Poetry

Abundant evidence of the ongoing evolution of the poetry collection into literary coffee-table book was on display in the Canadian English-language poetry publications of 2011. One third of the crop were composed according to some conceptual premise, and overall the sense of the book of poetry as novelty item has never been stronger. Would-be novelists and experimentalists alike feed their work to publishers angling for attention through a smorgasbord of colours, textures, sizes, attitudes, ambitions, graphics, and typefaces. Periodicals having ceased to be a significant vehicle for poetry, one might argue that the book has become the primary unit of poetic composition in this country, and the poem itself virtually passé, too small to compete with the boundless power of electronic handheld multimedia. Though potentially an exciting development in poetic evolution, closer scrutiny reveals that the subjugation of the poem to the sequence may be hazardous to our aesthetic health. Fortunately, many poets in 2011 did evade the concept-album’s tractor beam, while others managed to buck the odds in developing original book-length works of consistent quality.

The poets shortlisted for Griffin and Governor General’s prizes were those who managed to maintain the integrity of the poem while packaging their work according to suggestive but unintrusive schema. Examples include west coast denizens Garry Morse (Discovery Passages) and Jan Zwicky (Forge), central Ontarians Phil Hall (Killdeer) and Ken Babstock (Methodist Hatchet), and Montrealer David McGimpsey (Li’l Bastard). Yet it must be said that even these high-profile books feel in places padded or contrived. Many writers continue to try to package nicely crafted prose as poetry, a strategy which often inadvertently robs texts of their innate rhetorical strength. It may be the case that it has simply become too easy to publish as much poetry as we like, creating an aesthetics of disposability. Collections of older work by F.R. Scott, Patrick Lane, Richard Outram, and Dionne Brand republished in 2011 show different approaches and standards from much of the year’s new poetry. If verse reverses while prose proceeds, as John Hollander maintained, poetry should send us back to the top, driven to experience its sensations again and again. Yet a significant proportion of that kind of poetic energy today expresses itself through various performance vehicles which demand repeated presentation, such as popular song, hip hop rhyming, spoken word, and Slam poetry. The truth is that the pages upon which most poetry is printed promise to endure much longer in the physical realm than their contents are likely to survive in the cultural.

This review aims to summarize and comment on the ‘better half’ of the nearly ninety poetry volumes published in English in Canada in 2011, covering large presses and small from coast to coast, poets new and old, male and female, even a few writers working outside Canada. Discussion begins with the more prominent loosely gathered collections, examines in detail books built around some central poetic conceit, and concludes with translations and republished collections. Ultimately, of course, there’s no accounting for taste and no guarantee that the books selected for commentary will be found more worthy by all readers than those passed over. In the following paragraphs, poets who have demonstrated their flying skills are held to higher critical standards than are their fledgling cousins.

Although there is as much poetic energy in western Canada today as in the country’s centre, much of it was devoted in 2011 to thematic sequences, especially among male poets. The bulk of more loosely gathered collections were from Ontario, including Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet, Phil Hall’s Killdeer, Jeffery Donaldson’s Guesswork, Brian Henderson’s Sharawadji, David Groulx’s A Difficult Beauty, John Slater’s Surpassing Pleasure, and Jonarno Lawson’s There Devil, Eat That. Montrealer Asa Boxer’s Skullduggery also fits in with this group. Nova Scotia-born University of Toronto professor George Elliott Clarke brought out Red, while Ontario-born Dalhousie scholar Warren Heiti published Hydrologos, both clustering poems under very flexible rubrics. Thirty-something Newfoundlanders Joel Thomas Hynes (Straight Razor Days) and Mark Callanan (Gift Horse) recount tales from St. John’s...