Govemor-General's' Award-winner Karen Connelly has a thing about reptiles. A positive thing. Else's, the cafe in Plateau Mont Royal where she wants to meet me, is her kind of place, she chortles over the phone. It has a pet iguana.

I, too, have a thing about reptiles. I visualize a Komodo dragon slithering about, with fun run of the restaurant. Chalk up another reason that I'm worried about interviewing Connelly.

What's bothering me first and foremost is having to hang on the words of a writer young enough to be my daughter. I fear I'm an unregenerate ageist. There ought to be a law against anyone without a gray hair winning a major literary award.

At 25, Connelly has already won two: the 1990 Pat Lowther Prize (when she was 21) for the best book of poems by a Canadian woman, and the Governor-General's Award for nonfiction for Touch the Dragon, last fall. She published a second collection of poems in 1993 (This Brighter Prison), is currently working on "a book of tales" and has a couple of travel books up her sleeve.

It's a career trajectory that with a fair sprinkling of gray hairs and no literary prizes in the offing - I find frankly unsettling.

The reptile scenario, however, turns out to be alarmist. The iguana is of manageable proportions and sensibly confined to an aquarium,

Strikingly pretty, Connelly has nothing reptilian about her, although she does exhibit the changeability of a chameleon during our conversation. Alternately quirky (she claims the right to mispronounce the name of her home town Cal-GARY - on the grounds that she speaks five languages), sassy (she sports a nose ring acquired while writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick last year) and wise well beyond her years, she obviously likes playing to an audience, even if it's only an audience of one.

Touch the Dragon (Turnstone, 1992) - a journal of Connelly's experiences in Thailand at the age of 17 - is clearly the work of someone who revels in both language and experience. Its first sentence, a description of Canada from the air, tells us we're travelling with. a poet:

"A view of the body of mountains: deep sockets of aquamarine, blue veins slipping over cliff-sides, stone edges splintering from the Earth like cracked bones." On the first page she reports, "There's almost nothing to write yet because I know so little."

Yet every instinct led her to write. From the age of 11, "I kept a sort of regular journal and had a little binder full of awful poems and read a lot." She had an early love for the exotic and was inspired by Kipling. A little later, she discov- ered that the library of her junior high had a po- etry section. "And so I just went and I slowly read every book of poetry . . . I was about 14 when I started reading T.S. Eliot, and certainly I didn't like everything. . . . Some of it, I thought, what the hell is this'! Out some of it I loved. Like one poem that amazed me was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It blew me away."

Such intellectual tastes made her "a complete and utter freak in . . . a family of rednecks and bricklayers and landscapers,” she says with a bray of raucous laughter. She laughs often, in fact, as she outlines a painful childhood and adolescence. She was born in Calgary in 1969, the third of live children. Her father (a lapsed Roman Catholic) had a serious drinking problem and was absent for long stretches of time. Religion was a major bone of contention between him and her mother, a Jehovah's Witness. Karen, too, was raised in that fundamentalist sect, an upbringing that set up a great store of bitterness and alienation in her. When she was 16, her oldest sister died at the age of 24, an event that marked her deeply.

Her first poetry collection, The Small Words in My Body, reels with the pain of her troubled childhood. "This is the fifth season/when history is gone/and words have neither/echoes nor meanings/Whcn my father is lost/and my sister rots alone." , , '

But, permeated by a sense of wonder, Touch the Dragon is essentially a happy book, as the young woman who felt so alienated in her own land is taken into the heart of another culture. Although she does not flinch from describing Thailand's many injustices and cruelties, she still makes us tumble vicariously in love with the place.

She has since lived for extended periods in Spain, France and Greece and plans to return to the island of Lesbos in the fall.

When I comment on the darkness of her poetry with its frequent bloody imagery in contrast to her travel writing, she laughs again.

"It's the liquid we live in, I guess," she said. When she writes about other cultures, "I'm an observer. . . . Whereas the poetry comes right out of my blood. It is the pulse and breath of everything, it really is . . . the guts of every- thing,"

And then, suddenly, she begins to talk in the stunningly imagistic way in which she writes.

"My father was a hunter. And many of the men of my childhood were hunters. That awareness of blood and what's beneath the skin really colored my childhood. . . I have incredible memories of coming into the garage and these two skinned deer were hanging from the rafters. Who knows, maybe that was my first memory. Very, very evocative. Those memories still mean so many things to me. What my father was and what we all are; how-we can be the deer and how we can be the lather and how we can be the /lies that are buzzing at the window to get out.

"The smell of the animals comes back now, the smell of deer. Their legs half-hacked on-- we played with those legs, you know. They're just like sticks. Once you cut them off, from the knees to the hoof, they're really thin. It sounds so awful, but to me it's quite normal." Karen Connelly may be young, but she's the genuine article. I predict that we'll be reading lots more by her as she ripens.