Nancy Baele, Art Review, The Ottawa Citizen

Rob Farrow — Sun, 04 May 2008 18:08:28 +0000

“Joe Rosenblatt may not be a mainstream artist, but his art is in the mainstream in all the important ways. It is above all about life, lust and love and is stamped with the most human quality of all—the ability to provoke laughter. Following the tradition of Ronald Searle, the satirist, Rosenblatt pokes fun at society, at the vanities we indulge in, and draws a world that is a web of human-animal connections.”

Forward by Prof. Michael Bell to The Voluptuous Gardener

Rob Farrow — Sun, 04 May 2008 18:05:01 +0000

“Rosenblatt’s poetry and drawings are full of natural things: ants, beetles, dragonflies, birds, bees, pigs, cats, frogs , fish,lampreys, trees, horses, caterpillars, and serpents among

other things, including humans, and some metamorphosed’ unnatural ‘ things. A surprising number of these natural things are linked traditionally to mythology and folklore with fecundity:

in the Mosaic myth: God blessed them, saying , Be fruitful and multiply . . . ( Genesis1:22) .”

The Voluptuous Gardener

Rob Farrow — Sun, 04 May 2008 18:03:36 +0000

BOOK REVIEWS

The Voluptuous Gardener: The Collected Art and Writing of Joe Rosenblatt 1973-1996

Joe Rosenblatt; $29.95 paper 0-88878-371-X, 184 pp., 9 x 12, zz Beach Holme, Oct.

The Voluptuous Gardener by 1976 Governor-General’s Award-winning poet Joe Rosenblatt does not live up to the hyped controversy already surrounding it. Before it could go to press at the Winnipeg printer that publisher Beach Holme had contracted, the printer refused the job because of a certain image titled “Demonic Sex.” Such a dramatic move would seem to guarantee explicitness, but the image in question is about as sexually tantalizing as a bowl of fruit. Look hard and you might be able to make out from the many ink-drawn lines and squiggles a multicoloured beast and reclining woman. Anything demonic has to come from the viewer’s own creative juices.

What The Voluptuous Gardener does live up to is the poet’s equally gifted talent as a visual artist. Rosenblatt is best known for his quirky surrealism, his sense of rhythm and imagery. His poems are almost always funny, wry, smarmy, and self-assured; as if the poet plucks the right words out of thin air and lays them out in perfect structure. His drawings appear to be just as effortless and original. It is hard to come up with a comparable other. He is like animator Peter Max of Yellow Submarine fame, but looser, linear in the same way John Lennon’s drawings are, but denser, similar to Monty Python cartoons, but not quite. They are from an imagined world that comes right out of Rosenblatt’s head, and from his adored cats, his love for cigarettes, and his Vancouver Island garden in Qualicum Beach.

The book mixes drawings with poetry and despite Rosenblatt’s comment that his pictures don’t relate to any given poem, they are natural companions. He writes about frogs and also draws them, bare-assed and sitting on lily pads. He devotes many poems to cats, likewise whiskered felines, paws, and triangular-shaped ears appear everywhere in his sketches. The Voluptuous Gardener is beautifully original and lyrical. All that’s missing is music.

Reviewed by Catherine Osborne (from the January 1997 issue)