Some Books of Canadian Poetry in 1981

·Review article Some Books ofCanadian Poetry in 1981 BRUCE WHITEMAN F.R. Scott, The Collected Poems of P.R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. 379 pp. $29.95. Robert Kraetsch, Field Notes: The Collected Poetry of Robert Kraetsch. Toronto: General Publishing, 1981. 144 pp. $9.95. Eli Mandel, Life Sentence: Poems and Journals 1976-1980. Toronto: Press Porcepic, 1981. 133 pp. $5.95. Margaret Atwood, True Stories. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981. 103 pp. $5.95. David McFadden, My Body Was Eaten By Dogs: Selected Poems ofDavid McFadden. Edited by George Bowering. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. 112 pp. $8.95. Irving Layton, Europe and Other Bad News. Toronto: McCielland and Stewart, 1981. 96 pp. $8.95. It is not to be expected that the multitude of volumes ofpoetry published in Canada in any one year should exhibit common concerns to any marked degree, nor that a trend should be discernible from so limited a prospect as a mere twelve-month. It is a foolish critic only who is prepared to elaborate so precarious a proposition as a poetic zeitgeist on the basis of a handful of outstanding books and a houseful of less successful ones. Historical hindsight drains the lake of literature, as it were, and a subsurface ecological system is exposed to view. But the present is a good deal murkier, and to swim is at least as interesting as to collect, specimens for microscopic and taxonomic analysis, to some readers at any rate... Nevertheless, it is true that occasionally a book appears which sets many of its contemporaries into a perspective which only time normally affords. One finds oneself perforce measuring other books against it, not merely in terms of excellence, but also from the standpoint of change and development. One might, for example, use the first edition of Pratt's Col(ected Poems (1944) or Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959) as touchstones from which to consider and evaluate the collections published in those years. These are books which sum up much more than the author's work alone. They are declarations of the end of a period, and a good deal of change and experiment followed on the publication of both. One notes that in 1944 a small volume entitled Unit ofFive appeared, a book which existed because late in the war the Ryerson Press was deluged with book-length poetry manuscripts; being unable to bring them out separately, 150 Mr. Pierce compromised with a small anthology that constituted the first book publication of Raymond Souster, Louis Dudek and P.K. Page, as well as two others. A book could surely be written on the implications of the nearly simultaneous appearance of this modest anthology and the redoubtable Pratt Collected. The recently published Collected Poems of F.R. Scott might be the starting point for an equally fruitful meditation. Of course certain reservations immediately present themselves: Scott is not as representative a poet as Pratt or Layton, nor is he as good a poet. Yet in certain interesting ways the development of F.R. Scott parallels the development of modern Canadian poetry as a whole, and thus his concerns and successes by their very nature have implications that extend beyond this one particular pilgrim's progress. I am thinking not so much ofhis involvement with the McGill Fortnightly Review, the Canadian Mercury and New Provinces, as important historically as these publications Were. Scott stands out among the Montreal poets and the poets of New Provinces as the only one whose version ofmodernism was far-sighted enough to carry his contemporaneity beyond the end of the war. One cannot imagine, for example, a book by Finch or Kennedy being published by Conta~t Press, as Scott's The Eye of the Needle was in 1957. It was, of course, the anti-literary quality of his voice which permitted this, and Souster and Dudek (among others) must have learned a good deal from it. Scott has sounded contemporary for so long (it is not until The Dance fs One that he begins to seem a little oldfashioned ) that it takes so compendious a volume as the Collected Poems to make one realize that...