Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
biographical, a sometimes fairly close definition
of Canadian and québécois people in
clearly defined Canadian and québécois
places. In Steve Luxton's Iridium and Todd
Bruce's Jiggers, the entry is symbolic, symbolist
in the case of Iridium and allegorical
in the case of Jiggers. In J.A. Wainwright's
Landscape and Desire and Michael Redhill's
Lake Nora Arms, the entry is post-modernist
impressionism, an aspiring successor
to abstract art but in words.
With these six books of poetry, we don't
laugh very often. But among them, it is
autobiography that allows laughter or
something close to it most often. Doucet's
world in The Debris of Planets with its
recurrent image of the lion symbolic of the
creative poet romping continually through
his lines, is full of vignettes of his native
Newfoundland. The two planets of his title
are his Acadian father and his British warbride
mother; their debris is their son Clive
the poet, the fruit of his parents' stellar
crash into marriage; and, in the experience
of the young poet who came into being in
this happily blasted union, "A good drunk/
is a lot like a good mass./ It exalts and comforts,/
but without the hangover of virtue."
Rare surely must be the Canadian poet who
can make a Newfie paradox memorable
and amusing in serious verse. The laughter
is less evident in Morrissey's The Compass.
Perhaps the reading of this autobiographical
poem might inspire one to describe it as
an account of the fall of the house of middle-Westmount
in Montreal where the
almost very rich of Quebec's Anglos once
lived. Morrissey writes : "We could have
been a dynasty/.. . had Father's brothers/
pulled together, not lost the tug-of-war/
against death and failure." But if release and
relief are part of laughter's background, this
long compass narrative, which points the
way magnetically to the success of human
love, ends happily with three real old-fashioned
prayers that Morrissey addresses to a
Supreme Maker. If we, who occupy the geographical
space that we call Canada, find
ourselves in the contradictions of Doucet's
Newfie paradoxes, we also discover at least
a fraction of our image in the redeemable
darkness of Morrissey's Compass world.
By contrast to Doucet's and Morrissey's
autobiographical flights, Luxton's Iridium
and Bruce's Jiggers explore the aesthetic
possibilities of the human condition in the
images of verse. If the reader is looking for
an entry on traditional beauty in our imaginary
library card-catalogue of Canadian
poetic experiences, it is with Luxton and
Bruce among the six authors under consideration
here that he will find it most easily.
There is lots more there as well. The iridium
of Luxton's title, which sounds like a
flower, is actually a chemical element allied
to the most precious metal, platinum. Like
time that haunts Luxton's lines, iridium
resists fusion with other elements that constitute
the stuff of human existence: "Time
is irretrievable/ like the persuasions of selflove."
There are echoes of Luxton's British
origins in Vaughan and Traherne in
Iridium side by side with a superb tribute
to the true poetic spirit of an old muse on
her porch on de Bullion street in east-end
Montreal. The old lady emerges for her first
spring-time exit on her balcony as in a rite
of re-birth. Unlike the chemical element of
Luxton's title, here, for those who know
Montreal's east-end porches and staircases,
England and Quebec fuse: "Our fresh
spring outfits donned/ we earnestly seek
her sanction/ for our latest claims to original
vision." By contrast, in Bruce's Jiggers,
our symbolic muse is an articulate sensitive
rubby-dub. No Canadian contradiction
there. In our card-catalogue of Canadian
poetic experiences, you will find him
classed under the derelict whom you see in
the summer, who disappears in the winter
and who sometimes reappears in the
spring. Bruce has a strong lyrical sense
amid the irreparable damage of a fractured
universe. Here is the poet seeking his self:
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