In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

524 LETTERS IN CANADA '999 As Lemm shows, Acorn's sense of class was similar. He rejected his rather unremarkable middle-class heritage and turned himself into the champion of the working class. Lemm traces the many apocryphal stories about Acorn, most apparently created by Acorn, and where possible corrects them. The process becomes slightly comical, as Acorn's autobiographical imagination was dearly far too powerful for any biographer to catch up. Lemm depicts a much less forgotten poet than Gudgeon does. Part of this is simply that Gudgeon's thesis required an abandoned poet while Lemm is not driven by myths, except to correct them. Also, Gudgeon never met Acorn, but Lemm has fond recollections of a human, not just a legend. Perhaps more important, PEl emphatically remembers Acorn and Lemm looks at the work through a PEl lens. It is intriguing what a contrast there is between these two books. Out of This World is idiosyncratic and, as Lemm never tires of pointing out, often wrong in its minutiae. Yet the book is also almost as weird as Acorn himself, with strange turns and absurd phrases such as 'Thoroughly Modern Miltie.' On the other hand, Milton Acorn: In Love and Anger is just as earnest as the title, and also just as lacking in imagination. It seems strange that Gudgeon, a journalist and biographer, should be so idiosyncratic, although it must be admitted that his idiosyncracies are often glib, quite in contrast to the romantic myths created by Acorn. On the other hand, Lemm, a poet, seems to be without poetry. He is always the reasonable man, balancing the life and admitting when his hero has feet of clay. The book itself often has rather muddy boots, however. At least twice when Lemm evaluates Acorn books he prefaces his opinion with 'in fact.' Well, no, 'good' and 'bad' poetry are not facts. This is a useful book for anyone who wants a clear view of Acorn's history, and also for anyone who wants to see him in a Prince Edward Island context. But it is also decidedly dull, especially given the amazing man it describes. In my review of Gudgeon I said Acorn was the strangest person I have ever met. Nothing has happened in the last three years to change that. As well, he wrote some of the best poems I have read in my thirty years of university teaching: 'I've tasted my blood too much / to love what I was born to.' Perhaps some day someone will write an account of Acorn which captures the flavour of that poetic blood. (TERRY GOLDIE) Michael Kirkham. Passionate [nfellect:Tile Poetry a/Charles Tomlinson Liverpool EnglishTexts and Studies. viii, 334· £30.00, £13.95 The British poet Charles Tomlinson has had distinguished partisans, including Donald Davie and Hugh Kenner, for more than forty years, but he has never enjoyed the popular acclaim of contemporaries like Philip HUMANITIES 525 Larkin and Ted Hughes. In Passionate Intellect: The Poetnj of Charles T01l1linson, Michael Kirkham takes a long, serious look at the work of the man who has made a bridge between both sides of the Atlantic, and between the waning of the age of High Modernism and thefin de siecie. This is only the fourth book to deal with Tomlinson's substantial ",uvre, and its subtle, thorough analyses should inspire an upward revaluation of Tomlinson 's aesthetic merit as well as his historical importance. When he began writing, in the 1950s, Tomlinson posed himself against both the Sturm tlnd Drang of late Romanticism and Dylan Thomas, and the dry brittle wit of Larkin and the Movement poets. He was unique among British poets in maintaining a fondness for, and a commitment ·to, American poetry and American landscapes. His earliest influences (in addition to Ruskin, a natural inspiration for a man who was at one time a serious painter and who has always been a patient looker at landscape and art) were Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Tomlinson's poetry has always been marked by a refusal to court or parade the merely personal, but as Kirkham suggests, his impartial, selfrestrained tonalities are exact but never ascetic...

pdf

Share