The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690–1990 by D.M.R. Bentley (review)

HUMANITIES 179 providing a context for a vigorous and productive rereading of our past, and I offer the following examples of passages which may already be known to some readers. James Isham, in his Observations on Hudson's Bay (1743), recounts the elaborate symbolism of trading with the Natives, including the ritualized smoking of the Lcallimutt,' and the LCaptain or chief's' famous speech where he claims We Lived hard Last winter and in want' and therefore exhorts the officials to give his people 'good goods, give them Good goods, I say.... Give us good Measure, in cloth.' There is also Samuel Hearne's famous description of his Chipewyan guides' massacre of the Inuit at 'Bloody Fall' in 1771. And there is Franklin's riveting description of his first expedition's desperate trek overland across the barrens, from the Arctic Ocean to Fort Enterprise north of Great Slave Lake. Many of his voyagers perished and his narrative relates a thrilling tale of murder and possibly cannibalism. There are also many lesser-known narratives that make the book an important resource. For instance, one of the more 'canonical' quotes has been Pierre-Esprit Radisson's boast that he and his partner Des Groseilliers were 'Cesars, being no body to contradict us, we went away free from any burden, whilest those poore miserables thought themselves happy to carry our Equipage, for the hope that they had that we should give them a brasse ring, or an awle or an needle.' Peter C. Newman has even appropriated it for a book title. But less well known is that it precedes Radisson's fascinating rendering of the Huron Feast of the Dead, a powerfully symbolic event which greatly impressed him with its elaborate and spectacular rituals. Canadian Exploration Literature documents both the grand story of imperial domination and individuals' perceptive observations on the peoples and lands they encountered. The immense range of writing styles and abilities reflects the diverse backgrounds of the explorers themselves. Regrettably, excerpts from earlier sea voyages have been omitted. The narratives of Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, Thomas James, and Luke Foxe are important to Canada's history of exploration, and if the book were to be reprinted it might include two or three selections from this .period. However, as it stands Canadian Exploration Literature makes a much-needed contribution to textual scholarship on Canada. (EDWARD PARKINSON) D.M.R. Bentley. The GayJGrey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690-1990 University of Ottawa Press 1992. xii + 328. $25.00 paper For close to twenty years, David Bentley's scholarship has set the standard of accomplishment for researchers into Canada's literary 180 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 development. The period has seen the emergence of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews under his editorship as the premier critical journal in Canada, as well as the vital Canadian Poetry Press editions of early Canadian long poems, most of them editedindividually by him. The sum of this gifted work is a career at the head of Canada's literary scholars. The GayJGrey Moose redresses the only anomaly in Bentley's career, that is, his deferral of a major critical volume. A diversely figured validation of ecological perspectives in Canadian critical method, the book sustains not so much one compelling thesis as one governing vision, realized in a dozen various approaches. The structure thus reflects two of Bentley's desiderata: our alertness to the historical diversity of Canadian poetry, and a wider perspective that reads this eclectic richness as distinctly Canadian. One of the most familiar of Bentley's means of overview is his elaboration of W.1. Morton's claim in The Canadian Identity (1961) that 'the line which marks off ... the wilderness from the baseland, the hinterland from the metropolis, runs through every Canadian psyche.' The elucidation of this polarity occupies the first four sections of The GaylGretJ Moose, primarily to expose the 'ecology' of poetic experiment in Canada and the tendency of Canadian landscape poets for three hundred years either (baseland) to adhere closely to or (hinterland) to stretch and explode-the inherited tradition. The binarism of the argument makes one a little uncomfortable: in the course of...