Voicing Colourspaces: Colour-usage and Response as Alternative Narration in Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack.

Dennis Cooley has attempted to unsettle several complex issues relating to post modernity, intertextuality, mingling of genres, decentering authority etal. His poetry is rich in complexity and in dealing with the problems of the text. He has published three books of poetry. Leaving (Turnstone 1980), Fielding (Thistledown 1983) and Bloody Jack (Turnstone 1985). His poetry reveals his interest in formal departures from the tyranny of orthodox running rhythm, and the left hand margin. From Leaving to Bloody Jack, Cooley has decentred authority from its traditional formal and ideological strongholds including the author, and placed it in the mind and heart of the reader. In his books of poetry, especially Bloody Jack, Cooley tends to deal with flexibility, knowledge and tolerance and seeks to voice the sparsely populated and neglected space of the Canadian prairie. This paper is an attempt to read Dennis Cooley's Bloody Jack from the semiotic perspective of his use of colour as sign-code in it and the other related issues that it voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]