Poetry

354 LETTERS IN CANADA POETRY Hugh MacCallum One virtue of the year's poetry is sufficiently prominent to be singled out at Once for praise: it is rich in work which makes effective use of mythology. I do not have in mind imitations of The Waste Land, or exercises with archetypes, but rather poetry that brings real mythopoeic power to bear upon experience. Margaret Atwood and Margaret Avison, while totally different in other respects, share this capacity, but we need not look far for other examples of the same phenomenon. One of the more obvious disappointments of the year's work is perhaps related to this preoccupation with myth: it contains relatively little poetry in which there is strong awareness of society. We seldom find that the individual is placed within a context of public attitudes and communal experience. George Johnston, Henry Beissel, and Ralph Gustafson manage at times to do this effectively, but much of the work under review is lyrical and subjective in its orientation. In form and verse technique, the poems before us are frequently unsatisfying. A common tendency has been to stress imagery and phrasing at the expense of structure and the larger patterns of rhythm. There has been a good deal of interesting and provocative experiment, however , and no doubt some of it will prove to be of lasting Significance. The strong rhythms of Leonard Cohen combine the contemporary and the traditional, while John Robert Colombo's "found poetry" succeeds in arousing a new awareness of the significance of form. George Bowering continues to explore the syllabic line in the manner of William Carlos Williams, and the result is verse of impressive strength and flexibility. But too much of the year's poetry, even its better poetry, adopts a lazy attitude toward form. I have no objections to free verse, but surely it requires as much craft as any other kind of poetry? A great deal of the work written in this style today tends to rely on a few simple and fashionable mannerisms, and the result is an idiom more restrictive in its limitations than the rigours of the sonnet. Margaret Avison is a poet difficult to fault. Her new volume, The D"mbfounding CWoW . Norton [McLeod], pp. 99, $5.75, $2.50 pa.) confirms my belief that she is a highly professional writer with unusual resources of tact and poetic intelligence. Nothing here is exaggerated or faked, every insight is earned. The interest of her work arises partly from its descriptive power, as in this fragment from "Two Mayday Selves": POETRY The grackle shining in long grass this first day of green casts an orchid-mile of shadow into the sun-meld, that marvel, those meadows of peace (between the bird and the curved curb of the city-centre clover-leaf). 355 The vitality of the language owes much to Hopkins, as does the concern for the exact adjective and the precise detail. As we react to such deSCription , however, we become aware that it requires an intellectual, as well as a sensuous, response. A process of evaluation is implicit in the presentation of scene or situation; it arises out of contexts) out of an awareness of the way each new image qualifies the preceding ones. Avison is a poet of perspectives and points of view, acutely aware of the modes by which we see and understand. Even her titles suggest this: "Natural/ Unnatural," "Meeting Together of Poles and Latitudes (in Prospect) ," 'Walking Behind, en Route, in Morning, in December." When she presents a scene Cas in "Twilight"), it is usually with a keen sense of how the mood of the viewer controls the selection of detail; when she tells a story Cas in "A Story"), there are, characteristically, several frames of reference, a story within a story within a story. She is remarkably versatile in the techniques of establishing multiple points of view, and her poetry is full of voices, monologues, dialogues, and asides by the narrator. She handles sequences Cspatial and geometrical, or temporal) with great care, and she gives a S ignificant role to such elements of typography as italics, parentheses, and line arrangement. She explores the epistemology of saying...