Poetry

334 LETTERS IN CANADA POETRY The round-up has seemed harder than ever this year, or at least more tedious - as if 1were coursing a wilderness of scrubland, hoping over each hillock to strike something worth taking home. A friend tried to offer encouragement by advancing the mulch theory: good poetry cannot flourish, he suggested, except in territory where a heavy growth of ordinary verse is produced, as it were to prepare the ground. This appealed to the suburban gardener in me (I had not been happy as a range-rider), but not for long. Did the theory make sense? A rank undergrowth might signify that the soil was fertile, but it would hardly promote the springing of flowers and noble trees: more likely to choke them out. If the mulch theory had any truth, the weeds must first be cut down and converted. Which may be part of my job. You know my methods by now, Watson. First set aside the items which may be admirable in other ways but do not belong in my garden. Anthologies, for example, are gardens in themselves and therefore on the wrong scale. Shelve The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (Oliver Goldsmith to Marc Plourde), edited by Gustafson; and Horse d'CEuvres [sic] by the Four Horsemen. Likewise more modest collections in magazines, like Splices from the University of Ottawa, or Pugn NO.1 from Malaspina College in Nanaimo. Translations also have to go: this time Under the Eaves of a Forgotten Village, sixty Bulgarian poems rendered by Colombo and Nikola Roussanoff. 1exclude books which pretend only in part to be verse: thus Robert Sward's The Jurassic Shales, subtitled 'a novel'; Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, a collage assembled by Stan Dragland; and Robert Kroetsch's The Ledger, which reproduces bits of a historical ledger and intersperses them with verse comment. Two others belong to a genre best styled 'proesy,' prose which may be poetic but remains beyond the dividing line. Shelve David Slabotsky's The Mind of Genesis and Myron Turner's The River and the Window, which is imperfectly spelled besides. Finally two works which are certainly poetry, but do not belong to 1975 except in a scholarly sense. Margaret Whitridge has edited and introduced the late love poems of Archibald Lampman under the title Lampman's Kate. 1am more reluctant to put aside The Shrouding, which Leo Kennedy has been persuaded to reprint unchanged from 1933. Kennedy himself remarks upon that more formal world when 'poets thought a lot about scansion and almost as much about rhyme'; and his poems afford a sharp contrast to those of today's young writers, both in their attitude to craft and in their awareness of predecessors - 'the presence of others in the room.' Leon Edel's introduction says far more than 1could hammer out. Collected works by familiar authors present special difficulties. There is the presumption of trying to sum up a full career in a few lines, and also POETRY 335 the reviewer's problem of saying more precisely what he has adumbrated before. All I can manage is a formal salute, with a promise to explore more closely if that seems appropriate. McClelland and Stewart have published selected poems by Irving Layton in two volumes, each with a challenging portrait of the bard - only four years after their own edition of his collected poems. If you find the present selections more convenient, they are called The Darkening Fire (1945-68) and The Unwavering Eye (1969-75)' The second volume is justified in a forceful foreword by Eli Mandel. I have already said my piece about Layton, in these pages in 1972 and in a postscript last year, and I see little reason to modify it. It is tempting to try out the mulch theory within Layton's covers, for there are some strong and touching poems among the prevailing rhetoric; but at my back I hear the voice of Byron advising that I a bard may chaunt too often and too long.' The other big event last year was the publication, also by McClelland, of The Collected Works of Earle Birney, two volumes boxed and bound in brown cloth with...