Poetry

340 LEITERS IN CANADA POETRY The year's poetry reaffirmed a number of strengths, but disclosed little that was unexpected. There was new verse by such established writers as A. W. Purdy, Raymond Souster, and Irving Layton, while Margaret Atwood, Daryl Hine, and John Newlove continued to explore modes firmly defined by their previous work. Collections of already published work included A. J. M. Smith's edition of the poetry of Anne Wilkinson, Souster and Colombo's edition of the verse of the imagist poet W. W. E. Ross, and the selected poetry of Leonard Cohen and Robin Skelton. Much that was interesting, like the poetry of Ronald Bates, was traditional in manner, and apart from the verse of Dennis Lee and John Hulcoop there was little genuinely experimental writing. There was, however, a distressing amount of poetic doodling. The cult of instant poetry no doubt has its benefits, breaking old formalist compulsions, but it leads in its tum to a great deal that is drab and repetitive. The belief that the products of a poetic sensibility are always poetry often has monotonous results, and it is clear that this kind of bondage can be broken only by a discipline of form. The selected poetry of Leonard Cohen and of Robin Skelton provided two of the most significant publications of the year. Cohen writes in a way that gets under the skin, yet mood and subject are remarkably elusive and volatile. His comic-heroic-pathetic lovers find themselves menaced by public horror and private delusion, but their sense of style is never shaken, nor their magical command of fashionable repartee. Alienation is presented with wry humour and sensuous charm, dejection with natty elegance, and the heights and depths of experience are translated into whimsy. Such writing leads one to feel that perhaps facility of style alone matters - the creation of the mask which brings the sensibility of a moment into focus. This is both entertaining and compelling poetry, and produces a curiously haunting sense of the bitter-sweet rhythms of self-indulgence and self-negation in modem experience. Selected Poems, 1956-68 (McClelland and Stewart, 245, $5.95: Governor-Genera!'s Award, 1968) draws upon all the previous collections of Cohen's writing , and includes a handful of ballads and free meditations under the heading "New Poems." Robin Skelton's Selected Poems (McClelland and Stewart, 127, $4.95) includes work written in the two decades between 1947 and 1967. Skelton first visited Canada in 1962, and emigrated from England the following year. Only the late poems have a Canadian atmosphere, POETRY 341 and even among these there are several inspired by memories of England. The collection reveals Skelton to be a scrupulous and dedicated poet. He has learned from the heroic gestures of Yeats, from Auden's ballads, and from the irony and pathos of Hardy and Frost, but his style is distinctively his own. His development over the years has been toward an increasingly interior, meditative, and personal kind of poetry. His earlier work includes a number of line character sketches and landscapes, but in the late work he normally speaks directly out of his awareness of the human predicament. The overriding theme in Skelton's poetry concerns the conBict between human consciousness and the irrational forces by which it is eroded and sometimes overwhelmed. This is in part the struggle of speech, but beyond that it involves the effort to preserve memory, perception, and a sense of direction in the face of anxiety and despondency. Skelton conveys the beleaguered state of human awareness through many striking images - the mindless beachcomber in "John Arthur," the nameless beast in "The Fence," the heat in "Bread" - but some of the most memorable treatments are concerned with states of consciousness on the edge of sleep, with insomnia, and with the anxieties of the early morning watch. He is remarkably deft at suggesting psychic dissolution and loss of identity, and he is skilful in probing the experience of transformation, of participation in foreign and sub-human levels of being, which accompanies fatigue or trance. Here are some early stanzas from a night poem called "Tiger, Tiger": Sleep's grown a killer; jungle lills...