Letters in Canada 1969

LEITERS IN CANADA 1969 EDITED BY DAVID M. HAYNE We welcome to this issue of 'Letters in Canada' Professor Michael S. Homyansky, who succeeds as poetry reviewer Professor Hugh MacCallum , and we express to the latter Our gratitude for his distinguished contributions over the past few years. We also greet again a former contributor to these pages, Professor Robin S. Harris, who takes charge of reviews in education, succeeding Professor Edward F. Sheffield, under whose able direction the education section has become increasingly important. This issue of 'Letters in Canada' includes an author-title index prepared in the Editorial Department of the University of Toronto Press. POETRY A year's poems, crammed into two cardboard cartons-five dozen assorted books, squeak by howl, at sexes and heavens. I'm new here, an infrequent verse-reader. Do I reach for bench and robe, and set about pronouncing judgement? Not this time. In such a press, there is no hope of doing justice all round; and the magisterial role is a bind at best. Besides, some of the voices here point me a different way. These days, they remind me, it's the judge who is damned. Any attempt to play the critic is jeered as hypocritical (or Establishmentarian, or pedantic): all we have is private opinion, and truth is arrived at by vote. Well, so be it. Instead of straining to imply objective criteria and a vast background, I'll shrug into my mackinaw and tell you what I (personally) looked for and what I found. What I looked for: i.e. what I hoped to find, and what more realistically I expected. I hoped for words that take fire, echo in the mind, that might etch marble and outlive it. I looked for voices to shape me a worldeither a foreign cosmos that compelled my assent, or the familiar world caught fresh to astonish me. The old truth made new, or an unguessed vision made clear: can we ask less of a man who stops us saying he's a Volume XXXIX, Number 4. July 1970 ...