Invocations: The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen by Jan Bartley (review)

he is in 'Faces in the Mirror.' Similarly the definitive account of allusion, reference, and influence in The New AgelLe Nouveau Siecle is in the process of being written, essay by essay, by Hood himself. All those who have argued, for example, that the work's twelve-part roman fleuve structure is indebted to Proust or Anthony Powell will now have to attend, as Hood points out, to Arthur Ransome's books about 'Swallows and Amazons.' Hood's 'Afterword: What Is Going On' informs us that his 'more recent essays have grown progressively more delicately balanced between witness and invention,' an observation that surely could also be made about the stories and novels of the past decade. With one or two exceptions, most of the pieces gathered here can as easily be imagined as parts of the 'invented' New Age as of the 'witnessed' and therefore more autobiographical non-fiction. 'Before the Flood,' the lovingly nuanced and closely organized opening essay, seems almost an excerpt from or companion to The Swing in the Garden; 'Past Christmas Presents' can be read as an episode from the married life of Matthew and Edie Goderich; and even 'Scoring: Seymour Segal's Art of Hockey,' the occasionally Barthian essay on hockey as sex and sex as hockey, seems to look forward to a still-to-be-written volume dealing with sport. I suppose what I'm really getting at is the extent to which the body of Hood's work, with all its now-familiar strengths and weaknesses, is beginning to resemble an ceuvre in all parts of which we can trace the evolution and play of a remarkable sensibility. Yet perhaps the final effect of this very readable collection is an ironic one, since it always shows Hood's readers how not to read him. Since the teller has already offered an authoritative and often convincing reading of self and tale, his readers are invited to go beyond him to the text itself for interpretations unsanctioned by the author. (SAM SOLECKI) Ian Bartley. Invocations: The Poetry and Prose of Gwendolyn MacEwen University of British Columbia Press. 113· $12.95 This is the first book-length study of Gwendolyn MacEwen and it offers an elegant synthesis of the criticism that has accumulated over the years. Jan Bartley acknowledges that MacEwen's poems are sometimes 'like whispered secrets one cannot quite hear' but observes that many readers admire the magnificent obscurity even as they criticize it. Rich ornaments and exotic settings account for much of MacEwen's appeal, but are these decorations gratuitous and self-indulgent? Bartley quotes Ralph Gustafson 's vivid description of MacEwen's 'dangerous tendency to devote everything to inward complexity' but invokes Frank Davey's clistinction between the 'ornamental and kinetic application of myth' in defence of MacEwen's methods. A wide range of 'esoteric and psychological 466 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 sources' is here brought into focus by an emphasis on the process of 'internal exploration, on self-examination: Despite Bartley's opening claim, however, that the sources are only catalysts for this process and are not of interest 'independent of their relationship to and influence upon MacEwen's writing: this book often suggests the opposite: that MacEwen's writing is of interest primarily for the way in which it leads us to a synthesis of the mythic patterns to which she alludes. In other words, an enhanced appreciation of MacEwen'S craft comes through less forcefully than does the thematic emphasis. Bartley draws attention, for example, to the confusion resulting from the odd manipulation of point of view in Julian the Magician. Important questions are raised: 'Is the Christ referred to in the diary the "alien psyche" who usurps Julian's consciousness ...?' Examination of this technique, however, is aborted when we are told that 'these questions can only be resolved if one reads the word "Christ" as a metaphor for the true self: This equation, Bartley claims, has the virtue of offering a reading which is 'in harmony with alchemy, the philosophy of Boehme, and Christian Gnosticism: Maybe so, but it has the limitation of not getting us to the heart of an understanding of MacEwen's craft. Bartley...