I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything
By Lesley Choyce
Cape Breton, NS: Breton Books, 2013
103 pp. $16
On Thursday morn, October 10th, I guessed that Alice Munro had become Canada’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, because a woman sitting across from me, on my Frankfurt-Stockholm flight, was reading a Munro book. Carp as we like at some Nobel choices (a premature Peace Prize for a U.S. president who likes to—ahem—“drone” on and on), the lustre of the Prize illuminates nations. Munro’s triumph proclaims that Can Lit is must-read—worldwide.
Munro’s achievement also insists that we are not “provincial”—anywhere—anymore. Canada possesses—as Jewish Canadian poet A.M. Klein saw 70 years ago—the absolute universal, made richly cosmopolitan by immigration from without and multiculturalism from within. That’s how I read Nova Scotian author Lesley Choyce’s latest collection of poems, both new and selected: I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything.
Full disclosure: Choyce published my first book, 30 years ago, and he also published, among others, Richard Lemm and Maxine Tynes. Choyce’s own voice echoes their registers: He is as passionate as Tynes and as compassionate as Lemm. What distinguishes Choyce is his American openness—a capacious generosity—the charitableness of Lemm, the gusto of Tynes; or, rather, the democratic vista of Ginsberg and the observant quietness of William Carlos Williams.
To hear a kinship between Choyce and Lemm is sensible, for each is a dissident, ex-American. (Tynes’s “Americanness” derives from her African-American roots, though rendered “indigenous” to Nova Scotia by her own Aboriginal—Metis—heritage.) Choyce’s American qualities are vital to English-Canadian poetry, for, in its origins, it tried too hard to be “British” (an identity that our early poets interpreted as writing “Nature” poetry with an intellectual—even opaque—ingenuity; so-called eco-poetry has this same bias). Choyce descends more from Whitman than Wordsworth and more from (Franco-Canado-Yank) Kerouac than from Hopkins, and the result is—as in Tynes—nature-informed poetry with zest and Zen-singing soul.
“I am thinking about all the water in the world, / how it moves itself around day after day / in its own adventures.” Choyce makes us “flow” with the subject of the poem, so that we note water, water, everywhere, enough to make us think: “The storms pass quickly now and congratulate themselves, / not like when I was a boy…. / Now it’s one solid slap and it’s over, / the geese applauding at sunset / while all the water in the world / settles itself back down / into the deep democracy of itself.” “Blue Beach” describes an “Old dog … / black with a comedy of grey around the mouth” who follows the poet out along “Fundy’s Minas Basin,” where one can see “high graphic cliffs, strata like old books piled / on their sides, some stories more important than the rest.”
Perhaps the supreme poem of this sort is “Fog” (with its debt to Carl Sandburg acknowledged): “Fog sidling up against the dockyards / and thick and soft on the rat’s back / with pearling globes of the sea.” Yes, Choyce is a shameless wind-surfing, beachcombing, tree-hugger and mushroom-eater. But he’s also vulnerably personal, even when he allows himself a politic rant or two.
The consciously “Howl”-like anthem, “Best Minds,” demands that Baby Boomers (and kids) abandon their lattes and laptops and return to make-love-not-war plus “green religion” politics. But the poem is too much an imitation of inimitable Ginsberg. Much better is “The Beautiful Thing About My Outhouse,” which sets the homely architecture within the poet’s relations with neighbours and nature: It’s now “so old and persistent / it has become a living thing rooted in the planet / and can’t be destroyed.” That a drunk dude “peppered the door with birdshot” is fine: “The holes make good ventilation and with the door closed / the sun projects a crazy constellation.”
Some poems are too long and lose their concentration; or they falter upon an clichéd ending. But Choyce’s poetry is always compelling because it is sumptuously crafted—of feeling and philosophy; of whimsy and warmth. He makes us care for what he cares about—the exemplary liberty of wind, water, and light; the godly love for life itself. No finer choice.
