Poetry

358 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1965 POETRY Hugh MacCallum I For readers of Canadian poetry this has been a quietly encouraging year. No new and unexpected peaks were revealed, and many of the better known poets remained silent or took a holiday by e>..'Perimenting with minor forms; yet a number of collections bear witness to developing talent and suggest that the terrain may change considerably in the near future. The year produced several distinguished first collections, such as those by John Newlove and Francis Sparshott, while some of the more established poets, notably Daryl Hine, showed that they were developing along lines of increasing interest and competence. One of the most substantial collections of new poetry, and winner of Governor-General's award for 1965, is Alfred Purdy's The Carihoo Horses (McClelland & Stewart, pp. 112, $2.50 paper, $4.50 cloth). This is Purdy's seventh gathering, and the signs of his apprenticeship to what one of his titles calls "The Crafte so Longe to Lerne" stretch back over more than a decade of publication. The present volume does not open up any radically new perspectives; rather it secures what has already been won, bringing the chief preoccupations of the earlier poetry into sharper focus and employing the established techniques with a new ease and precision. In its variety the volume is a distillation of Purdy's work; here one finds, for example, both the taut, short-lined descriptive poetry with which he experimented in The Blur in Between (1963), and the more expansive, loose-limbed, semi-ode form which is prominent in Poems for all the Annettes (1962) . While the forms are familiar, however, they are handled with greater than usual economy and a firmer sense of direction. The Cariboo horses of the title poem live somewhere between heroic myth and bourgeois fact. Their lost ancestors were creatures of the elements, kin to thunder, wind, and sun, and they themselves, avoiding "the roads of man's devising," can be glimpsed on the high prairie "clopping in silence under the toy mountains." But they can also be seen in more familiar circumstances, pastured outside town by the busy highway or waiting at the grocer's in "the gasoline smell of the dust." In similar fashion, Purdy's Pegasus may lift him toward the domains of myth and romance, but it usually sets him down in the ordinary world of the here and now. There is a strong lyrical and visionary impulse in his poetry, but it is kept under tight control by an ironic and concrete sense of the world in which we live. POETRY 359 The best of these poems develop under a surge of emotional pressure. The speaker is almost breathlessly eager to reveal himself, yet at the same time he is baffled by the complexity of his position and thus led into qualifications and parentheses and seeming digressions. The effect is highly dramatic. We become aware of a man speaking at a momen.t ·of crisis or passion and giving free rein to his feelings as he gropes toward the expression of an urgent but elusive truth. Thus "The Madwoman on the Train," perhaps the most terrifying and moving poem in the collection, opens with an effect of compulsive talk which is subtly appropriate to the subject: . I've always been going somewhere-Vancouver or old age or somewhere ever since I can remember: and this woman leaning over me, this mad woman, while I was sleeping, whispering, "Do you take drugs?" And the sight of her yellow-white teeth biting the dark open wide and white eyes like marbles children play with but no children play with marbles like those-saying, "Do you take drugs?" and Vancouver must be somewhere near this midnight I can't remember where tho only the sister holding the madwoman, fighting her: me saying stupidly, "No, no drugs." The art is to seem without art, to create an effect of immediacy, of expe1ience recalled in the present. Restlessness and urgency emerg~ from the rhythms. Purdy has mastered a form of verse which seldom lets the reader pause. While the individual line has its own cadence, its own lyrical curve, the...