A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

LastPagesretire their legs, those cellos locked in cases,/ we write music as if we were caged, / as ifwe were the moths, white and thin- /winged stumbling against the pane."The poems in Gary Geddes' ActiveTrading: Selected Poems 1970-1995 (GooseLane, 1996, $12.95) share with di Michele's aformal commitment to the apparently documentaryand testamentary transparenciesof the plainspoken, but expand the poeticdomain to the historical and the political(in perhaps the traditional sense, since diMichele's feminist psycho-poetics thoughtfullyexplore the politics both of the patriarchalfamily and of the mating game); inaddition, his poems rely much more thanhers do on ventriloquism, the speakers typicallybeing given a lively demotic idiomand an "unrealistic" self-consciousness thatallows them to be who they are while yetreflecting upon their situation. They aremouthpieces, in other words, but often inthe best sense, articulating Geddes' aliveand thorough decency and his humaneresponses to strangers, friends, and family.Capable at times of the lamest verse("Sometimes during spelling bee /1 get towondering about the origin / of words."),Geddes writes most engagingly when thereis a leaven of humour (e.g., "MahatmaGandhi Refuses an Invitation to Write forReader's Digest"; "Kravinchuk"; "At theDowntown Hotel"), or when he is outsidehimself, as in The Terracotta Army, HongKong, or "Girl by the Water"—perhapsbecause in such cases he cannot evade art'scold mandate to qualify, complicate, andtransform what it purports to document.Al Purdy has long understood the claimsof poetic art on experience, which is onereason why the overfull 150 pages of Roomsfor Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems1962-1996 (Harbour, 1996, $16.95) are somuch richer and more satisfying than thecrammed 400 of Starting from Ameliasburgh:The Collected Prose (Harbour, 1995, n.p.),both edited by Sam Solecki (the poemswith Purdy's assistance). The latter book,which is actually a selected, shows Purdy tobe a thoughtful as well as a regular guy (weknow this anyway from the poems) and afitfully insightful reader of his poetic compadres,but most pieces leave you feelingthat the author's getting paid by the wordand (understandably) determined to makethe most of an income his poems will neverbring. Even some of the poems can leaveyou feeling that way, since the characteristicPurdy mode is the loose, sometimes goofy,yet paradoxically alert and controlled personal,meditative ramble (shades of Purdyin Lee): a mode that misses more oftenthan it hits, firing as it does on any numberof grey-cell cylinders, but when it hits, as in"The Horseman of Agawa" or "TheCountry North of Belleville"—well hell, it'sa purple surprise in the river's white racket,as the man sez of arctic rhododendrons.What's more, the loutish-husband andhorny-toady shtick happily collapses underthe force of the most moving poetry,becoming mere grit in the deliberatelyunpolished pearls. Rooms offers the wholerange of Purdy's poetic—in the first fivepoems, in fact—and so has begun theprocess of sifting out the essential work, ifnot always certainly: the Birneyesquethrowaway "When I Sat Down to Play thePiano," for example, which must get theyuk-yuks going at readings, takes up twoand a half pages that could have been givento more compelling pieces like "Love atRoblin Lake," "Private Property," or "NewsReports at Ameliasburg." "I regard myselfas an odd kind of mainstream poet," Purdywrote recently, ". .. as eccentric-conventional,"a self-evaluation that the presentselection confirms and that explains whysome poems should last, pitted, like thepainted Horseman, against oblivion:"which is kind of ludicrous or kind ofbeautiful I guess."That habit of confirming while undercutting,of mocking without quite negat-202