John Lent, A Rock Solid

Craig McLuckie (Okanagan College)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1978

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection
Story Collection

Resources

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A Rock Solid

(1978), published by the small and innovative Dreadnaught Press, combines prose passages and poems. Lent's first book plays off the various senses of the term rock: geological, musical, and etymological, with emphasis on its derivation from the Old High German

rucken

: “to cause to move”. The term solid relates to the Cubist-influenced geometric structure, an insight prompted by the epigraph from Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's

Du Cubisme

(1912). Combined, the “rock solid” signposts a pre-postmodern emphasis on fluidity and stasis. The title's indefinite article foregrounds this rock solid as one

petite

narrative among many; that is, the structure and sense are not a univocal, universalising “truth”.

Biographical information informs the text's meaning(s). Lent

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1128 words

Citation: McLuckie, Craig. "A Rock Solid". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11942, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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