Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

graceful voice of the poet. A sense of transcendent
optimism emerges above the
inevitable ironies and paradoxes which such
an overview of western civilization must
necessarily invite. The sense of personal
and universal apocalypse which fills the following
lines is subtly balanced against the
sum of the poetry that precedes it:
I am next to midnight.
Almost I hear the bell toll—
Assurance I could do without.
I have no answer, faith the warrant
Of intransigence I would not leave.
Sensation claims me, I leave my love.
The negation implied in the fourth line, for
example, is belied by the the strongest
answer of the collection: the poetic fact
itself.
On the technical side, Collected Poems
Volume Ulis notable for the revisions
Gustafson has made to many poems. Not
all of the four books are reprinted in their
entirety. Words, lines, and often whole sections
of poems have been reworked in the
present edition. As the most recent text
over which the poet has exercised his editorial
control, this one will no doubt figure
strongly in any future editions of his work,
but readers would be well repaid by making
their own comparisons with the original
editions.
Memories Uncovered
Todd Bruce
Jiggers. Turnstone $9.95
Clive Doucet
The Debris of Planets. Black Moss $10.95
Steve Luxton
Iridium. DC Books $24.95/$9.95
Stephen Morrissey
The Compass. Empyreal $10.00
Michael Redhill
Lake Nora Arms. Coach House $12.95
J. A. Wainwright
Landscape and Desire: Poems Selected and New.
Mosaic n.p.
Reviewed by Anthony Raspa
It is strange how poetry continues to be
vital. Strange because on the surface of
everything that absorbs us without, there is
no place for it. Strange, too, because in the
poetry written by the poets who are with
us, we find ourselves. If practising poets in
Canada have a common virtue, it is that
they call us to order by bringing us face to
face with our moral contradictions and our
conflicts of sensitivity. The six poets under
consideration here are witness to this. If
there was no place for poets and their little
books of poetry, there would be no place
for a part of what we are.
The gamut of emotions, feelings and
thoughts that the practising poet in Canada
seems to cover represents a kind of reference
system for our collective private
world. So often this world is a formative
past moment that has been catalogued, as it
were, in the present. The system of our
memories in poetry is like an old style
library card-catalogue where you can look
up what you want while passing over the
entries that for the moment you don't
need. You put short pencils and scraps of
paper in front of some cards to remember
where to go back to them later. In Clive
Doucet's The Debris of Planets and Stephen
Morrissey's The Compass, the entry is auto-
189