Poetry

POETRY 339 conscience de dire, souvent presente dans ces ceuvres, en est camme Ie principe organisateur et Ie leitmotiv. On affiche bien parfois I'arbitraire (Le BonllOmme Sepf-heures) au les limites (Appassionata) de l'ecriture, mais cela n'empeche pas la fiction de fonctionner et Ie livre de poser, comme dans la meilleure tradition romanesque, Ie n,cit comme vraisemblable (les seuies ceuvres aremettre en cause la constitution d'un monde conslruit et coherent etant Ruches et Ie Journal de I'annee passee). On ne se moque plus ouvertement du lecteur, camme dans certains romans des annees 60, mais on s'en fait un complice, soit en l'integrant ala fiction (Poupart, Ouellette), en lui presentant de larges fresques historiques (Tremblay, Caron) ou en lui offrant une suite de mondes paralleles dans lesquels i! peut asa guise inventer des correspondances avec celui qu'i! connait (Poulin, Bergeron, etc). Le sujet du roman de Poulin m'invite II jouer au jeu de I'ile deserte. S'i! me fallait choisir parmi cette production et ne retenir que quelques livres pour un sejour estival sur l'ile Madame (celie des Grandes Marees), j'amenerais Ie livre de Poulin, bien entendu (pour son humour et sa tendresse), Un ete de Jessica (pour sa fascinante rigueur), Journal de I'annee passee (pour certains de ses fragments), Rue Sf-Denis (pour ses enigmes) et Les Nuifs de I'Underground (pour sa beaute tragigue). Si je ne mentionne pas Ie livre de Ouellette dans cette enumeration, c'est qu'i! me semble mieux cOIncider avec la n?flexion automnale gu'avec les lenteurs capiteuses de l'ete. Poetry MICHAEL HORNYANSKY HaVing advanced the deadline this year, the editors ease the blow by allowing me to be still more selective in what I review. It's another bumper vendange, purple floods from Parnassus, so I've jumped at every chance to thin it down. I'll repeat my principles of exclusion, if only for poets who miss their 1978 titles in these pages. I omit anthologies and magazines, and also translations, for reasons explained in other years. A new dispensation permits me to omit Americans published in Canada: a pity this excludes two new books by Robert Flanagan, but I'll find space on the threshold to report that he is up to his old skills in Gravity and Once You Learn You Never Forget, the first in his spare style, the second more leisured. An older rule overriding all directs me to pick out only the books that interest me: generous enough, though I must sift through the Jot to discover which these are. The poets who do not interest me, and will not be listed here, are as usual the shardborne genus, whose sole art is to dispose gasping fragments on a page. Another threshold item, Craig Powell's Rehearsal for Dancers, is a little better than those, but may be 340 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 taken as symptomatic: despite his trick of incorporating pauses within longer lines, the effect for me is still splintered panting, which regrettably undercuts some canny perceptions and wordings. But I can't in all conscience take the 'interest' rule as licence to choose only what I like. There are poetic events, books from established writers, that may not stir my pulse but deserve acknowledgment; there are poets I like so well that I've already spent all my tributesi there are others who delight not me but must please others, or they wouldn't go on appearing in print. For all such, I have devised the elastic category of the Salute, varying in warmth. To start with the coolest: Bill Bissett lapses into his old tricks, bittiness and demotic spelling, in Sailor. Victor Coleman's Terrific at Both Ends is likewise fragmentary, and offputting in other ways, though there is some appeal in the Unseen Father cycle and a spark of wit elsewhere. The Selected Poems of Robert (formerly Sunyata) MacLean speak a language that doesn't reach me, but it does reach Fred CogswelC who writes a warm introduction: 'the kind of poet who can seize and feel an idea of an essential simplicity - as all true...