Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

English-Canadian Perspectives of LandscapeSamuel Y. Edgerton (1975) points out how the development of linearperspective in the Renaissance corresponds with a strong interest incartography as another way of conquering the world in mental terms. This is aconnection of particular interest in light of Canadian literature, as Canadianwriters have been noted for their preoccupation with mapping andgeometrification. 17 The role that Renaissance perspective plays in modernCanadian landscape poetry can be understood as another attempt to grasp theland conceptually, to make it accessible to the mind—an attempt which is,however, doomed to fail.Anne Marriott's “Prairie Graveyard” (1945) presents a landscape whichevades visual organization: “Empty prairie slides away/on all sides, rushestoward a wide/expressionless horizon, joined/to a vast blank sky.” There is novanishing point in the horizon where perspectival lines might converge; withthe land sliding away, the square base of the visual pyramid cannot beconstructed. Barry McKinnon's “Bushed” (1980) is about an equally emptyCanadian landscape, a “desert of snow.” Here, too, there is neither a fixture forthe eye nor a viewpoint from which the land mass could be seen in perspective:“each way/to go, presents an equal/choice, since the directions, &/what the eyesee's [sic] is the same/if there were some sticks, you wld/stay & build a house,or/a tree wld give a place to climb/for perspective ....”While these poems accentuate the frustration of conventional ways of seeing,others point out alternative modes of perception—while retaining a distinctlyvisual quality. The poetry of both Margaret Avison and Margaret Atwood hasbeen noted for its pronounced visuality, 18 although both poets claim theinadequacy of sensory perception for an understanding of the world.In Avison's “Perspective,” it is eminently import that perspective is somethingcontrived and artificial and not inherent in the country that is beingperspectivized. Like the Renaissance painters, the poem's addressee constructsperspective with the help of a grid system (“the mesh of generations sinceMantegna”) and tapering lines that converge in a single vanishing point: “Westand beholding the one plain/And in your face I see the chastening/Of its smalltapering design/That brings up punkt.” The restrictive nature of this perceptualformat is underlined by the choice of the German word punkt which, apart fromreferring to a point in space, means “full stop.” The addressee's way of seeingis forced (vistas are “pressed out” of the a-spatial flux of experience), and itdelimits, “chastens” and even “cripples” the limitless grandeur of space—while the “adventitious” eyeballs of Avison's persona slip the confines of the“law of optics.” The persona travels on train tracks that do not meet in avanishing point, and s/he is able to perceive everything with a “foreground”intensity so that the dimension of depth is lost:But ho you miss the impact of that fierceRaw boulder five miles off? You are not piercedBy that great spear of grass on the horizon?19