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  • Documentaries: Poems by Walter Hildebrandt
  • Dale Lakevold
Walter Hildebrandt, Documentaries: Poems (Edmonton: NeWest Press 2016)

Walter Hildebrandt's latest and eighth collection of poetry, Documentaries, focuses on an investigation of history, whether recent or more distant history, by exposing its fault lines, more specifically those moments when oppression is met with resistance and something new is created. It is there in "dissensus" and "disjunction," we learn in the collection's first poem, "Illegal Combinations: Glasgow 1787," that the poet finds the presence of "another history." (13) The disruption of the ordered past thus enables new alignments in that history to be perceived, and new ways of thinking and acting to be engaged by this knowledge. (13) This process of recording these other histories, such as that of the Glasgow of 1787 or the Winnipeg of 1919, and of understanding our present moment in those contexts becomes the subject of Hildebrandt's book.

There are seven poems in Documentaries, five of the long form variety and two shorter ones. It would be possible to call the entire work a long poem, considering the documentary approach common to each individual piece and a narrating voice that remains consistent throughout the collection as it shifts between present and past. The form of the writing, as well, with the short, broken line of projective verse connects each poem with the next, not that such formal coherence is necessary. The author could, if he were so inclined, continue to add to this collection in much the same way that Robert Kroestch did when he turned his long poem project Field Notes into a life work that spanned decades. Hildebrandt is following Kroestch in this respect by showing that the work of reading the past with an eye on the present is never complete. There are many perspectives and many obstacles to be found in this undertaking. In the collection's second poem, "Let Them Eat Grass / The Dakota Wars 1862," for example, we hear the speaker struggling to come to terms with the extent of the American betrayal of the Dakota. "Treaties / had been / the hope for both," he says, until "the ground moved / the rules changed," and coexistence on the land is transformed into violence and genocide. There are "so many windows / onto these events … hard to see it all at once." (26) The poet relies on documenting this history as a response to the amnesia that often keeps the past safely hidden and forgotten: "removals / legislated violence / humiliations / marginalization / loss of homelands / windows / onto this complex / history / documentaries." (34)

The works within Documentaries lie very much within the tradition of the Canadian long poem of the past century or more, a poetry that has characteristically made history its subject. Examples of such work might include Dorothy Livesay's Call My People Home (1950), a treatment of the Japanese-Canadian internment; Armand Garnet Ruffo's Grey Owl (1996), a deconstruction of the life of Archie Belaney, an Englishman who posed famously as an Ojibwa; or Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (1976), an examination of Southwest Saskatchewan history that gives voice to Indigenous and settler experience. Hildebrandt's poetry turns decidedly toward the political, which places his work in good company with the work of poets such as Livesay. In fact, Hildebrandt may have been recalling Livesay's The [End Page 271] Documentaries (1968), her collection of six long poems, all addressing political subjects, when he conceived of his own Documentaries.

The book opens with a poem set in present-day Glasgow where we are taken directly to the site of Glasgow Green, the "people's park," a "place of mass protests / public demonstrations." (9) Here in this city and in this park a "radical reform movement" would find a home in the aftermath of the weavers' strike of 1787: "on September 3, seven thousand gather at the Green / strike / demand a just solution / companies lock them out / call in police and military / desperate times / unarmed protesters / asking to talk / answered by force." (19) That day three would be shot dead and three would die later, says the speaker, and a union movement would be born. (20) In recording this...

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