Tom Robbins: Wild Ducks Flying Backwards

Tom Robbins' collection of short works — travel writing, essays, tributes, poetry and other assortments dating back to the late 60s — begins well enough with some engaging travelogues and his trademark wordplay excesses.

A 1988 Esquire piece "Canyon of the Vaginas" has him venturing to a remote canyon in Nevada where, having negotiated Highway 50, "a blue guitar string of asphalt" passing hills resembling "the contents of Brunhilde's bodice", he's "surrounded by a plenitude of pudenda."

There's similar fare in "The Day the Earth Spit Wart Hogs". Robbins hikes and paddles the Selous, a game reserve in Tanzania and finds "the lethal lullaby of an infected tsetse (the most romantically named of all flies) is arguably preferable to the anaesthetic drone of computers, freeway traffic and television sets." Happily Robbins finds the fly "all pester and no siesta."

And, as he shows in a Helix review of a 1967 Doors concert in Seattle, Robbins once wrote sublimely cool sentences. "Their style is early cunnilingual, late patricidal, lunch-time in the Everglades, Black Forest blood sausage on electrified bread."

But, as the liner notes to Leonard Cohen's 30-year tribute album Tower of Song (1995) demonstrate, Robbins can also blurt too far. Society approaching the millennium is "flailing and screeching all the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side."

Even Cohen who "speaks to this wounded zeitgeist" with "a voice raked by the claws of Cupid" can't save us from metaphors like this.

Sadly Wild Ducks Flying Backward has not much more to recommend and much to question. Robbins wants us to believe that Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh "put the fun back in profundity" and that the Bhagwan's "ridiculous fleet of Rolls-Royces was one of the greatest spoofs of consumerism ever staged." Yeah right.

Only fans will bother to wade through the following scrapings of dire poetry, tedious short stories, "musings", and some pretentious art critiques.

At the bottom of this sad barrel, the author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues answers inane questions — about his favourite things, writer's block, John Steinbeck and how he feels about America ("it's so interesting").

There are gems to be found here, but mostly Ducks is very much less than the sum of its parts.

* Chris Barton is a Herald features writer
* Bantam, $29.95