Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje ed. by Sam Solecki (review)

· 166 LETTERS IN CANADA 1986 innovative embrace is a denial of precisely the traditional levels of meaning that Kroetsch has never denied' (p 123). This inconsistency of argument may partly stem from the fact that many of these pieces (including the discussion of Badlands, the chapter on the poems, and the opening section on the criticism) were self-contained critical essays before they were chapters in this book, and that the Badlands essay came after the other two, perhaps reflecting a change in Lecker's own thinking about how to read Kroetsch. But the more open and responsive quality of the chapter on Kroetsch's aesthetics and of the chapter on his poems makes them the strongest sections of the book. (RUSSELL BROWN) Sam Solecki, editor. Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje VOhicule 1985. 369. $14.95 paper Solecki's selection ofessays on Michael Ondaatje in Spider Blues guides us through the various issues surrounding his poetry, and suggests the development of an argument. The title 'Spider Blues' (from a muchquoted poem in Rat Jelly) brings to mind the central theme of the artist and his distance from the work of art. This theme appropriately becomes the focus of the arguments in the essays that follow. Although Stephen Scobie suggests that Ondaatje shows a divided admiration for the spider image of the artist whose control is 'classic: Dennis Coolie thinks that Ondaatje condemns the spider as epitomizing the artist in a stultifying modernist tradition that seeks to enclose reality in unchanging forms of art. And this same debate continues pertaining to Billy the Kid (considered as an artist figure) and the jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The collection is divided into two parts, 'The Poetry' and 'The Longer Works: and these are enclosed between two interviews conducted by the editor, Solecki himself. 'The Poetry' deals with the early collections up to Tin Roof, but none of the essays consider Secular Love, the most recent collection; 'The Longer Works' include the poem 'necklace: the man with seven toes, the prose-poetry medley of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, the poetic novel Coming Through Slaughter, and the fictive autobiography Running in the Family, which is interspersed with poems. Eight of the essays and the fmal interview have been done especially for Spider Blues. The essays in the first part, 'The Poems: deal with larger problems about Ondaatje's place in tradition, postrnodern theory ;md practice, particular techniques for eliCiting a response in the reader, the use of collage to create a sense of violence and, more generally, human values in the poetry. George Bowering in 'Ondaatje Learning to Do' describes the poet as merely providing a link between a post-Eliot poetic in which reality is artificially enclosed in a world of art and an American poetic in which open-ended form and a sense of process are considered essential to portray a complex, changing reality. Bowering praises Ondaa~e only perfunctorily: 'As a fiction writer he is superior, as a poet he is one of our most proficient' (p 69). By contrast, Douglas Barbour in his review of The Dainty Monsters enthusiastically recommends Ondaa~e's conservative values, his sense of form, the suggestion of a story context in much of his work, and the profuse imagery that remains alien to much contemporary poetry. The central issue of the poet's distance from his created characters directly enters a number of the essays in part 2 . Scobie in 'Two Authors in Search of a Character' considers that Ondaa~e is presenting a positive artist figure in Billy the Kid, whereas the later critics, Dennis Lee, Perry Nodelman, and Judith Owens, have disagreed. In the 1984 postscript, Scobie defends his original position, asserting that unlike b.p. Nichol who makes a 'serious joke: Ondaa~e attempts to create myth with a sympathetic hero. Dennis Coolie in "'I Am Here On the Edge": Modern Hero/Post-modern Poetics in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid' builds on Nodelman's and Scobie's thesis that Billy is an artist figure, but disagrees with the former about the implications of the poet's distancing of events through photographic imagery. While Nodelman considers that...