Canadian Writers and Their Works ed. by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (review)

HUMANITIES 155 a colonized mentality.' Regarding the impact of collective creation: 'it was the key which for the first time enabled Canadian artists to define indigenous theatre in terms of a popular audience rather than an educated elite ... collective creation recreates traditional literary genres as genres of performance.' He notes that the collective play tends towards involved performance structures and lends itself to a theatre of physical and visual metaphors: not only do these figure in avant-garde theatre but they have also affected the work of playwrights. And the collectively created documentary has produced a generation of actors who bring to their work an indigenous performing style that 'combines intimate realism with a delight in broad gesture.' This is an important book, not only because it is a model of discriminating theatre history and of criticism grounded in the specificity of theatrical performance, but because, as Filewod notes, so many of the documentaries produced in this country existed only as performances; it is the exception not the rule for there to be a script. Filewod's examination validates a form of drama that from the viewpoint of traditional dramatic criticism scarcely exists. (ROBERT NUNN) Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley, editors. Canadian Writers and Their Works. Introduction by George Woodcock. Poetry Series 3 ECW Press. 300. $40.00 The Canadian Writers and Their Works series aims at providing a reference library of literary criticism on major Canadian poets and fiction writers, and should thus be scrutinized as an influential canon-making enterprise. ECw'S energetic directors have a well-developed sense ofwhat major projects are needed in Canadian literary studies and of how to get the academic community going on them. This third volume of the poetry series is textually accurate (I found only one misprint: protested for protected on page 26), but it is a mixed success overall- an inevitable result ofthe format and various hands involved in the book. The essays address four writers of extremely various stature, but George Woodcock, charged with providing a unifying introduction, discovers their similarities: beginning their writing careers in the 1920S, they chose one ofthe diverse paths to modernism by searching for a genuinely Canadian voice while concentrating on material associated with the here and now. The two writers who unquestionably deserve the biographical, contextual , critical, andbibliographical attention accorded them in this book are, in Woodcock's words, that 'irremovable figure in the history of Canadian poetry' (3) E.J. Pratt and 'the best poet writing in Canada today' (12), . Dorothy Livesay. Of the two. more minor figures, Woodcock is unac- 156 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 countably harder on Raymond Knister than he is on W.W.E. Ross, who he says is 'Canada's best nature poet' (9). Nonetheless, Woodcock's introduction is the valuable product of a broad and consistently engaged experience of Canadian literature. By contrast, }oy Kuropatwa's 'Raymond Knister' shows a young academic's passion for her subjectmisleading her into making overly bold claims for Knister as 'a major Canadian writer - if not the major Canadian writer - of the 1920S' (27). Her explications of individual poems, especially those of 'The Hawk' and 'White Cat,' are strong, but even on this front her work could have benefited from some probing editorial queries. Her reading of 'The Plowman,' for example, fails to account for Knister's recognition in the final lines of the necessary obsession with the perfection of craft. A vigilant editor would also have checked her penchant for the passive voice and untangled such thickets of abstraction as 'The vision of reality which informs Raymond Knister's writing is one which celebrates the acknowledgement of experience' (32). In Paul Denham's thoroughly researched 'Dorothy Livesay' the journeyman critic is so careful not to overstate his case that he leaves the reader to recognize the remarkable fact that Livesay's first commercially published book of poems appeared when she was a nineteen-year-old first-year undergraduate. Sometimes constrained by the prescribed separation of the biographical, contextual, and critical commentary, Denham charts her nearly seven-decade-Iong career, seeing it as a continuing dialectic of public and private selves that alternately found form in documentary and...