On Beauty

“What is the responsibility of ‘building a person’? rob mclennan's On Beauty accumulates searing questions, and delves into the deep memory of consciousness 'held in amber.' How might we wake from loss and conduct internal excavations? He writes: ‘The tricky part of our travel was in attempting to speak solo to my younger self. . . I woke before the narrative completed.’ Woven with threads of ancestral memoir, this collage of stories collects the habits of those attempting to swerve from conventions of elegy—and what comes 'after.' We proceed through glowing fragments: ‘paper dolls and Red Rose figurines. . . placed on every surface. Set out to safeguard.’ A deeply moving portrait, from embryonic scrapbooks and quotidian diaries to the many births which compose a life. A deft encounter with what happens when—'We won’t allow our dead to disappear.’” Laynie Browne, Intaglio Daughters

"rob mclennan’s On Beauty is an astonishing work of literary panache, a collection of brief, elliptical stories that make a virtue of their brevity, terse words carved out of the white space of the page, glowing with wit, startling juxtaposition, crashing sadness, and sly comedy. For each story there is an emotional core, the thing of the story, an ordinary human thing involving birth, death, marriage, and parenthood, around which mclennan elaborates swirling arabesques of language, image, and thought. Figure and ground, object and mystery. Author as a lone skater on a pristine sheet of ice, unscrolling his mind. mclennan’s sentences are elegantly dramatic and precise. He is a master of the sapient aphorism, the exquisite detail, and cascading sequences of word associations that are pure poetry. Two things to notice especially in this regard: the stories are grounded in place (Ottawa and the Valley landscape streaming by), but there are a dozen very short texts all entitled “On Beauty,” together to be read as part of mclennan’s strategy of contrasting and alternating figure and ground. The real, the human, and the Canadian are set inside the frame of beauty. Beauty insists. All this life is beautiful, the author says." Douglas Glover, author of Elle and Savage Love

"Written in a prose style that at times is so chrome-shiny it dazzles, On Beauty visits the vagaries of the questing mind, 'the secret origins of the everyday,' and the hopes, dreams, memories, and losses that burden us all. This is a superb collection." M.A.C. Farrant, author of Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces

"Though I am often mistrustful of literary notions of Beauty, I am not being ironic when I say this book of stories On Beauty is in fact Beautiful. It’s a beauty attributable, in part, to the author’s response to wide philosophical and literary readings over time, little threads of which wind comfortably through these almost conversational tales of everyday life in a city called Ottawa. rob mclennan, the critic, is also a thoughtful reader of poetry. It is not surprising, then, that his sentences are written with the ear of a poet, forging the painful dramas and small pleasures of the everyday lives of generations, of neighbours, in ordinary neighbourhood contexts, into an episodic suite that has the depth and complexity of a good novel. Above all, I am struck by the descriptive accuracy of the prose, the hot Ottawa streets, for example, that I also remember from childhood. The details of a certain Scottish heritage. The portrait of a city almost empty in the middle [save for the Parliament]. The relations of son to Mother, Father, children. On Beauty underscores once more that it takes a good reader to make good writing." Gail Scott, author of Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012]

In mclennan’s work there is a fine balance between how each piece happens and what happens, which is a particular delight for readers who are writers: opportunities to learn craft from a master.... I would add that On Beauty is also of beauty, in beauty, from beauty, as well as being simply beautifully written, beautifully expressed." J. Robinson, Goodreads, September 30, 2024

"[On Beauty] is lyrically and evocatively written. Every word is carefully chosen, and the author succeeds in painting compelling, distinctive characters..." Alice Violett [full post at https://www.draliceviolett.com/on-beauty-by-rob-mclennan]