Poetry

POETRY 29 deux observations. La·premiere, sur la presence envahissante des formes autobiographiques, Ie pluriel etant rendu necessaire ici 11 cause non seuIement des multiples formes narratives a la premiere personne, mais aussi du recours a des genres relevant de l'ecriture personnelle: carnet, essai, journal intime, correspondance, etc. Resurrection du Sujet? La deuxieme remarque conceme la forte presence de la narrativite. Certes Ie roman quebecois n'a jamaisvraiment cesse de raconter, et Ie discours n'y a jamais eu la pn!seance qu'il a pu avoir ailleurs, mais il est egalement vrai que I'ere du soup~on, que son objet soit Ie personnage ou la diegese, voit Ie soup~on se retourner contre lui. La fm du roman La Notede passageou Ie heros est heureux de reintegrer la 'normalite,' peut nous servir d'indice dans l'appreciation general du roman quebecois. Encore qu'il faudrait ajouter, pour finir, que la narrativite explore des mondes apparemment antinomiques:Ie quotidien, l'evenement banal d'une part, et une certaine mystique, un au-dela de la connaissance rationnelle d'autre part. Ce que certains romans incament, particulierement ceux de Villemaire, Brault et Ouellette, c'est une sorte de definition'trans-rationnelle' de I'etre, un nouvel horizon de valeurs. Poetry RONALD B . HATCH For several decades now both poets and critics in Canada have placed far too much emphasis on the anecdotal poet who comes to us in shirtsleeves, discussing everyday things, and far too little on the poet who appears in bardic attire, addressing ultimate questions. The more formal or more obviously'poetic' trend develops from the concerns of the Prroiew poets, who were in turn influenced by England's Apocalyptic and Surrealist movements, both of which gathered momentum in the 1940s. With the publication of The New Apocalypse (1939) and The White Horseman (1941), English poetry turned away from the impersonal ironies of Eliot and Auden to return to its bardic roots. George Barker, Henry Treece, G.S. Fraser, Herbert Read, and DylanThomas proclaimed a personalist poetry that connected the individual with larger psychic and social forces. Certainly in Canada this desire to link the individual with a metaphysical reality, frequently fusing individual and landscape (the Frye-Atwood thesis about 'fear of the land' is misleading), has continued to exert an enormous influence. One of the more prominent of the early Prroiew poets and editors was P.K. Page, who has continued as an importantforce on the contemporary scene. The publication of The GlassAir:Selected Poems (Oxford, 191, $11.95 paper) offers the opportunity to re-examine her exploration of Apocalyptic and Surrealist themes. The volume gathers together poetry from 1944 to 1985; it.also includes nine reproductions of her drawings (exhibited under her married name of Irwin) as well as two short essays from the late 1960s in which Page describes her attitudes as poet and painter. At this stage in her career, Page's publishers might well have brought out a 'Collected: not merely another 'Selected.' Nevertheless, the new volume proves timely, allowing us to follow her work from the days when she was an editor of Preview and her poems appeared in Ronald Hambleton's Unit of Five. Many of the early poems in this new volume appear as old friends, and come up fresh and clean from the page. 'The Stenographers: 'T-Bar: and 'Portraitof Marina' must be among some of the best-known Canadian poems. A chronological reading of Page's poetry shows the consistency of her vision, her concern with the felt loss of imaginative perception which adult conditioning can bring. Her early poetry describes both a sense of confmement in the adult world and a longing to lose herself in a higher, better world which she only dimly perceives. A number of her poems celebrate children 'whose blood I remembers' the event which begins all creation. Her early novel, The Sun and the Moon, published anonymously, illuminates her desire for a Schopenhauerian transcendence in which the poet can sing, like Isolde, 'Ich bin die Welt.' Many of Page's most successful poems delineate the imprisonment of, and by, the ego in modem life. In The PermanentTourists' she describes how the'terrible...