Where the nights are twice as long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, 1883-2014
edited by David Eso and Jeanette Lynes
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2015
432 pp, $22.95
Expect love described in all its variations in this luminous collection of letters and letter-poems from 130 Canadian poets. An eclectic collection of voices representing several generations, the book includes Louis Riel writing about his love of God in letters to his wife Marguerite, Ivan E. Cayote informing her former lover she has no regrets despite heart-break, and Bliss Carmen confessing he can’t sleep or eat when Kate Eastman is away. Editors David Eso and Jeanette Lynes, both poets and academics, have skillfully combed through the “public domain” of archives and anthologies, selecting love letters dating back to 1883—as well as gathering submissions and permissions from living poets.
Malcolm Lowry’s letter to Carol Brown, written when he is 16, introduces the opening “teens and twenties” chapter, followed by four chapters of letters from poets writing in their thirties, forties, fifties and finally, their “sixties, seventies and beyond.” The aging process does not seem to reduce the writers’ passion, one of many mysteries of romantic love to consider when reading through these epistles.
Poet-lover writes poet-lover in the case of Gwendolyn MacEwen and Milton Acorn. MacEwen is only 19 when she tries to extricate herself from the older Acorn. She does so gently, with much self-examination. “I believe everything I do, think, or feel is touched off by love,” she writes.
Meantime Pat Lowther, aged 39, is trying to extricate herself from her husband, as indicated in a letter to her (anonymous) lover. “Always when I wake my first consciousness is of your face, inside me, as if it were under my own, as if my features overlay yours.”
Robert Service makes desperate pleas to Constance MacLean throughout his youthful letter-writing years. “This is only a scap, a fragment, a mood if you will, but one of those sacred, vital records of a moment when a man forgets everything else…”
P.K. Page was 28 when she wrote to (married) lover F.R. Scott during a geographic separation: “darling, darling. Your wonderful red-letter letter has just arrived. All outflowingness & now I am a mass of you—veins full, head full. There is hardly any me left. And that is happiness.”
Dennis Lee is the ripe old age of 46, writing an erotic poem-letter entitled “Coming Becomes You” to his beloved. Penning images of ‘coming,’ he then describes the aftermath, when: “you nestle and noodle and nest.”
Susan Musgrave was in her thirties when she began writing to Stephen Reid while he was in prison. Some of their correspondence is included in the ‘thirties’ section of the book. Following Reid’s release, they raised two children. When Reid was incarcerated again, Musgrave began letter writing once more. “I so prefer letters where I can be reflective instead of reactive,” she writes at age 56. If I didn’t need the phone line for email I might chuck the thing into the sea.” And later, “I love you Stephen. That doesn’t change. If only I wasn’t me, I would be so much happier.”
Di Brandt is 51 when she wisely looks back on love after divorce, in this letter-poem. “Loving each other/beautifully/we thought/ would, grandly/and single-handedly,/take on/ our unreasonable fathers,/our helpless mothers,/the war,/the Capitalist System….
Howard White ponders the stages of love and marriage in a poem letter to his wife: then came the kids/and our mornings were gone/our delicate and sustaining love/moved over/and another kind took its place… An index of the poets’ names and published letters, along with short biographies of their work, accompanies the book. While the editors have declined to give context to the letters (for example, which poets are having affairs, which poets are gay or straight, and so on), they succeed to whet our appetite to find out more about the authors’ lives and relationships—and poems. This collection a wonderful gift on many levels, including for those of us—past and present—tangled up in romantic love.
Will Starling
by Ian Weir.
Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2014
483 pp, $32.95
Prepare for a wild ride back in time to Regency England in this second work of fiction by BC based author Ian Weir. The story’s hero Will Starling is an impoverished orphan and self-educated surgeon’s assistant. He works at a time when medical surgery is still in the early stages, and experimentation on cadavers—not always legally obtained—is practised. Herein lies rich material for a plot, and the book’s narration through Starling’s rough yet lyrical ‘voice’ succeeds in delivering a lively and suspenseful tale.
Starling finds his talent as a healer on the battlefields of Napoleon’s Europe, assisting his employer, “Mr. Cromrie,” an unflinching British surgeon who is forced to spend much of his time sawing off the limbs of injured soldiers. When Mr. Cromrie asks Starling about his past, he is told to mind his own business. “I said it with a careless shrug,” Starling admits, “the sort that marks out a London lad, tough as nails—and not at all the other sort of lad. The sort who’d find himself sobbing on the road to Southampton, with a sense that the world was much too large, with no one in it who’d care if he expired in the nearest ditch.”
As it happens, Mr. Cromrie does care about Starling. Romantic love finds it’s way into Starling’s heart too. All the while “Your Wery Umble” as Starling refers to himself, keeps his sights on arch-nemesis, Dionysus Atherton, an ambitious surgeon willing to cross ethical and moral boundaries to advance medical science. As Starling takes us through the crowded, impoverished streets of London in 1816, in the decades before Victorian author Charles Dickens does the same, we glimpse the city’s underbelly, replete with desperate crimes, biased legal trials and swift executions.
Unravelling the truth about Atherton takes Starling to graveyards and taverns, prison dungeons and medical lecture halls. The reader is introduced to London’s thespians, (including the very ‘real’ Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean) grave robbers, servants, medical students (among them ‘true character’ and poet John Keats), as the author provides the story with a fascinating layer of social history. Scenes are richly and sometimes humorously painted. Consider when Meg Nancarrow, the true love of grave robber Jemmy Cheese, has an ominous encounter with Atherton on Ludgate Hill. “There is certainly fog,” Starling narrates, as he sets the scene, “on the night I am conceiving. Oh, we must have fog, for such a meeting, a true London Partic’lar, slithering up from the Thames like the ominous creep of a cello.”
Mary Shelley’s highly popular Frankenstein first appears in this period and her novel’s theme of resurrection is also at the core of this story. Newspaper accounts of sightings and assaults by freakish ‘creatures’ (such as “Boggle-Eyed Bob” with “hair standing on end and mouth smeared with gore”) are added to Starling’s narration. While these stories put Londoners on edge, Starling is haunted by his own demons previously encountered on Europe’s battlefields and has painful flashbacks.
At the story’s end, all the various threads come together. Once shadows of truth begin to take shape, “like the ghostly ship at sea,” Starling is able to see the whole truth about his nemesis and himself. Most notable about this satisfying historical fiction is the author’s masterful depiction of Starling, a ‘common’ narrator with a scholar’s perception who finds a way to achieve what he pursued, despite great odds.
