This group of poets, as George Woodcock described Andrew Suknaski, write geopoetry, poetry rooted in the land, often in a specific place. I originally had planned to include Suknaski with the "Bush Work Dirt" poets. However, in response to Woodcock, I thought of other poets who, when included, make an interesting juxtaposition. Though I might be slightly shifting Woodcock's definition to create this grouping, I have included two of them here: Douglas Lochhead and Peter Sanger. Woodcock states that this kind of verse is concerned "with the nature of the land, the moral meaning of its history, the guilts and failures of those who inhabit it" (LH V3 316). I'm using geopoetry to mean not just those poets who write about a specific place and our human attachment to it, but also those who praise, lament, elegize and respect the land itself. To some extent, many poets do this. These three poets are distinguished by the depth of their commitment to a geographic, physical place and the metaphors it engenders, to the revelation of topography, and the way we, as human beings, are engraved upon the land.
Lochhead's newest book, Midgic, begins with a dedication:
This is a love story. A gathering of lyrical word-moments which
reveal how one person came to know and care for a village. Its name
is Midgic, situated on the edge of the great Tantramar Marsh, not far
from the sea. Once it was a popular meeting and hunting place of the Mi'kMaq. Then it was settled by Yorkshire pioneers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Midgic is a place where old and new farms break ground, grow hay, nourish cattle, where people live, love and die.
If they were not too young (as poets born post 1945) for this history, I could have included Dale Zieroth, Harry Thurston, and John Terpstra in this section. This sort of poetic is a persistently poignant and revealing source of our experience as Canadians.
Andrew Suknaski (b. 1942)
Andrew Suknaski was born of Polish and Ukrainian parents on a farm just outside the village of Wood Mountain, in South West Saskatchewan. Like the poets of Bush Work Dirt, he left home at an early age; tried many different manual labour jobs; traveled; and attended institutions, including Simon Fraser, the University of British Columbia, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art & Design.
Suknaski's first full collection (he had previously published chapbooks) was Wood Mountain Poems (1976), encouraged and edited by Al Purdy. In a note at the end of the book, Suknaski describes the collection as "a return to ancestral roots in my birth place, after seventeen years of transience and aberration in numerous Canadian cities—and of trying to find the meaning of home" (124). He also states that his poems are an attempt to come to grips with "a vaguely divided guilt; guilt for what happened to the Indian (his land taken) imprisoned on the reserve; and guilt because to feel this guilt is a betrayal of what you ethically are—the son of a homesteader and his wife who must be rightfully honoured in one's mythology" (124).
In his introduction to The Land They Gave Away, Stephen Scobie states that "although (Suknaski) has moved about all over Western Canada, his true home and centre is Wood Mountain...Suknaski's central subject has been the people and the heritage of Wood Mountain and the Prairies generally" (12). Many of the poems are about the town's people, past and present, the settlers, and the first nations—and their attachment to the land. Suknaski writes in the vernacular of these voices, a realist poetry that produces "a kind of personal mythology, in which the names of the postmaster, Lee Soparlo, and the café owner, Jimmy Hoy, stand alongside the great names in history, such as Sitting Bull" (13).
gee clyz
all time slem ting hoy would say
when he got mad at some obnoxious drunk
stirring hell in the café
all time takkie to much
makkie trouble sunna bitz
wadda hell madder wid you?
Suknasksi tells the stories of the people who broke the land and were broken on it. In an elegy to Philip Well, he writes:
in 1914
well and my father walked south from moose jaw
to find their homesteads
they slept in haystacks along the way
and once nearly burned to death
waking in the belly of hell they were saved by mewling mice
and their song of agony—
a homesteader had struck a match and thought he
would teach them a lesson
well and father lived in a hillside and built fires
to heat stones each day in winter
they hunted and skinned animals to make fur blankets
threw redhot stones into their cellars
overlaid the stones with willows
and slept between hides
father once showed me a picture
nine black horses pulling a gang plough
philip well proudly riding behind (breaking
the homestead to make a home)
Mixed in with these local figures are other poems, narrative and likewise rooted in the details of everyday life, about historical figures like Sitting Bull, Crowfoot, and Gabrielle Dumont (his own mythmaker/a true dreamer), and poems of celebration to other prairie figures like William Kurelek. Anyone who has lain on the prairie in the heat of August reading Kurelek's delightful book "A Prairie Boy's Summer" would relate to Suknaski's question:
...who is this sleek cat invading like a memory the barnyard of youth ... my God! the swallow divebombs the cat as if the air we breath were a territory to defend
The effect of this juxtaposition of lives led is an authentic, raw, heart breaking yet celebratory portrait of prairie life. It is fascinating to read Suknaski's poetry along side of Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning, to overlay these remarkable visions of the prairie.
Suknaski won the CAA poetry award for The Ghosts You Call Poor in 1979. He has also delved into film making, as a researcher on a number of National Film Board projects like "Grain" and "The Disinherited." In 1978, Suknaski, himself, was the topic of "Wood Mountain Poems," a film by Harvey Spak for the National Film Board of Canada that Stephen Scobie calls, "the best critical statement we have on the poet's life and work" ( The Land They Gave Away 13).
Selected Titles: Wood Mountain Poems (1976); The Land They Gave Away (1982)
Douglas Lochhead (b. 1922)
With Douglas Lochhead and Peter Sanger, I turn away slightly from the expression of suffering we see in Suknaski and the Bush Work Dirt poets, and toward a geopoetry that arises more directly out of the topography of a natural environment. As Greg Gatesby said in his comments at Harbourfront, "In Breakfast at Mel's and Other Poems of Love and Places, Douglas Lochhead returns to the marshlands and woods that have proved to be such rich sources for his poetry. Exultant or downcast, playful or meditative, these poems grasp and hold what is real to the senses, dealing with love, passion and longing as much as they do with landscape and loss."
Douglas Lochhead, was born and raised in Guelph, Ontario in 1922. He served as an infantry officer in the Canadian Army during World War II. Over the course of his life he has had many "word jobs" including an advertising copywriter, librarian, bibliographer, professor, and anthologist. He attended McGill University and the University of Toronto. He has taught English and been a member of library staffs at universities in Canada, the United States, and Scotland. He was the first writer-in-residence at Mount Allison University (1987 to 1990). He has achieved numerous academic honours including that of Professor Emeritus at Mount Allison University, and as a Senior Fellow and Founding Librarian at Massey College, University of Toronto. He was president of Goose Lane Editions and is a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets.
Midgic (2003) was not the first time Lochhead wrote about the great and mysterious Tantramar Marsh. In 1980, he wrote the lovely and haunting High Marsh Road, a book of meditations on the Marsh, short listed for the Governor General's Award. It begins with a Preface, "To live near the Tantramar is to be conscious of its brooding, changing and always beautiful presence. On the High Marsh Road one's thoughts stay with minute details of mouse tracks or harrier or they move with the past, with people, all quite personal." Like haiku, these epigrammatic statements never stare, just glance then turn away to meditate:
why not turn just ahead beyond
the covered bridge? There is a
good view of the river. Several
turns. Heron and greater yellow
legs are often there
The poems turn sometimes to history:
there is a song in these seasons. The
Tintamarre. Ghost birds over the
centuries. Voices in the tape of
wind. Caught. To come back in their
times. Tintamarre
Sometimes, the Marsh provides an hermeneutic into art:
the real round of the saying never forms,
but the poet s constantly working, moulding
it closer and closer to the truth
In 1989, Lochhead wrote Upper Cape Poems, and Dykeland which renew his fascination with the Tantramar. Lochhead's poems are often a celebration, as in the opening couplets of All Things Do Continue:
Always to begin, to end
with praise, o praise!
What else but clutters the tongue,
flicks darts against the heart?
What else to give to the wind
but praise, o praise?
A celebration of how we live inside nature, as here, in the view from the window:
the gripped magic
of the view,
all this from the kitchen
out into spruce, pine
stretched birches,
the over hang of elms
so to hold it
with the eye
the morning after
and begun,
does turn around
the day to come
it is there
behind the house
where inside
mouths babble
as steadily
as the brook goes
finding its way
from the quarry,
the stomach,
the babbles going on
inside and out.
Of all his collections, my personal favourite is Breakfast at Mel's. "Love in Places" for example, takes up many of his familiar themes—Marsh, love, writing—and favourite devices—allusion, metaphor—and moves seamlessly through image, emotion, history, to take us to unexpected places.
This brief description does not cover the work of Douglas Lochhead—he has also written long poems, such as the three part invention, "Homage to Henry Alline" and memoirs such as the eloquent memoir of personal war experience, The Panic Field. However, many of Lochhead's 16 collections of poetry are rooted in the Tantramar Marsh. Deeply immersed in the beauty of the place he inhabits, Lochhead's poetry is a continuing investigation of love, in the ebb and flow of existence.
Selected Titles: Tiger in the Skull: New and Selected Poems, 1959-1986; Breakfast at Mel's (1997); Midgic (2003)
Peter Sanger (b. 1943)
Peter Sanger, poet, critic, editor, and Professor Emeritus, was born in Bewdley, England, and immigrated to Canada in 1953. He was educated at the University of Melbourne, University of Victoria, and Acadia University. He lived and worked in Ontario, B.C. and Newfoundland before settling in Nova Scotia in 1970 and teaching at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, where he became Head of the Humanities and Professor Emeritus.
Sanger's first book, the America Reel, was published by Pottersfield Press in 1983. This collection was followed by five poetry collections including Earth Moth (1991), Ironworks (2001) and Kerf (2002). Many readers also know Sanger for his measured criticism and insightful reviews of work by John Thompson, Douglas Lochhead, Richard Outram, Robert Bringhurst, Emily Carr and Elizabeth Bishop.
One of Sanger's prose works that is useful to place beside his poetry is Spar: Essays on Words in Place (2002). This is a collection of poetic essays that Sanger describes as "pauses during which I looked at the map. Their concerns are the ways in which we take words with us when we journey, what they do with our conversation while we travel, and how we may learn to live with their consequence when we have found a destination." The essays resonate with a scholarly life lead close to nature, a working out of aesthetic and ethical questions viewed through the metaphor of nature, where earth is "sacred and unappropriated."
In my favorite of Sanger's essays I am reminded of a quotation Phyllis Webb uses in one of her essays: "make me see closer and smaller." Sanger writes:
I know a poet who was briefly mad. He explained to me how madness briefly imprisoned him in systems of interlocking archetypes of great dignity, but essential inhumanity. As he recovered, he felt the sanity of small, exact things, of each individual leaf, of each individual birdsong, and the possibility of change and free will existing in no real, provable way among natural instincts and necessities. He found that unless he allowed them attributes of particular identity, change and free will, the symbols in his work would become sterile allegories, which only he could explain, and not even he could inhabit. Now he tries to watch the detail of words and things—by stopping, waiting and walking. (18)
This passage represents what I love most of Sanger's work, both prose and poetry. He forces us to slow down, to savour the words in the mouth, to gently turn over the thoughts and view them from all sides, to attend to details, to see closer and smaller. As Annie Dillard states, in order to read this kind of writing, you must lean down from 'loud life.'
The earth, for Sanger, is a place of mystery and interdependency, as we see, for example, in The Snake:
When I touched the green snake with my foot two carrion beetles in shiny black coats patched with orange ran out of its belly and showed me expectant antennae until they'd made sure I was warm. And then they dodged back to tidy and mate and summon up newly hatched children with secret slight rasps of their wings
American Reel is also studded with portraits of people stamped on the Nova Scotia landscape, like Jerome, a fascinating tale of an abandoned mariner found on the beach at Sandy Cove, his legs cut off at the knee, but carefully stitched, with a tin of biscuits and bottle of water beside him to keep him alive. For fifty eight years the man lived among the villagers of French Cove, speaking, in all that time, only three words, three proper names: Jerome, which they took as his, Trieste, his homeland, and Colombo. The poem ends:
a third name, Colombo
the ship which had judged him for innocence
guilt, betrayed or betraying, as murderer,
victim of what he'd committed
or kept from witnessed inside
by his implicate silence and ours.
It is a haunting poem, which embodies the depth of individual isolation and vulnerability, and reminding us of the mystery of existence.
As poet, critic, professor emeritus and poetry editor of The Antigonish Review, Peter Sanger is a strong, measured voice in the culture of Nova Scotia.
Selected Titles: American Reel (1983); Earth Moth (1991)
Copyright © Heather Pyrcz 2004. All rights reserved.