Poetry

50 LETTERS IN CANADA 1990 Terminons ce parcours avec un court n~cit dont Ie ton est bien celui d'une generation actuelle d'ecrivaines et d'ecrivains: celui d'une voix Iyrique, voire d'un neo-romantisme qui exploite it l'envi la marginalite de l'artiste, la mort, dans un discours empreint d'une forte subjectivite. II s'agit d'un texte de Daniel Gagnon, Venite a cantare (Lemeac, 73, $12.00), qui rac'onte I'histoire d'une cantatrice italienne, lolanda Marconi. Celle-ci souffre d'un cancer et Ie president de la Republique I'exhorte a revenir malgre tout chanter pour son peuple. Mais il est trop tard, pour deux raisons: Iolanda ne veut plus revenir chanter et, dans peu de temps, la mort aura fait son ceuvre. Ce court recit, comme la majorite des textes de Gagnon, propose en fait une reflexion sur la condition de I'artiste, dont Ie president ne reconnaH qu'in extremis la valeur pour son peuple. Le ton Iyrique, presque incantatoire de ce roman convient parfaitement it la matiere de cet Antigone modeme ou se retrouvent, sous d'autres modulations, l'honneur, Ie pouvoir et la mort. On voit encore - faut-il repeter Ie cliche? - la grande diversite du roman quebecois, qui ne se laisse pas saisir d'un seul trait. Y aurait-il lieu, cependant, de mettre en relief une ceuvre ou une tendance? La encore, Ie passe fait figure d'element recurrent, qu'il soit saisi pour commemorer certains evenements significatifs au comme pretexte it l'humour. Mais cela, on l'a vu, n'empeche pas une preoccupation pour Ie present, it travers les problemes lies au destin de I'art en particulier ou de la societe en general. Poetry RONALD B. HATCH In an interview broadcast earlier this year over the CBC, the American poet and critic Robert Bly commented that poets today divide into two separate groups depending on whether they write along a horizontal or a vertical axis. The 'horizontalists' concentrate on the dailiness of life, either in tones of praise or with distance and irony. The 'verticalists' reach up or plunge down into the nature of being, sometimes in a vatic voice, more often a meditative one. In reading through the more than one hundred volumes published this year, one finds that Bly's distinction between the two kinds of poets can be used as a rough and ready measure. But it is also apparent that Canada's poets are least successful when concentrating on one of the axes. The most successful poets are those who conjure metaphysical responses from the sensuousness of everyday images. As will become apparent, moreover, some of the best poetry develops from a questioning of the very relation between the two axes. POETRY 51 Among the writers who have best succeeded in developing the horizontal quality of daily life while continuing to call it into question, Al Purdy must surely take pride of place. A new book by Purdy is always an occasion, and it is a pleasure to report that The Woman on the Shore (McClelland and Stewart, 113, $9.95 paper) is among the finer collections of poetry published in 1990. Purdy's writing career began at the end of the Second World War with The Enchanted Echo, an undistinguished volume in which Purdy wrestled with closed forms. By the 19505 and 1960s, Purdy had abandoned the struggle with conventional rhyme and metre and had developed the laconic, rolling style of speech that has become his trademark . New books of poetry appeared virtually every year, and the Purdy voice became and has remained one of the stronger influences on Canadian poetry. His Collected Poems (so-called) appeared in 1986, the volume winning him, deservedly, his second Governor-General's Award, but the later poems were weak, particularly those from Piling Blood, and it looked as though Purdy had allowed his facility as a raconteur to overwhelm his interest in larger questions. The turn to prose that one could hear in Piling Blood seemed to be confirmed when he published his first novel in 1990. In the new poems from The Woman on the Shore, however, Purdy reverses...