\s mYevtew ELECTRONIC ADDITION - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWchoral observations with remembered incidentsand quotations. Discipline, thediscipline of imperial power and the disciplineof the craftsman, is evident in thefact that each representative is given nineunrhymed couplets in which to speak.There is no room for rhetorical flourishes,for tropes, for sweet music. Thetones are dry and resigned, often ironic,sometimes disturbed or angry, sometimescynical, but not allowed to depart markedlyfrom the rule of careful understatement.These speakers are guarded.Which is not to say that there is noindividualizing of the voices. In lettingeach have his say as representative andindividual, the poet allows each his ownperspective, preoccupations, and perceptions,which necessarily order and colourhis speaking. Personalities do emerge —forthright, cunning, naive — in thevaried tones and rhythms. But individualizingthese choral voices is not thepoems' main work. The individualizingthat does occur is of the central figure,Bi the maker, who speaks within some ofthe monologues, but has no piece of hisown. His pottery is the stage for theempire-wide drama:It was not so much the gossip thatattracted meto Bi's pottery though there was plenty ofthat:news of the latest atrocities against thepeople,rights and property abolished, heads ofchildrenstaring vacantly from terraces, dismemberedcorpsesturning slowly in the current along thenorth bankof the Wei. Rather it was a sort of clearinghouse,a confessional, where our greatest fearswere exorcisedpiecemeal through the barter of objectivedetail.The polarity that creates the dramatictension is between the potter and theemperor, who is also portrayed throughoutthe monologues, but who too joinsthe chorus in disguise to speak the finalpiece. The polarity shows everywhere asthat between brutality and rigiditygrounded in fear and failed idealism andthe subversive power of an imaginationfully realized in craft. The protean Biwith his cynicism, pragmatism, shiftingmoods, impatience with fools and charlatans,his earthiness, his insight into thehuman tragedy he is part of, emerges asstronger than the emperor, who himselfacknowledges :I joined the potter in his rest.I broke his ranks but could not break hiswill.The universality of the poem and itsissues comes not from any effort to allegorizebut from staying close to theimagined voices conjured by the terracotaarmy itself. As do Eliot's lines in aChinese-jar, this poem realizes in its ownmeasures, its own craftiness and purity,the kind of art it celebrates. The bookwith its fine paper and its setting of eachmonologue on its own sheet facing itscalligraphic title (done by Shuai Lizhi)is appropriately handsome.Patrick Lane's A Linen Crow, a CaftanMagpie suggests in its title, asGeddes' title does, artifice, the imaginedand the imagination as having primacyover the literal-actual. It also suggestsmore arbitrary and radical departuresfrom mimesis or mirroring. To callwhat's inside its covers, by way of completinga symmetry, the fat of poetrywould be to falsify. Lane's lyrical meditationsare in their way as lean as Geddes'monologues. Each of the forty consists offour unrhymed couplets set on its ownsheet faced and surrounded with whitespace, which enhances the sense of apartness,of austere withdrawal from themundane.181