The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition by Brian Trehearne (review)

542 letters in canada 1999 resignation (which was long intended) came only three days after the end of the war and almost a month before Igor Gouzenko defected in Ottawa and triggered the Red scares of the late 1940s. On the other hand, for those who want to disinter the complex family relationships that accompanied Budge Crawley's dramatic rise and fall as a Canadian movie mogul, complete with authoritarian fathers, reckless treatment of children, and hints of bigamy, this makes compelling reading. (DAVID CLANDFIELD) Brian Trehearne. The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition University of Toronto Press. x, 382. $60.00 Brian Trehearne's densely argued and critically nuanced study of EnglishCanadian poetry in the 1940s is in many respects a sequel to his earlier study of the presence of Imagism in the poetry of the 1920s. And given that he concludes this study with some suggestive comments about Louis Dudek's influence on poets like George Bowering, Frank Davey, and Robert Kroetsch, I wouldn't be surprised if his next work brought the narrative of English-Canadian poetry to the near-present. It is Trehearne's thesis in The Montreal Forties that the decade had a period style shared by the supposedly rival groups gathered around John Sutherland's First Statement magazine and Patrick Anderson's Preview. He rejects the view put abroad originally by Sutherland and Dudek B and later by Dudek's students at McGill B that the Preview poets wrote in a highly figurative style and offered `word patterns rather than poetry' or what Dudek called `polyglot displays' while the First Statement group offered àmore wholesome' and more colloquial, less obscure, even proletarian poetics. Respecting the various differences among the poets, Trehearne nevertheless insists that, in their poetry as opposed to their polemics, both groups of poets cultivated a style `in which brevity, density, and difficulty of metaphor are central to a poem's soundness of structure.' The examination of the dialectical relationship between the two seminal little magazines is part of an ambitious, and only partly realized, attempt to situate Canadian poetry of the period in the context of modernism as well as in relationship to work being done in England and the United States at the same time. And while Trehearne has some suggestive pages on Irving Layton's awareness of the English New Apocalypse school, he understates the degree to which the four poets he studies in detail B P.K. Page, A.M. Klein, Layton, and Dudek B are indebted to non-Canadian writers. On the other hand, his lengthy chapters on these central figures in Canadian modernism are among the best critical work done on them. They remind us of how shamefully neglected the canonical figures of Canadian literature have been in recent years. It is unsettling to recall that we still do 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...