Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem ed. by Frank M. Tierney, Angela Robbeson (review)

humanities 403 definition in early Canada. (JANICE FIAMENGO) Frank M. Tierney and Angela Robbeson, editors. Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem University of Ottawa Press. 192. $25.00 Ever since Dorothy Livesay's modest essay on the documentary poem in Canada (1969) , the long poem or poetic sequence has been proclaimed a major Canadian genre, with the proviso that it is not actually a genre and not peculiarly Canadian. Rather, it is a Canadian defiance of genre and nationality, of epic pretension, historical coherence, and narrative selfdiscovery . That its virtue lies in its instability is confirmed by this collection of thirteen essays, which cannot agree on the shape, aim, or even length of a long poem, a ragged form that may include closet dramas, fragmentary lyrics and photos, Fred Wah's breathing exercises, and a sequence of `ten fairly short prose-poems' by Bronwen Wallace. The line from Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village that gives this volume its title B`The bolder flight of my adventurous muse' B is oddly inappropriate in that the essays are in turn competent, workmanlike, earnest, cautious, or enthusiastic; but they are rarely bold. Instead of taking risks, they consolidate two well-established strains of criticism: traditional historical and genre studies, whether these forms are endorsed or challenged; and close readings in which poststructuralist ambiguities are disclosed as the motive or reward of selected poems. The latter are more highly charged theoretically; the former are more rigorous historically. Standing between them are Robert Kroetsch and Smaro Kamboureli, whose poetry and commentaries are repeatedly cited with either respect or complaint. Appropriately, the book illustrates how critical schools compete for territorial advantage by identifying heroes and villains B thereby reenacting one of the main themes of their subject: the long poem. Although the essays pursue different interests, they usually treat the long poem as a form of longing for, and/or disruption of, community. David Bentley's quick tour of nineteenth-century poems that serve as `a means of aligning individual with collective experience and, in so doing, establishing its author's membership in a community,' offers a useful key to the volume. When poets reach beyond the lyrical moment, they encounter some larger social or historical presence against which to measure themselves. They enter a `sociable dream' (Adrian Fowler) in which the social may be absorbed by personal fantasy, or conversely, the personal may merge B painfully, according to Reinhold Kramer, who speaks of thèlacerations' of authority B with a larger collectivity. This dominating 404 letters in canada 1999 Canadian presence may take the form of E.J. Pratt's Laurentian monster (Sandra Djwa), a feminized or eroticized landscape (Wanda Campbell), a patriarchal canon (Margot Kaminski), heroic national history (Djwa, Gwendolyn Guth, who both spring to Pratt's defence), the force of law (Kramer, Andrew Stubbs: the most highly charged theoreticians), or the fractured stories of selfhood (Karen Clavelle, Gary Geddes, Charlene Diehl-Jones, Meira Cook). This final category applies especially to the postmodern sequences of David Arnason, Sharon Thesen, Fred Wah, Kristjana Gunnars, and Dennis Cooley. Their poems reverse the conventional strategy, usually ascribed to Pratt, by which tropology (the rhetoric of identity) seeks fulfilment in topology (place, home, dwelling, nation). Instead, we find a pattern of endless beginnings in Arnason, a radical (rooted) open-endedness in Wah, of side-stepping displacements in Wallace, of passionate abjection in Gunnars, of trespass in Cooley. Bolder Flights will be a useful volume for admirers of the Canadian long poem, although it contains few surprises. As for the competition of critical schools, the final score is a good Canadian compromise: a tie. (JON KERTZER) ...