The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Victoria's uncle, the devious Senator Albion
Hackington to blow up the newly constructed
East Northumberland Underwater
Mall Tunnel, brainchild of Dr. Highcheek-
Bevington and P.E.I. Angus MacDougall-
Doyle (known as Big Mac).
Also prominent in the cast are the Iwin
family—Ulyoosa Iwin, her niece Yorlanda,
owner of the 4,000 acre Deep Dish Farm on
RLE. and exporter of Deep Dish Wine, and
her three daughters, Oilivia, Greaselda, and
Gasandra. Gasandra is the producer of The
Ancestors of Anne: An Island Epic. Directed
by Karuro Kitusano, the film tells the story
of Grannyann, the Japanese great-greatgrandmother
of Anne of Green Gables, and
her Jesuit lover, Dan Maloney.
And so forth.
Happily, Maritime Union is as brief as it is
broad. As Dryden suggests, a perpetual grin
can easily become tedious, and "there is a
vast difference between the slovenly
butchering of a man, and the fineness of a
stroke that separates the head from the
body and leaves it standing in its place".
Donovan's novel makes no pretence at fineness.
Rather, it chops its victims into
messes. Whether readers should be grateful
that Maritimers can still laugh at the
destruction of their culture.
To take up Miriam Waddington's poems
after Donovan's light-hearted dystopia is to
turn from the prolusory to the genuinely
prophetic. In all her poems Waddington
strives for a transparency of language, for
directness and simplicity in expression. But
the poet who assumes, as Waddington
surely does, the moral obligation of poetry
must balance on a vibrating wire, continually
risking a fall into mere preachiness on
the one side, or, on the other, into silence.
And falls undoubtedly there are in The Last
Landscape. The poem "Futures", for example,
is at once flat and curiously inexact in
its language—"the long sunny autumn/of
being thirty", "it simply stands there waiting",
"the frowzy worn-out path/to death".
The brief poems "A few Things" and "Peace
Notes" fail to achieve the haiku-like clarity
and immediacy that is surely intended. In
some of the poems—for example, "The
Hurly Burly Arcade", written in the third
person—the narrative voice speaks with an
almost clinical detachment of the isolation
and loneliness of women facing the reality
of old age and death:
she would
eat her lunches on benches downtown
or at McDonald's where they give old
women free coffee.
After all her travels
she would end up with this
small wisdom; how to find
warm places and free coffee.
At their best, however, the poems in The
Last Landscape recall that early persona, the
visionary poet who "went out into the
autumn night/to cry my anger to the stoneblind
fields" ..."held/in a... seize of hate"
(The Glass Trumpet 1966). Fierce, biblical,
uncompromising, the poems are a lament
for all those women who dream "against
guns/and hunger whose words/turn into
songs as they/climb into higher/and higher
skies", women who come "to warn you/of
future Guernicas" and to awaken "your
broken promises your/ancient righteousness"
("The Woman in the Hall"). They
also cry out against injustice, against the
hypocrisy and destructiveness of power.
Waddington is also acutely aware that, as
Geoffrey Hartman puts it, "To live in truth
is to live in that temptation toward silence,
toward aphasia, yet to maintain the imperative
of the word":
Locked in our separate
trances, we joined
the invisible procession
towards what was still
undisclosed; and the angels
with the red lanterns
hovering over us, their wings brushed us
with silence and the silence