The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Last Page
Where? Place in Recent North American
Fictions (Aarhus Univ. Press, Aarhus,
Denmark DK-8000; 121 Dankr.), edited by
Karl-Heinz Westarp, opens with the tentative
wisdom of Patrick Lane's poem "Indian
Tent Rings", and includes (among its 10
essays) Ellen W. Munley's "Spatial Metaphors
in Anne Hébert's Les enfants du sabbat
Within and Beyond the Confines of the
Convent, the Cabin, and the Quotidian."
But the essays of most general use to students
of Canadian literature are likely to be
James I. McClintock's outline of Gary
Snyder's environmental poetics, and David
Kranes' introductory essay "Space and
Literature: Notes Toward a Theory of
Mapping" which provides background and
succinct guidelines for discussing the use(s)
of space in literary texts. A perceptive piece
of complementary criticism—not explicitly
North American, but ultimately just as relevant—is
Jonathan Bate's Romantic
Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental
Tradition (Routledge, $74.95/$i8.95). Bate
reacts against recent criticism which politicizes
Wordsworth, or laments his lack of
political engagement, not by returning to
aesthetic hermeticism, but by discovering
in the poet a different ecological-politics.
Romantic Ecology is a short, taut, yet
relaxed, new take on Wordsworth, which,
in such chapters as "The Moral of
Landscape" and "The Naming of Places"
centres Wordsworth as the author of the
Guidebook rather than of the Prelude.
David C. Miller reminds us, however, of
the limitations of Wordsworth's versions of
nature by quoting Aldous Huxley: "Wandering
in the hothouse darkness of the jungle,
he would not have felt so serenely
certain of those "Presences of Nature," these
"souls of lonely places," which he was in the
habit of worshipping on the shores of Windermere
and Rydal."' This passage might
have been an epigraph for Miller's Dark Eden:
The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American
Culture (Cambridge UP, n.p.), a wide-ranging,
generously illustrated cataloguing of
the metaphor of the swamp (and marsh
and jungle) in American painting, writing
and folklore. Miller's attention both to the
physical shapes of particular landscapes and
to what artists project on to a landscape
makes the book a useful extension of work in
a Canadian context by Dick Harrison, Robert
Thacker, and Gaile MacGregor, while the
far more theoretical investigation of "the
picture-making capacity of words" found in
Murray Krieger's Ekphrasis: The Illusion of
the Natural Sign (John Hopkins UP, $38.00
U.S.) establishes for such an investigation a
wider context of philosophical history.
"I am accustomed to regard the smallest
brook with as much interest for the time
being as if it were the Orinoco or
Mississippi," wrote Henry David Thoreau
in 1850. This principle of concentrated
close-up attention to the apparently unremarkable—
Wordsworth's world in a grain
of sand—permeates nature writing and
much environmental writing. For the armchair
urban biologist, large-format photo
albums often provide the main means for
looking close up. Judging by the number
which reach Canadian Literature's offices,
publishers are detecting an expanding
interest in such books. We are often, in a
journal devoted primarily to literature,
more interested in the text in such books
than in the photographs. In this sense, Kim
Stafford's Entering the Grove (Layton UT:
Gibbs Smith, $34.95 U.S.) sets an exceptional
standard. Surrounding Gary Braasch's
moody photographs, poet Stafford's essaystories
discover sermons in forests and
tongues in trees. Wings Over Water: Water
Birds of the Atlantic (Nimbus, $27.95) is at
the other extreme. The text (by Stuart
Tingey) is utilitarian, conveying little sense
of discovery, while the photos (by Wayne
Barrett) provide the close-ups—of a com-