Orion, and Other Poems by Charles G.D. Roberts (review)

humanities 441 early years of this century as Boas and his students began to find fault with Powell's fifty-five language families are particularly fine, giving a sense of the power of a contribution of critical ideas and careful, detailed fieldwork coming together to reveal a simpler and more powerful classification. The product of this critique was Sapir's classification listing six families for North America. Greenberg's posits three families for all New World languages. Although well beyond the scope of the book, Darnell's opinion on Greenberg's further reduction of Amerindian language families to three would have strengthened her argument for the centrality of Amerindian linguistics to anthropology as a whole and for its core debates as a vital area of scholarship at the end of the twentieth century. The form of the debates about Sapir's classification is similar to the controversies that met both of Greenberg's syntheses, of African languages some decades ago and more recently of Amerindian languages. Tracing the patterns of these debates in more detail and intrepeting them more fully would have enhanced that side of the history that is about ideas. Darnell, biographer of Edward Sapir and compiler and editor of his collected papers, has opened up the founding period of American anthropology , showing convincingly that despite the rivalries, changes of personnel, and sometimes noisy debates, the Boasian innovations built on a continuous line of questions and research. This book is a model of intellectual history, describing fully as it does the institutional shape of scholarly life and noting the contributions not only of the great, remembered scholars but also of those essential collaborators, too often forgotten. It will become a standard reference for the early years of American anthropology. (MICHAEL D. LEVIN) Charles G.D. Roberts. Orion, and Other Poems. Edited by Ross S. Kilpatrick Canadian Poetry Press. xxxii, 144. $25.00 Canadian literature has always been an upstart industry served by a remarkably small number of authors and texts over the relatively brief span of its history. Very few texts can be spoken of as having attained monumental status in terms of publishing and literary history, and of these few, Roberts's Orion, and Other Poems is perhaps the most significant. The success of Al Purdy's Poems for All the Annettes and perhaps Anne Michaels's The Weight of Oranges/Miners' Pond might be considered to be comparable. Despite the fact that Orion, and Other Poems is an apprentice work published by Roberts when he was only nineteen, one may argue that its stature and influence among Canadian poets are roughly analogous to those of Lyrical Ballads among English poets. Though the Canadian text is much the lesser, both signalled the triumphant advent of an indigenous Romantic voice in poetry. As Archibald Lampman put it in 442 letters in canada 1999 the much-quoted passage: `It was like a voice from some new paradise of art calling us to be up and doing.' Ross S. Kilpatrick's scholarly edition of Orion, and Other Poems makes Roberts's book available again for the first time since it appeared in 1880. It is an inexpensive paperback of good quality. The scholarship and editing are impeccable. Hence it will be useful to lay readers and scholars alike. Kilpatrick is a classical scholar, and one of the most valuable aspects of the book is his expert explanation of the influence upon the work of Roberts's own classical learning. The introduction is a substantial essay in two parts. The first part surveys the book's reception from the first reviews to the more recent studies by Desmond Pacey, Roy Daniells, and L. R. Early. The second is justly critical of the view up to now ascendant in which Roberts's and the other Confederation poets' works are routinely discounted. Explicitly to challenge this view, Kilpatrick posits these `imperative' questions, research into which may begin with the publication of this edition: How do the collection and its constituent poems measure up against contemporary work in Canada and abroad? What were the young Roberts' literary models and influences, and personal experiences, and what did he create from them? What were his principles...