Poetry

POETRY 61 leur absence ou, au mieux, ne sont evoques que pour etre aussitOt tournes en derision. De plus en plus chaque annee, semble-t-il, petites et grandes derives personnelles occupent I'avant-scene romanesque; meme Ie roman historique emprunte Ie plus souvent les voies etroites de l'amoureux ou du familial. Chose certaine, anotre epoque ala fois post et prereierendaire , l'heure est aI'evocation du passe, ala rememoration nostalgique, aI'elegie. Ce ne sont plus les lendemains qui chantent, dirait-on, mais les hiers. Poetry RHEA TREGEBOV Though the increasing popularity of poetry readings and performances (there are now MTV poetry videos!) indicates that the genre continues to flourish off the page, it has been a somewhat quiet year in Canadian poetry publishing. Books by the superstars were rare; Leonard Cohen's Selected was published in 1993 while Atwood's long-awaited new volume, Morning in the Burned House, was not published until 1995. We were, however, lucky enough to get a new collection from Victoria poet P.K. Page. Page's elegant, intelligent, and acutely compassionate poetry, first published in the 1940s, has set the standard for the poets who followed. Page's energy has continued unabated, with a fine volume of new poetry, The Glass Air, issued in 1985 (and reissued in a revised edition in 1991) and now with her most recent collection, Hologram: A Book ofGlosas (Brick Books, 72, $11.95). The glosa, as Page explains in her introduction to the book, is an early Renaissance verse form which derives its structure from four lines 'borrowed ' from another poet. Fascinated by the form, Page spent a year (lucky woman!) rereading her favourite poets in search of the right four lines. The poems are acts of homage, and it is intriguing to discover which poets Page chose (though Page asserts that the poems chose her). Among the fourteen included are such acknowledged giants as Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, as well as the home-grown talents of Leonard Cohen and the late George Woodcock. Page astutely refers to the glosa as a 'marriage' of the source and the new poem. Indeed, the act of writing the glosa may even be seen as a dangerously wifely task, in which the new poem serves all too deferentially , obediently, the 'master' from which it is derived. If the glosa is merely gloss, if it simply expands or expounds on the source text, there is a strong risk that the resulting poem will have rather a stale feel to it, that it will be haunted by.the source poet's voice. The trick is to make the 62 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 source poet's lines one's own; who was it that said, 'Good writers borrow, great writers steal'? Page is such an accomplished poet that she is capable of stealing very deftly, and in a number of ways. 'Poor Bird' is very much derived from the image suggested by Bishop as a starting point. It is not, however, derivative. Page has created here a stunningly beautiful poem, perhaps because there is something in Bishop's vision deeply kindred to Page's: From birth, from the first astonishing moment when he pecked his way out of the shell, pure fluff, he was looking for something - warmth, food, love or light, or darkness - we are all the same stuff, all have the same needs: to be one of the flock or to stand apart, a singular fledgling. 'Love's Pavilion' uses a different technique. Though the Dylan Thomas lines set the rhythm and theme of Page's poem, Thomas's voice is used as a counterpoint, both inquiry and reply, to Page's own meditation: Tell me the truth. How does it end? Who will untangle their matted hair? Shine in the dark hole of their sleep? Though they rattle the stones in their broken brains, in their thicket of words who will find a way, discover a path through unmapped terrain? When will the unpretentious air fall like rain on the ache of their skin? What is the price they pay for pain? Though they go mad they...