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LEITERS IN CANADA: 1963 EDITED BY F. W. WAIT The number of books in the fields of history and social studies continues to increase. This year Professor G. M. Craig shared the burden of local and regional studies with Monis Zaslow; Professor John Willis has reviewed a group of books on law following Alexander Brady's survey of national and international studies; and-a particularly welcome addition -an assessment of the unusually large output of books on Canadian furniture and other artefacts has been provided by June Biggar of the Canadiana Department of the Royal Ontario Museum. The regular contributors have shown their usual promptness in submitting their manuscripts, and the Officers of the Press have provided the generous co-operation without which it would be impossible to conduct this annual survey. I want especially to thank Mrs. Marion Magee and Mrs. V. A. Grant for their patience and helpfulness. POETRY Milton Wilson This is my fourth year surveying the poetry in English, and it has certainly been the least exciting of the four. The staple product is substantial enough, even distinctive, but high points are hard to find. The best are not exactly full of passionate intensity, while the worst have at least the courage of their convictions. Good but unexceptional work by established writers and definitive collections by lesser ones: roughly speaking, that's the pattern. If 1963 deserves to be remembered, it is mainly because Milton Acorn at last published a fuJI-scale collection (in fact, two of them, if you count the Spring issue of the Fiddlehead), and also because a few interesting young poets (such as Gwendolyn MacEwen ) have been given the chance to show themselves at some length. I I haven't seen all of Eldon Grier's earlier books (there are at least three of them, they have had very limited circulation, and nOne has been Volume XXXII!, Numbe,. 4, July, .1964 370 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1963 reviewed in these pag~s), but a glance at the one I happen to possess, The Ring of Ice (I957), makes it clear that his latest, A Friction of Lights CContact Press, pp. 61, $2.00), is in part a selection of previously published work. This new appearance should serve to make an attractive but neglected poet a little less unknown. Being a painter first and a poet second, Grier may be content to hide his poetry under a bushel. But the poet certainly doesn't neglect his alter ego. Although there are nO visual accompaniments to this collection Cas there were to a section of The Ring of Ice), the poems seem to know that their author is also a painter: Across the lake the careful greens are plastered with expended light. The moon, grown shriller, bobs away on islands of synthetic snow. (from "Season of Uneasiness") Across the steeply climbing flat-faced street at the six vertical ochre strips, her older sisters, short skirts flaring from the hips, emerge and blow away buoyant as wasps. (from IIView from a Window") Still, it isn't simply the coming together of artistic functions that interests Grier, but also their duality. He believes that his two vocations are different as well as the same. The dust-jacket quotes him on the fascination of being both painter and poet. He sees the one art approaching feeling in a more direct, uncompromising, functional, and even passive way, while the other is necessarily impure, in the sense that "poetry can never escape the onus of meaning, and meaning arrived at through feeling is one of its distinctive revelations." Grier the poet is fond of mixing his more uncompromising imagery with oracular invitations to meaning: rock becomes light and sand becomes glass and still we are cheated of time and enchantment. There the two approaches seem to touch and separate. O ccasionally the oracles are dull, or weakly assertive, but Grier needs to mean as well as see and feel. Correct me if-the image of a crab, a cup of metal on an iron tree, is not the way this magic passes to ambition. The poems actually about artists or specific art-works are often consciously transitional, interpretative, poised between...

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