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POETRY Northrop Frye This is an unusually thin year: one good book, two promising ones, and a miscellaneous assortment of what the Elizabethans might politely have called a paradise of dainty devices, though it would be more accurate to speak of an amusement park of rhythmical gadgets. Some of these latter are pleasant and readable enough: with others, one is strongly tempted to take the plangent tone of a couplet which appears on the opening page of one of the year's few published volumes: Last of the mighty oaks nurtured in freedom! Brambles and briars now supersede treedom. However, here goes. The good book, of course, as the GovernorGeneral 's committee has this time recognized, is Jay Macpherson's The Boatman (Oxford, x, 70 pp., $2.50). The book itself is one of the few physically attractive objects on my Canadian poetry shelves, and the fact is an appropriate tribute to its contents, for The Boatman is the most carefu\\y planned and unified book of poems that has yet appeared in these surveys. It is divided into six parts. The first, "Poor Child," contains poems that appeared in a small pamphlet reviewed here some years ago: they form a series of tentative explorations of poetic experience, ranging in tone from the macabre "The ill Wind" to the plaintive "The Third Eye." The next two sections are called "0 Earth Return" and "The Plowman in Darkness." The titles come from two poems of Blake that deal with "Earth" as the whole of fallen nature in female form, and the subjects are chiefly the more common mythical figures connected with this "Earth," including Eve, Eurynome, the Cumaean Sibyl, Mary Magdalene, and the bride of the Song of Songs, identified with the Queen of Sheba. Hence the subtitle, "A Speculum for Fallen Women." The two parts are, like Blake's lyrics, matched by contrast against each other, the relation often being marked by identical titles. The contrast is not so much Blake's innocence and experience, though related to it, as a contrast between a theme idealized by a kind of aesthetic distance and the same theme made colloquial and familiar. "Sibylla," whose fate is described in the motto to Eliot's The Waste Land, appears in "0 Earth Return" thus: Silence: the bat-clogged cave Lacks breath to sigh. Sibylla, hung between earth and sky, Sways with the wind in her pendant grave. LETTERS ll{ CANADA: 1957 and in "The Plowman in Darkness" thus: I'm mercifully rid of youth, No callers plague me ever; I'm virtuous, I tell the truthAnd you can see I'm clever! 435 In the last two sections the corresponding male figures appear. ''The Sleepers," intensely pastoral in tone, is focussed on Endymion and his moon-loved daze, with overtones of Adonis and Adam. Then the figures of Noah and his ark emerge, expanding until they become identified with God and his creation respectively. The creation is inside its creator, and the ark similarly attempts to explain to Noah, in a series of epigrams in double quatrains, that it is really inside him, as Eve was once inside Adam: When the four quarters shall Turn in and make one whole, Then I who wall your body, Which is to me a soul, Shall swim circled by you And cradled on your tide, Who was not even, not ever, Taken from your side. As the ark expands into the flooded world, the body of the Biblical leviathan, and the order of nature, the desigu of the whole book begins to take shape. The Boatman begins with a poem called "Ordinary People in the Last Days," a wistful poem about an apocalypse that happens to everyone except the poet, and ends with a vision of a "Fisherman" who, more enterprising than Eliot's gloomy and luckless shore-sitter, catches a "myriad forms," eats them, drinks the lake they are in, and is caught in his tum by God. Such myths as the flood and the apocalypse appear less for religious than for poetic reasons: the book moves from a "poor child" at the centre of a hostile and mysterious world to an adult child who has...

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