MAPS WITH MOVING PARTS Bitar, Walid. Ilderton (Ont.), Brick Books, 1988. 60pp, paper, $9.95, ISBN 0-919626-37-8. CIP Adult Reviewed by Doug Watling Volume 17 Number 1 1989 January Maps with Moving Parts is a self-possessed look at aloneness and displacement. The poems begin appropriately with "Emigration" and are handled unaffectedly and without real ego. As Bitar says at one point, "It's not me I'm after." The early portions of Maps with Moving Parts read like a travelogue, with Bitar setting down at various spots in the Far East and Europe. The poems make up an alienation route; however, there's nothing very alienating about the poet's images or tone—Bitar's descriptions are just fittingly cryptic: We drove: concrete was a thought we dropped. The road was a clock, our car second hand. Time flies when it hits a rock. Nothing turns Its back fast as land. A touch of the surreal leavened with dead-pan humour—there's something haunting about the combination. Bitar's poems deal with the enigmas of mental and visual perception. Throughout the book, Bitar upsets the reader's expectations. The poet's uncertainty is almost always resolved into something aphoristic and wise. Maps with Moving Parts is marred only by Bitar's casual approach to form. The poems are probably too dense and notional to generate classroom response. They're good, but they don't lend themselves to analysis. Doug Watling, Toronto, Ont.