Green Books Campaign: The Dead Can't Dance by Pam Calabrese MacLean

Credits go to Susan Newman for this logo.
This review is part of the Green Books campaign . Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a  a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

Genre: Poetry
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 110
Publisher: Ronsdale Press
ISBN-10: 1553800699
ISBN-13: 978-1553800699
Rating: 5/5
Printed on: Ancient Forest Friendly Silva - 100% post-consumer waste, totally chlorine-free and acid-free

Synopsis: With a mother’s touch, a lover’s touch and the sure hand of an undertaker, MacLean compels the reader to take a dangerous look behind every façade, even though we will long to look away. Her women are fierce with their men, protective of their children and abrupt with the world. She observes the minutiae of life with an eye of appreciation, and looks at the grandeur with suspicion. MacLean’s love poems are blunt instruments, ready to strike: “So far I’ve loved men / whose names are short / for nothing. / Kent. / Luke. / Kirk. / Quick blunt pokes / of sound.” Throughout these poems, MacLean offers up a solid understanding of what death leaves behind. Death of dreams, death of desire, death of a beloved. Always we are “Left holding nothing, / surprised by the weight of it.” MacLean’s poems are unforgettable landscapes of grief and tenderness with just enough wicked wit to plunge the reader into new insights on what it means to be alive.

Review: Written in poems, The Dead Can't Dance is a compilation of stories by different women; a scorned lover who's slowly moving on, a daughter who just lost her father and can't let go, an unfaithful wife and more. You'd have thought that it'd be weird reading stories written in the form of poems, but it's not. They evoke such contrasting emotions in the different stories: joy and amusement, and in the next instance, sorrow.

My favourite story in this book has got to be The Ida-Mae Poems. This is the story of a beautiful woman, who from young was obsessed, if not obsessed, then intrigued by sex. Wed to a man couldn't give her any children, Ida-Mae starts having affairs to finally have her children. Here's an example:

Pet Names
Ida-Mae has pet names
for all her lovers,
helps keep straight
who belongs to who.
On each child's birthday
Ida-Mae spends time
remembering the father.


She chuckles
over her last lover,
Catherine-Billy's dad.
Ida-Mae nicknamed him
Bungalow Bill
nothing upstairs
but lord, the basement.


The Dead Can't Dance is a great book. It's a light read, and my favourite part is the fact that it leaves me wondering afterwards, if perhaps there are other hidden meanings that the one I found while reading.