Shaping a World Already Made: Landscape and Poetry of the Canadian Prairies by Carl J. Tracie (review)

The geographer Carl J. Tracie offers here a welcome poetic interpretation of region and a call to geographers to go beyond considering space as reduced to scientific systems, to space as felt and imagined. While the tradition of poising environmental and cultural determinisms dates to the 1970s' "imaginative turn" in geography, Tracie believes geographers have continued to favor the "natural landscape," or what he calls, citing a phrase of the poet Louis Dudek, a "world already made" (4). Poetry, he argues, yields "resonance" or "what makes space place" (9).

Of the book, the strongest chapter focuses on enduring elements—land, sky, and space—in prairie poetry from nine modern Canadian poets (although some twenty receive mention). Tracie has a good eye for classic poetic imagery. Lorna Crozier suggests the sky "gives you/all the room you need/to grow small" (34) and cites how a windblown aspen "'signs whole alphabets of light'" (36). Eli Mandel depicts wind's effects on fields "strewn with corpses of could" (56) and John Newlove tells of wind's toll "at best, blowing endurance/and stupidity into the people" (61). Tim Lilburn argues the prairie "will set up a small/homestead of thinking in you'" (52). Still, television (59), the "Harlem Globetrotters" (150), a coyote's howl as "weightless as Amway sales talk" (51), and land in "chemical sleep" (50), all suggest late twentieth-century renditions of enduring elements. Empathy expressed for both aboriginals and settlers appears in the poetry of Di Brandt and Andrew Suknaski. Settler society's poets transform not the "natural" patterns to which geographers reduce the world but an Indigenous-made world.

Less compelling but still useful chapters discuss themes of gender, race, rural/urban location, mystery/spirituality, silence, and the presence of "interactive binaries" (125) oozing ambivalence. Tracie analyzes the texts of Indigenous poets such as Emma LaRocque, Marilyn Dumont, Armand Ruffo, and others, but these citations serve mainly to emphasize settler society commodification of land. The detail threading this settler regional poetry, what Lilburn calls "thick-looking" (141), Tracie insightfully notes, actually distances settlers from the land. Moreover, popular prairie poetry traditions (such as the lines of Edna Jaques and general cowboy poetry) grow out of rural impulses rather than those of region. Tracie sees the students of academic poets as the main hope for bringing transformative literary prairie poetry into popular consciousness. To raise, finally, the geographic tradition of scientific patterns that Tracie writes convincingly against, how do enduring poetic elements interact with scientific systems to create regions?