Flicker

Call it what you will-the short-short story, the prose poem, micro-fiction-this unusual form has recently come to the public consciousness via the Governor General's Awards. Now accomplished poet, anthologist and novelist Rob Budde, who calls them "flickers," uses the form to convey glimpses of narrative and character, or story, through the intense personal imagery of poetry. Flicker is made up of short prose pieces, many with the emotional intensity of lyric poems. While a narrative arc penetrates the pieces and binds many of them together, the tightly constructed language and profoundly personal imagery tell another story, the emotional heartbeat that lives beneath language. A young man's summer in the bush becomes a dark, frightening and mysterious meditation on the meaning of wood. The old man for whom he works is seen through the narrator's eyes becoming a gnarled relic of the forest, the tree as human. These stories of youth and experience lure the reader in through plot and characterization using the subjective immediacy of poetry, creating what might one day be called "the flicker effect."