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t1UMAN1TU:.~ j Uy would seem less anticlimactic and sketchy had they taken some notice of the twenty major stage productions Bergman has directed during that period. 'The only sensible alternative to the stage is the morgue: he says, quoting the character of the director in TheGoldberg Variations. And as these lines are written, his newest production ofStrindberg's The Ghost Sonata has just opened in Stockholm. Above all, Marc Gervais's enthusiastic and handsomely published tribute to Ingmar Bergmanconveys a fascination with his cinematic art that is easy to share. (FREDERICK J. MARKER) Sam Solecki. Tile Last Calladiall Poet: An Essay 011 Al Purdy University of Toronto Press. xviii, 316. $5~.OO In his preface and opening chapter in this volume, Sam Solecki suggests that a line has been drawn in the Canadian sand by postcolonial/postmodern writers and critics. On one side are Canadian homogeneity and national identification grow1ded in the expression of'once dominant traditions and hegemonies that constitute the historical matrix out of which the nation developed.' On the other side are decentralization, pluralism, and multiculturalism that politicize cultural expression and 'make it do the work of identity politics ... part of a compensation package for historical wrongs or present anxieties.' It's a line that separates past from present, aesthetics from ethics, and, for Solecki, 'profurtdity and comprehensive vision' from righteous ideology. There's no crossing of this line: writers like Purdy, Irving Layton, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Avison, P.K. Page, Northrop Frye, and George Woodcock are grouped together; opposing them are those like Dionne Brand, Rohinton Mistry, a host of 'minor or ephemeral' talents, Robret Kroetsch, and Frank Davey who do not break ranks. By implication, readers and teachers of Canadian literature focus on either 'achieved content' and 'compelling aesthetic signature' or 'preferred topics (gender, homosexuality, language, postcolonialism, race, the native, etc.).' Solecki's main lament is that 'the questions we thought worth asking about identity, nation, and culture no longer have the same frame of reference they once did. It's as if the key words - including nation and culture - have themselves shifted, and continue to shift in meaning.' The line is really Solecki's (it certainly isn't Al Purdy's), drawn with a Damoclean sword honed in defence of a lost cause - the promulgation of self-contained attitudes and values that have everything to do with intellectual privilege and denial of their own agenda, but little to do with how Purdy's 'totalizing' of cultural fragments is complemented by, and complements, Brand's fragmentation ofcultural absolutes. Three years ago, Al Purdy came into my W1dergraduate Canadian literature classroom, read a few poems, and crossed whatever exclusive generational borders were 510 LEITERS IN CANADA 1999 supposed to exist by talking about his lived experience and asking the students about theirs. From their written responses afterward, I'd say they'll never forget that visit; but they'll also remember the postcolonial and intercultural issues we discussed in works by Lee Maracle and Rohinton Mistry. Shifts in frames of reference and meanings are not things that frighten today's students or distort their developed sense of self and place in this country, at least not any more than they frightened and unsettled Purdy in his formative years during the Depression. In fact, such shifts expand their self-admitted limited views of Canada based upon traditional teachings in elementary and high school that still focus on 'our Negroes and Indians' (to quote Solecki quoting Emerson), but rarely on 'our Japanese' (the internment of twenty thousand during the Second World War is still a national secretforschoolchildren, despite redress), and never bring up the Caribbean disapora or Oka. Do I digress in a review that is about a book on AI Purdy'S rel/vre? I don't believe so, because Solecki takes great pains to contextualize everything he subsequently says in his close reading of Purdy'S poems about Purdy'S use of tradition, his views of the poet and poetry, and the undeniable links he forms between local (Ameliasburg), national (Canada in prehistory and history), and ontological concerns. Solecki is a fine scholar, whose research of Purdy'S sources is impeccable. His exegesis of individual poems...

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