Poetry

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 POETRY 325 poet? The skill to see, and to say what he has seen. At the very least a man who knows what he is dOing, and an artefact that invites q second visit. I've seen it done, and in this country, so I preserve the hope. But having SOme acquaintance with the scene, I expected other things too: chalk scrawls, worn-out spells, old tunes, whimpers, bleats, fulminations . I looked for attitudes struck a hundred times before - the show-off who shouts 'Look Ma, I'm a poet' with every line; the mini-Whitman celebrating his own infinite variety; the well-wrought lens, crying 'Look at me looking at the world.' Then the discoverers-of death and fear and pain (their name is lesion), rubbing our noses therein; of their native land, in the gtip of philistines and lady poets; of love, tender and personal and unique, or so they claim in ancient cliches. Minstrels more plain-spoken, bragging about their last lays in straight terms (what did Purdy call the frogs years ago - 'batrachian nightingales, rehearsing the old springtime pap about the glories of copulation'?). And two attitudes typical of the Canadian poet since early Layton: the confusion of sexual potency with poetic power (the priapic fallacy); and the advance sneer at the academic critic, a weak-eyed failure at any kind of making-a curiously defensive posture this, considering how many of the sneerers are tame poets on campus or professors On the side. These things I looked for, and found. Others I did not expect. A surprise to find quite so many new poets, appearing for the first time in soft booklets too slim to be called volumes. I suppose in other days you'd have met them only in undergrad literary magazines. Now even estal>lished journals have been offering them occasional space, and they troop forth on solo Bights from presses in Fredericton, Vancouver, Toronto, and other Helicons in between. One welcomes the evidence that the art is so much alive. But it does complicate the reviewer's job: tricky sometimes to tell them apart (like confusing...