Poetry reviews
John Thompson: Collected Poems & Translations
edited by Peter Sanger
Fredericton, NB: Gooselane, 2015
296 pages, $24.95
Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb
edited by John F. Hulcoop
Talonbooks, 498 pages, $29.95
I’m a fan of collected works, so it was with pleasure that I worked my way through John Thompson: Collected Poems & Translations and Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb. Both volumes should find their way onto the shelves of Canadian poetry lovers as these two poets had a strong influence on current poets. And they produced some terrific poetry.
Introductions should be read after the literature, I tell my students, to encourage them to come to words unfiltered by someone else’s viewpoint. And now I’m going to ignore that suggestion as it’s impossible to review these books without attention to their editors and thus to the lives. Both John Thompson and Phyllis Webb led fascinating lives even if they had not written a single line.
Thompson’s story is the tragic one: he died, possibly a suicide, at the age of 38, his output slender but weighty in its importance. Born in England in 1938, Thompson was left with relatives to care for him, and according to Peter Sanger, the abandonment by his mother affected him deeply. He did well at school and eventually went to Michigan for graduate work. He did his Ph. D on René Char, and this volume contains his translations of Char’s work. He was offered positions at the University of Calgary and Mount Allison in Sackville, New Brunswick, having identified Canada as where he wanted to live. He chose Mount Allison, apparently because it looked like New Brunswick and was mostly wilderness. He loved guns and hunting and fishing.
Problems developed quickly as his marriage fell apart, his wife returned to the US with their daughter, and his drinking continued. He was denied tenure, and then a review of the case overturned the earlier decision. Going through that would have led most people to a few drinks. But there’s no doubt that Thompson was a challenge. Sanger criticizes the University’s handling of things but notes that “Thompson was a difficult, awkward man who refused to compromise and did not suffer fools as gladly as those who contract to work in a university usually find they must.” In the last few years of his life, Thompson battled mental illness and was hospitalized for a breakdown. But his commitment to poetry was absolute.
Thompson’s reputation is largely based on his second (and final) collection, Stilt Jack, which was published in 1978, two years after his death. The poems are ghazals, and it’s likely that any Canadian now writing ghazals owes Thompson. His own brief introduction lays out his view of poetry:
There is, it seems to me, in the ghazal, something of the essence of poetry: not the relinquishing of the rational, not the abuse of order, nor the destruction of form, nor the praise of the private hallucination. The ghazal allows the imagination to move by its own nature: discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense—a chart of the disorderly against false reason and the tacking together of poor narratives. It is the poem of contrasts, dreams, astonishing leaps.
The 38 poems take Thompson’s idea of the ghazal and make it real. Typically Thompson shows his erudition but he does it in completely accessible language and images of the natural world. Horses and birds frequently appear amid his consideration of emotions. In XV, for example, he starts by saying “ If I give everything away / it’s because I want to take everything,” and the final couplet “If I give you my right arm, / will you” ends the poem perfectly.
The ghazals are worth the book on their own, but the poems of the first collection, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets (1973), are necessary not only for seeing his development but in their own right. In “The Onion,” Thompson articulates the struggle of the poet: “I am without grace, I cannot shape / those languages, the knots of light and silence” and we can see the labour of all human communication.
Phyllis Webb has had a much larger body of work than Thompson. Peacock Blue contains the poems from her eight published books along with almost fifty uncollected ones, and a few previously unpublished. In his Introduction, John F. Hulcoop is far more concerned with analyzing the poems that Sanger but he includes some biographical detail as well and quotes from interviews such those conducted by Smaro Kamboureli (1991-92), Janice Williamson (1993), and Jay Ruzesky (2002). Webb was born in 1927 and raised on Vancouver Island. She has lived on Salt Spring Island for about forty years. No doubt Webb was an expert at getting along with people as she and William A. Young created the long-running CBC show Ideas in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967-69. Hulcoop’s introduction is harder to follow than Sanger’s given all the references to other poets and critics.
Webb’s personal life was nothing like the destructiveness of Thompson’s. She was a successful broadcaster, and in 1949 she was the youngest person in the Commonwealth to run for office. She ran for the CCF in the BC election. She has been politically active for much of her life. Her relationship with F. R. Scott has been scrutinized as well her sexual preferences. In a 2013 letter to Hulcoop, she writes, “’there has been too much interest in my lesbian side when the most significant relationships have been with men. Many more men in my life than women, though perhaps it would have been better the other way around. It all seems so far away now.’” What comes through in the poetry and interviews and lectures is a vibrant intelligence coupled with a wry wit. Like Thompson, I doubt that she suffered fools, but she dealt with them more effectively. Or at least not in a way damaging to herself.
Webb’s dedication to social justice is evident in her poetry. She started out as she says, “’as a socialist, a left-wing person, not necessarily a writer, and that was a major identity for me for a long time. And then that shifted to anarchism, and then to feminism.’” She has a series of poems on Peter Kropotkin, the prominent anarchist who believed in a system of voluntary mutually exchanged goods and services. Her first book, Trio (1954), is wide-ranging in subject and shows the essential curiosity at the heart of her work. But Webb often returns to the big topics of love and death. One of my favourite of her poems is “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide,” and she treats the subject with dignity and humour. For example, she writes: “Some people swim lakes, others climb flagpoles, / some join monasteries, but we, my friends, / who have considered suicide take our daily walk / with death and are not lonely.” That poem has stuck with me since I read it as an undergraduate.
As time progresses, Webb gets more experimental with form. In Naked Poems (1965), much of the page is white space and the very short poems are positioned in various places to emphasise the white space. “The Bruise” is a good example of the dense brevity of the poems:
Again you have left
your mark.
Or we
have.
Skin shuddered
secretly
And the last sequence in this book is called “Some final questions” and is comprised of a short question and answer. The last one is simply “Oh?”
In Wilson’s Bowl (1980), “Letters to Margaret Atwood,” is a sequence of prose poems, a conversational tone that exhibits Webb’s fondness for and admiration of Atwood: “Peggy: When I see pictures of you in your old fur coat I think maybe you’ve jumped into an animal skin so you can hide where you’ve always wanted to be.” It’s evident from this book that Webb knew many of the major Canadian writers. She dedicates poems to many writers, she refers to writers, and she celebrates the words of others.
Trying to capture these two volumes in a review is like trying to catch wind. There’s too much and it’s too powerful. Ultimately all I can say is “Read these poets.”
