Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century by Modris Eksteins (review)

humanities 543 not have major critical studies of Page, Layton, Margaret Avison, Raymond Souster, and Dudek, and that E.J. Pratt, despite a new Collected Poems, seems to have slipped off the critical map. And this at a time when more theses are being written on Canadian literature than ever before. It is a measure of Trehearne's critical tact as a reader of poetry that his lengthy readings of poems by the four poets do not resemble each other. Each of the four main chapters is in effect a substantial monograph on the poet's work of the 1940s and early 1950s. Each offers an overview of the poet's place in the turf war between the two magazines; each describes the development of the poetic career; each presents lengthy close readings of exemplary poems; and each indicates why and how the particular poet is a seminal figure in Canadian modernism. The only chapter that seems to me problematic is the one devoted to A.M. Klein, where Trehearne, for understandable reasons, is unable to bring the life and the poetry into a telling relationship. For me, the most interesting and provocative chapters B and also the ones in which Trehearne seems to be enjoying himself B are the ones on Layton and Dudek. To his credit, Trehearne does justice to both. He recognizes the heroism involved in Layton's struggle in the 1930s and 1940s to make himself into a poet, and he understands that the poet's intense subjectivity in his major work is often provoked by the impersonality of modernist poetics as well as by modernity's assault on the self. His readings of Layton's neglected early poems like `Waterfront' are informative and usually convincing, and he is honest enough to admit that he finds `The Cold Green Element' difficult. In some respects the chapter on Dudek is the most controversial. First, because Trehearne argues that Dudek is a major poet. And second because he shows that Dudek in the 1940s and 1950s and his students in later years were responsible for disseminating and maintaining the myth of the contrasting styles of First Statement and Preview. As Trehearne points out in closing, it is therefore appropriate that another of Dudek's students should challenge it. There are various criticisms one could direct at The Montreal Forties B including the fact that its author never saw a long sentence he didn't like B but the book will be indispensable to all future discussions of EnglishCanadian poetry of the twentieth century. (SAM SOLECKI) Modris Eksteins. Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century Key Porter. xiv, 258. $32.95 It may be the result of a general urge to close accounts at the end of the century that the second, or even third, generation of families uprooted 544 letters in canada 1999 during the vast shifts of population wanted to rekindle and thus perhaps burn to purifying ashes the horrendous experiences of their youth and the fate of their families. Whatever the reason, the last decade of the twentieth century has brought forth a veritable flood of books that render accounts B of great variety and, naturally, differing value B of what has happened in this most formidable but also most terrible of centuries. The remarkable thing about the book before us is that it combines the meticulousness, of a scholar, the ethical commitment of a personal witness, and the passionate elegance of a creative writer. This combination is, needless to say, rare fare. How does the author do it? Supported by numerous bibliographical references and a number of revealing and moving family photographs, he explores the history (for the last 150 years) of Latvia and the Latvians and superimposes it on the history (four generations) of his own family. It is a simple family, rooted in the land. Re-emerging throughout the whole story like a mythical figure is the imposing, flaxen-haired great-grandmother Grieta, who served (in more ways than one) in a manor house, whose son moved his family on a one-horse cart to escape wars, starving and struggling and starting all...