John Thompson: Collected Poems & Translations Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb I\u2019m a fan of collected works, so it was with pleasure that I worked my way through John Thompson: Collected Poems & Translations<\/em> and Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n Introductions should be read after the literature, I tell my students, to encourage them to come to words unfiltered by someone else\u2019s viewpoint. And now I\u2019m going to ignore that suggestion as it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Thompson\u2019s 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 Ren\u00e9 Char, and this volume contains his translations of Char\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s no doubt that Thompson was a challenge. Sanger criticizes the University\u2019s handling of things but notes that \u201cThompson 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Thompson\u2019s reputation is largely based on his second (and final) collection, Stilt Jack<\/em>, which was published in 1978, two years after his death. The poems are ghazals, and it\u2019s likely that any Canadian now writing ghazals owes Thompson. His own brief introduction lays out his view of poetry:<\/p>\n 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\u2014a chart of the disorderly against false reason and the tacking together of poor narratives. It is the poem of contrasts, dreams, astonishing leaps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The 38 poems take Thompson\u2019s 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 \u201c If I give everything away \/ it\u2019s because I want to take everything,\u201d and the final couplet \u201cIf I give you my right arm, \/ will you\u201d ends the poem perfectly.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> (1973), are necessary not only for seeing his development but in their own right. In \u201cThe Onion,\u201d Thompson articulates the struggle of the poet: \u201cI am without grace, I cannot shape \/ those languages, the knots of light and silence\u201d and we can see the labour of all human communication.<\/p>\n Phyllis Webb has had a much larger body of work than Thompson. Peacock Blue<\/em> 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<\/em> in 1965 and was its executive producer from 1967-69. Hulcoop\u2019s introduction is harder to follow than Sanger\u2019s given all the references to other poets and critics.<\/p>\n Webb\u2019s personal life was nothing like the destructiveness of Thompson\u2019s. 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, \u201c\u2019there 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.\u2019\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Webb\u2019s dedication to social justice is evident in her poetry. She started out as she says, \u201c\u2019as 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.\u2019\u201d 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<\/em> (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 \u201cTo Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide,\u201d and she treats the subject with dignity and humour. For example, she writes: \u201cSome 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.\u201d That poem has stuck with me since I read it as an undergraduate.<\/p>\n As time progresses, Webb gets more experimental with form. In Naked Poems<\/em> (1965), much of the page is white space and the very short poems are positioned in various places to emphasise the white space. \u201cThe Bruise\u201d is a good example of the dense brevity of the poems:<\/p>\n Again you have left And the last sequence in this book is called \u201cSome final questions\u201d and is comprised of a short question and answer. The last one is simply \u201cOh?\u201d<\/p>\n In Wilson\u2019s Bowl<\/em> (1980), \u201cLetters to Margaret Atwood,\u201d is a sequence of prose poems, a conversational tone that exhibits Webb\u2019s fondness for and admiration of Atwood: \u201cPeggy: When I see pictures of you in your old fur coat I think maybe you\u2019ve jumped into an animal skin so you can hide where you\u2019ve always wanted to be.\u201d It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Trying to capture these two volumes in a review is like trying to catch wind. There\u2019s too much and it\u2019s too powerful. Ultimately all I can say is \u201cRead these poets.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Astatine<\/em> Astatine<\/em>, Michael Kenyon\u2019s latest collection of poetry, contains meticulously crafted poems by a writer who takes chances and wins. A rare chemical element that has never been seen in its elemental form (Kenyon provides a definition at the beginning of the book), astatine is an apt symbol for the mutability and mystery of life that these poems explore.<\/p>\n This volume has four parts, and in them Kenyon demonstrates a preoccupation with form, something a bit unusual these days. While the poems are not conventional fixed forms, they are written forms that are fixed for their purpose; to my mind that indicates a commitment to poetry and a deep knowledge of it. Two techniques frequently appear and work extremely well, given the subject: repetition and juxtaposition. \u201cAbove New Westminster\u201d uses both elegantly:<\/p>\n You arrive by chance and by design The constant in life is change, and Kenyon employs this motif while searching for a meaning that can be fixed. Perhaps the constant is the search?<\/p>\n Several poems deal with marriage and family. Some refer to a wife, some to a son. Some are about a critically ill father. In \u201cStoma,\u201d the speaker says, \u201cMy dad\u2019s colon purses its ruby lips\u201d and the indignity of coping with body waste is levelling and humanizing. Hospitals make their way into a number of poems, and death is present. In one of the most powerful and disturbing poems, \u201cRed,\u201d the speaker talks to a loved one who is gravely ill:<\/p>\n One last time your body resisted Kenyon is a professional counsellor with practices in Vancouver and on Pender island, so the focus on human problems is that of a person who likely spends his days trying to help people with serious problems. And he must spend much time on ferries, so it\u2019s no surprise that water and boats are part of the fabric of many of the poems. Waves capture the sense of movement, change, and inevitability found in much of this book.<\/p>\n A strong destabilizing technique (at least for me) is the inclusion of Italian in many poems. The vowel-laden language adds beauty, and Kenyon has helpfully added a translation at the end of the book of the many Italian lines. Some readers may find it awkward to flip back and forth, but I like the enforced slowness of reading.<\/p>\n So in quatrains, tercets, couplets, iambic pentameter, prose poems and much more, Kenyon tackles both ordinary life and literature over time. \u201cReading Middlemarch<\/em>\u201d is perhaps my favourite in the collection as that\u2019s one of my favourite novels, but it would be hard to choose. (It\u2019s also set on Vancouver Island, where I live.) Another contender is \u201cLibrary,\u201d which does what Kenyon often does\u2014yokes the manmade with nature: \u201cblown nests for words that can\u2019t walk \/ to the mall or access the Internet . . . .\u201d Kenyon moves swiftly and easily among various levels of culture and diction. In \u201cAeneas\u201d, for example, he slyly combines mythology with well, a less lofty aspect of life: \u201cThe Cumae waved \/ their burning scrolls \/ lit serious farts.\u201d You have to laugh.<\/p>\n The juxtaposition abounds in many ways throughout the book. Reading these poems is a mental and an emotional exercise in the world of words. And Kenyon\u2019s words place us right back in the tangible world. It\u2019s the magic of poetry.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m 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. 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\n<\/em>edited by Peter Sanger
\n<\/span>Fredericton, NB: Gooselane, 2015
\n<\/span>296 pages, $24.95<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>edited by John F. Hulcoop
\nTalonbooks, 498 pages, $29.95<\/p>\n
\nyour mark.
\n<\/span>Or we
\n<\/span>have.
\n<\/span>Skin shuddered
\nsecretly<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nby Michael Kenyon
\nLondon, ON: Brick Books, 2015
\n136 pages, $20<\/p>\n
\non this hillside, retired and planning
\nfall, winter, deciding not to plan,
\nall around you in flux while you are still;
\nthen all else still and you are in flux<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nwaking while I watched the morning\u2019s long white
\nveins ride forward across the thin blanket,
\nand saw your eyes glitter, your wrists open.
\nThe pain expressed in this poem is overwhelming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n