Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works ed. by Irene Guilford (review)

552 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the event and the telling, the books read and the writers met along the way, are the necessary elements to the growing of a writer. The magpie is a cousin of the crow, a bird that has made many appearances in Canadian literature B think of Robert Kroetsch=s What the Crow Said and The Crow Journals. Like the crow, the magpie almost always travels in groups because it likes to chat and is often playfully contentious. Considering the many fellow writers whose company Bowering has kept over the years B Avison, Duncan, Kearns, Kroetsch, Kiyooka, Marlatt, Nichol, Tallman, Wah, to name but a few B the title of this delightful book is most appropriate. It clearly demonstrates the crucial role Bowering has played, and is still playing, in the establishment of a distinct Canadian literature. While he is not afraid of tipping his hat to American influences, neither is he afraid of asserting that we have >just north of the U.S., the best postmodern poetry in the English-speaking world.= The seriousness and affection with which he regards Canadian literature and its writers are abundantly clear even when they are cloaked in humour. This is only one of the many paradoxes of Bowering=s work. Behind his bravado, there is incisive perception; behind the facile phrase and the play on words, there is complexity of thought; behind the Batman comic books of childhood there is the university student discovering the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In one chapter, Bowering writes about various collaborations with artists and photographers who have either painted his likeness or taken his photograph. Some of these have appeared on the front or back covers of his books. On the front cover of The Kerrisdale Elegies, which won him his second Governor-General=s award in 1984, there is a photograph of a relatively younger Bowering sporting a thick moustache and wearing dark glasses, a good portion of his face hidden in shadow. It=s as if the poet wanted to conceal part of himself. The face in the photograph on the front cover of Magpie is not hidden in shadow, nor is the author wearing glasses or sporting a mustache. His face, in fact, looks exposed and vulnerable. It is deeply lined. One could say that in the years since Kerrisdale Elegies, his entire face has been rewritten. When I first finished reading Magpie, I wished I could have discovered in this book what transpired in the intervening years that produced such a change. But then I changed my mind. What we are offered, as readers of Magpie, is only one extension of a varied life made all the more interesting because of the accomplished poet, novelist, historian, essayist that Bowering has become. It is an extension in which he has found great delight and satisfaction as will any reader interested in literature whether it be Canadian or not. (LOLA LEMIRE TOSTEVIN) Irene Guilford, editor. Alistair MacLeod: Essays on His Works Guernica. 128. $10.00 humanities 553 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Alistair MacLeod=s writing, evoking a world of memory and myth, and containing the texture and flavour of their East Coast settings, has achieved international recognition ever since the first short story, >The Boat,= was published in the Massachusetts Review in 1968, and included the following year in Best American Short Stories. MacLeod is not a prolific writer, and the publication of his first novel, No Great Mischief, in 1999 was consequently a greatly awaited literary event; the novel went on to receive numerous fiction prizes, including the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. It was followed almost immediately by Island, collecting the stories contained in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), along with two additions. Guilford=s collection of pieces, part of Guernica=s Writers= Series, is thus bound to attract interest, and is pleasantly eclectic B some of its texts apparently designed to appeal to a general readership, others to a more specialized readership. Alongside essays by academics, there are...