada", University of Toronto Quarterly
John Reibetanz on his discovery of the 'riddlu' form:
“These are a lighthearted but heartfelt attempt to combine two poetic forms that demand
extreme concision and that value the suggestive power of metaphor: the riddle and the haiku.
Both forms have long ancestries. The English riddle predates the modern English language, and
the Japanese haiku goes back still farther. Both have different strengths – the quick thinking of
the riddle (a lifesaver for Bilbo Baggins), the serious looking of the haiku. My "riddlu" tries to
lighten the haiku's seriousness while lending some of its intuitive weight to the riddle, producing
little triads of lines that glance across metaphorical waters like skipped stones.
That's the theory, anyway, and like all theory it came on the scene after the fact. I started
fooling around with riddlu as an indoor form of stone-skipping on cottage weekends, a way of
pushing stale city preoccupations out of my head and making room for fresh encounters with the
world. My family took to the idea, picking up the post-it notes I had left on the breakfast table
and enjoying the chance to pass around some inspired suggestions along with the orange juice
and cereal.
Often their "answers" were at least as appropriate as the ones I had in mind, and I'm hoping
that readers of these riddlu will feel similarly encouraged to fling the stones well beyond their
original confines. Each riddlu has many possible answers, just as one answer often works for
several riddlu: the "ordinary" takes numerous extraordinary shapes.
The aim of the game is liberation – to free ourselves from ordinary presuppositions and take
advantage of the capacity of metaphor to wing our thoughts over a lake made new by the freshly
risen sun." |
