John Newlove (1938-2003)

By Douglas Barbour

 

from Canadian Writers And Their Works, Volume 10, Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley, (ECW Press, Toronto: 1992) pp 281-334

 

Reproduced with permission of ECW Press

 

Biography

 

JOHN NEWLOVE was born to Thomas Harold and Mary Constant Newlove on 13 June 1938 in Regina, Saskatchewan. His father was a lawyer, his mother a teacher. Since the family moved quite often, Newlove lived in many districts of Saskatchewan during his childhood, and, although not simply a poet of landscape, he has made the Prairies he knew as a young boy an icon of imaginative possibilities in his work. At one point, his mother taught school in the Doukhobor community of Veregin, the focus of many of his poems of childhood experience.

            He went to primary and secondary school in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, near the Manitoba border. After one year of university, he worked as a high-school English teacher in Birtle, Manitoba, during 1957-58, as a Saskatchewan government public assistance social worker during 1958-59, and as a radio copywriter, music and news announcer, and news editor for CFSL in Weyburn, CJME in Regina, and CKSW in Swift Current during 1959-60.

            In 1960, at the age of twenty-two, Newlove left the Prairies for the west coast. Although he often hitchhiked back and forth across the country, British Columbia was his home for the next ten years, except for a period on the opposite coast in Portuguese Cove, Nova Scotia. In Vancouver he befriended a number of artists: Brian Fisher, another émigré from Saskatchewan; Robert Reid; Takao Tanabe; and Roy Kiyooka. In the early years, Newlove dedicated himself to learning his craft and spent much of his time in the Vancouver Public Library, reading poetry, but also studying history and mythology, especially the history of the exploration of Canada. Although the Tish group of poets was busy at the University of British Columbia, and although he knew most of them and eventually had some poems published in Tish in 1963, Newlove was not a member of that group. Nevertheless, his early published poems indicate that he was learning from some of the masters as they were.

            In 1962 Reid and Tanabe privately published Newlove’s first collection, Grave Sirs, in a limited edition of three hundred copies, of which fewer than half were bound. Only a couple of its poems ever appeared in later Newlove collections, which is perhaps an indication of his own evaluation of this early work. In 1962, as well, Newlove’s poems began appearing in various little magazines. In the following years, his poems graced the pages of periodicals in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Almost all of them are remarkably good, and carefully crafted. It is obvious that Newlove served most of his apprenticeship in private, not attempting to publish until he was writing poems of high quality. As a result, he has little early published work to be ashamed of.

            In a profile in Books in Canada, Newlove talks about his first big break:

It’s such an accidental life. I’d been in few little mags in the early 1960s. What really set me off from small private-press books was that I was doing my laundry in a Laundromat on Fourth Avenue in Vancouver when George Bowering walked in to do his laundry and said there’s some guy out East named Colombo who ‘s putting together an anthology for Ryerson. Why don’t you send him some of your crap?

            So I did and he took 10 or 12, and he was then also connected with Tamarack so he took six or seven for Tamarack. You get into a few good magazines, an anthology or two, one full-size book, and suddenly you’re an “arrived” poet.[1]

 

The anthology was Poésie/Poetry ’64, and the poems included are still judged by some to be among his finest. Nineteen sixty-four was also the year Newlove was awarded his first Canada Council writing grant, a sign that his work was receiving critical attention.

            In 1966, he married Susan Mary Phillips, a graphic artist and professional organizer for the NDP, who had two children, Jeremy Charles and Tamsin Elizabeth, by a previous marriage. As his poetic reputation grew, Newlove came in contact with poets across Canada, including Al Purdy, who had become a McClelland and Stewart poet in 1965. In 1968 McClelland and Stewart published Newlove’s sixth collection, Black Night Window, and in 1970, The Cave. In 1970, as well, Newlove moved to Toronto and joined the publishing firm as a senior editor continuing in that position until 1974. In 1973, he won the Governor General’s Award for poetry for Lies (1972). In 1974 he became a writer-in-residence at Concordia University in Montreal, a sure sign of his eminence in Canadian literary circles. He followed that appointment with two more residencies, at the University of Western Ontario (1975-76) and at Massey College, University of Toronto (1976-77). In 1977 he was awarded a Senior Arts Grant from the Canada Council, and in the same year, McClelland and Stewart published The Fat Man: Selected Poems 1962-1972, a fitting summation of his extraordinary first decade as a published poet.

            In 1979, Newlove returned to Saskatchewan to take up the position of writer-in-residence at the Regina Public Library. He remained in Regina, where his wife worked for the NDP, until the summer of 1982, when he moved to Nelson, British Columbia, to take up a teaching position in the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. When the British Columbia government closed the writing program at David Thompson in the early 1980s, Newlove moved to Ottawa, where he works as an editor for the federal government.

            During the latter half of the 1970s, Newlove published little in comparison to his prolific first decade. One longer poem, “The Green Plain,” appeared in a privately printed volume, Dreams Surround Us, which he and John Metcalf produced in 1977. That year he also edited an anthology of verse, Canadian Poetry: The Modern Era, for McClelland and Stewart. He has continued to work as a free-lance editor, one of his projects being The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott (1981). In 1981 Oolichan Books published The Green Plain, and in 1986 ECW PRESS brought out The Night The Dog Smiled, his first collection of new poems since Lies. Newlove’s poetry is the work of a unique and significant voice in Canadian literature.

 

Tradition and Milieu

 

If ever there were a vexing problem, it is that of literary influence, and the old concept of “tracing influences” is simply inadequate to the labyrinthean reality of intertextuality, as it is now understood. Which is to say, perhaps, that “influence” is likely to occur in very roundabout ways. Thus, rather than a line of influence, we are far more likely to find a web of strange connections, via which certain techniques and concepts spread out among a whole group of writers.

            In reference to how he learned to write in a contemporary mode, Newlove says, “Basically, I began in ignorance and had to invent it all for myself” (Moritz, p. 11). This remark is a bit ingenuous, although his further comment that he “didn’t know at that time that Saskatchewan was not a fit subject for a poem in the common estimation” (Moritz, p. 11) is certainly to the point. Still, he undoubtedly read a lot of modern poetry in the Vancouver Public Library during his early apprentice days, and although Keats’s line “Ruth amid the alien corn”[2] impressed him in school, he obviously realized he must try for something equally striking but in a contemporary mode. Newlove has mentioned liking Browning and Tennyson, along with Keats. He also points to Robert Graves and Wallace Stevens, the latter of whose influence various critics have detected in his work. Finally, he says he has read and been influenced by “George Seferis in translation” during the late 1970s and early 1980s and did get a little Bliss Carman, “Archibald Lampman, who’s quite good really, and Robert Service, if he really is a Canadian writer,” in high school (Bartley, “Interview,” p. 137) Newlove’s comments are helpful but they do not really tell the whole story by any means.

            Newlove chose well when he went to Vancouver to apprentice at his chosen craft, for the early 1960s there was a time of great excitement. He was aware of his many talented contemporaries as well as such older poets as Irving Layton and Al Purdy. He can be located at a nexus of the twentieth-century intertextual web where the modernist poetics of Pound, the T.S. Eliot of The Waste Land, and William Carlos Williams, the most traditional lyricism of Wallace Stevens, and the postmodern experiments of the postwar generation of American and Canadian poets met and meshed for a number of young writers in the sixties. In terms of a personal tone, the importance of Williams, and later, Robert Creeley, is clear. Yet the austere perfectionism of poetic syntax in Stevens also attracted the young writer. Moreover, although his philosophical stance is often opposed to Eliot, Newlove obviously loved some of that poet’s cadences, for they can be heard behind his own, especially in parts of “The Pride.”

            What does this all mean? Nothing more than that Newlove was alert to some of the most powerful and stimulating poetic signals “in the air” around him as he began to write. With an exquisite ear for sound and rhythm, he quickly developed his own voice, but, as is the case with all young writers, he took what he needed from wherever he heard it. Purdy’s brash and homey garrulousness is picked up in such “letter” poems as “Dear Al” and “Letter Two” because it fits. These poems do not sound like Purdy—Newlove’s personality is too strong for that to happen—but they definitely acknowledge his presence as a new master in Canadian poetry.

            Newlove very quickly became a master in his own right, influencing younger writers in his turn. Yet, because he belongs to the largest most powerful poetic generation yet in Canada, he has had few obvious imitators. His achievement, along with those of such fellow luminaries as Robert Kroetsch and Eli Mandel, undoubtedly helped to make possible the explosion of Prairie poetry, yet his classical purity of form has had less effect on the formal qualities of Prairie anecdotal poetry than has Purdy’s easy colloquial storytelling style. Nevertheless, Newlove is recognized by many writers as a “source,” someone whose command of rhythm and tone taught them much about the formal possibilities of open verse. Certain of his poems—“Ride Off Any Horizon,” “The Pride,” “Verigin, Moving in Alone,” “The Flowers,” “The Double-Headed Snake,” and “Crazy Riel,” to name but a few of the best-known, most anthologized poems—are loci classici for the generation of poets who came to prominence in the 1980s. Newlove’s technical mastery is one of his greatest gifts, especially to his fellow poets, and it will continue to influence younger writers who care about form.

 

Critical Overview and Context

 

Newlove started writing quite late, after leaving high school and going to work. He says he began accidentally:

 

I can’t remember the real first attempts or anything. One day, in Regina, I remember sitting at my desk, writing what I guess was an imitation of “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird.” I know I tried a few other things earlier that year, but I can’t really remember when or why I started writing them down. (Bartley, “Interview,” p. 141)

 

Nevertheless, he matured into a poet whose work caught the attention of editors and critics more quickly than most. His poems began to appear in periodicals in 1962,and his first two small-press pamphlets were published in 1962 and 1963. When Colombo featured his work in Poésie/Poetry ’64 and The Tamarack Review, he was on his way to recognition. Thus the publication of his first book, Moving In Alone, in 1965 was met with serious reviews, of which the most important was D.G. Jones’s review article in Quarry. Jones precisely discriminates the precise discriminations of Newlove’s poetry, and in so doing, lays the ground for much later criticism. After pointing out that these “personal, autobiographical, confessional” short pieces “are not lyrics” but “are essentially dramatic, querulous, analytical,” Jones further remarks on how they “avoid” mythic and literary allusion, “resist” the usual tropes, and instead, “rely on statement.” He sees an almost puritanical desire to falsify nothing, to discriminate, to be honest with oneself.”[3] Quoting some of the major poems in the collection, Jones offers brief insights into them and begins to map the concerns of the whole book. He suggests that when “discrimination fails, and when self-contradiction fails, there is always silence, a kind of dumb-pointing.” adding that “silence is also significant, allowing the world to make itself heard” (p. 14). Jones then moves beyond a number of later critics to see the positive side of what many infer is an utterly despairing poetic vision: “And here lies the wisdom of these poems: the simple fact of things, that they exist and endure, is beautiful and terrible, and to be embraced in their beauty and terror” (p. 15). Jones does not try to argue that Newlove’s visions are not often hellish, but he insists that a trace or two of heaven is usually present as well, if only by negative implication. Where most reviewers recognized the technical quality of Newlove’s poems but also found his vision exclusively pessimistic, Jones perceived the great range of his work, something he would argue further in Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970).

            Both Butterfly on Rock and my 1972 article, “The Search for Roots: A Meditative Sermon of Sorts,” discuss Newlove’s poem “The Pride” as a paradigmatic work. In his Introduction Jones uses quotations from “The Pride” to buttress his arguments that the poetic imagination has firmly claimed Canadian space for its people. Similarly, my essay explores the then-recent upsurge of poems about the native and immigrant past, suggesting that poems like “the Pride,” “Ride Off Any Horizon,” and “Crazy Riel” are exemplary efforts of that poetic, imaginative, claiming.

            Of course, Jones does not simply use one of Newlove’s poems to support the basic argument of his study of themes in Canadian literature; in his final chapter, “An Ancient Slang or a Modern,” he analyzes a number of Newlove’s poems, and, as he did in his review of Moving In Alone, he makes a number of suggestive comments about Newlove’s deceptive “simplicity” of language. He says of  “At This Time,” that though the scene is not too violent, “…it is part of the crude actuality of place, the isolated moment of experience that the speaker refuses to gloss or distort by referring it to some social or moral or metaphysical idea.”[4] Though there may be some irony in the tone, the poem basically speaks of immediate experience as it is, refusing “to betray” it “by some imposing comparison.” Jones points to the influence of William Carlos Williams’ poetic on a number of Canadian poets, and quite rightly argues that the Canadians share “a common conviction” with Williams and others of a real need “to explore and articulate those aspects of their experience that are ignored or denied or simply distorted by the traditional matrix of language.” Newlove, then, is one of the poets who is still building on the Imagist program, seeking to ”present an image, the thing in itself; [to] use rhythms that correspond to the emotion felt, the rhythms especially of actual speech” (p. 168). Indeed, Jones clearly identifies the importance of tone of voice in Newlove’s poetry, and he goes on to suggest that Newlove’s continual talking is “his way of taking possession of his world in all its immediacy” (p. 169). Later, Jones suggests that Newlove struggles to recollect the roots of his existence as vital “despite [his past’s] banality, its occasional violence, its incoherence” (p. 172). In the larger context of his study, Jones sees Newlove not as a simple harbinger of despair but as one of the poets who are “concerned with digesting…desolation and affirming the world despite it” (p. 176). Jones is one of the few early critics of Newlove’s work to argue that his vision, although unsentimental and often desolate, is not one of unmitigated despair.

            In 1972 Margaret Atwood wrote “How Do I Get Out Of Here: The Poetry of John Newlove” and also included Newlove among the “elect” of Canadian literature in her Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Much of what Atwood has to say about Newlove’s poetry is valuable, but it should be noted that, as is the case with many other poet-critics, Atwood’s analyses apply to her own work as much as, if not more than, they do to the works of the writers she is ostensibly studying. Thus when, in her essay, she argues that Newlove’s poetry is obsessed with corners and that “…for him it’s a life-and-death obsession,”[5] we should recognize that she is pointing out a very real aspect of Newlove’s poetry but also ignoring other traits that simply do not interest her.

            For Atwood, Newlove’s corner is  “the world he is stuck in” (p. 59), and it is a bleak place, indeed: there nature is ugly and frightening, animals are terrifying or dead; people are equally destructive of one another; death lurks in every encounter, waiting to spring its trap. “What kind of life is possible for the individual—as man, lover, poet—in such a universe?” asks Atwood, and answers, “Not…a very enjoyable one,” in which the typical stances “are revulsion, guilt, fright and paralysis” (p. 61). Success “is a position he must almost by definition—self-definition—reject. He is a loser and his proper study is loss” (p. 63). The Newlove persona, as Atwood sees him, is “a paralytic or a transient” when alone, and “a treacherous friend” or incapacitated lover when with others. He is often wistfully sad about this, and he attempts against all the odds, which include the ways in which language itself can lie, to at least be honest about it all: “…the concept of truth, the truth, is perhaps the only piece of firm ground he has to build on” (p. 64).

            Because Newlove must believe in the possibility of truth, he is all the more distrustful of the language in which lies can be told. This distrust accounts for the bare-bones quality of his poetry, his and its refusal of the usual rhetorical tropes. But, if lies are ever-present, even in poems, why write at all? This nadir of hope is also the point at which a “beginning of the way out” (p. 65) can also be found. Although she concentrated on what she believes is the majority of Newlove’s poems, which are despairing, Atwood indicates that there are a few in which “… the encounter with the outside world through words, the externalization and transcendence of the self becomes possible” (p. 66). She points to the poems “in which the function of the poet is seen as praise, though it must be a praise based on the truth” (pp. 66-67). Yet although she mentions some of these poems—“The Singing Head,” “The Double-Headed Snake,” “The Flowers,” “for Judith, Now About 10 Years Old” “Samuel Hearne in Wintertime,” and “The Fat Man,” among others—her much stronger and longer concentration on the poems that reflect the desperation and even despair sounded by her title leaves the impression that Newlove’s work is essentially bleak and harsh. By refusing to talk about Newlove’s “craftsmanship,” she manages to ignore many of the means by which he creates an almost comic energy of performance even in his darker poems. Nevertheless, Atwood’s essay remains an important and influential introduction to his work.

            Atwood’s essay is the locus classicus for those who perceive Newlove as a poet of despair, but  she is not alone. Many of the reviews of Black Night Window, The Cave, and Lies emphasize the bleakness of his vision, as Purdy’s statement that “Newlove is allied to all the verse pessimists who ever lived”[6] demonstrates. One review of Lies that digs much deeper into the complexities of that book is Bowering’s “Where Does The Truth Lie,” which argues that “Newlove has…removed himself as subject or observer, to give you despair and pity for the world, and he isn’t blaming his father. Somebody had to get our poetry over that obstacle, and wouldn’t you just know it would be him?”[7]In the Fall 1974 issue of Open Letter, Jan Bartley published a long essay, “Something in Which to Believe for Once: The Poetry of John Newlove,” which argued, pace Atwood and others, that Newlove’s poetry is more complex than these critics have allowed, that “the perseverance of Newlove at least equals his pessimism,” and that his “work can be read as a mixture of positives and negatives” written by a “vulnerable explorer who is often uncomfortably accurate.”[8]

            Although she deals with all the major books published before 1974, Bartley concentrates on the two most recent ones, The Cave and Lies. She begins, however, with readings of some of the historico-geographical poems of Black Night Window, especially “The Pride,” which she finds ambitious but finally unsuccessful. She notes, however, that “the search motif [in “The Pride”] is strongly established and it is not the role of explorer which changes but rather the nature of his discoveries” (p. 23). Bartley goes on to begin the necessary examination of how Newlove articulates the poetic act of exploration; that is, she pays attention to his technique and to his always “finely crafted expression” (p. 24) of mood and states of mind.

            Bartley does not ignore the often devastating clarity of Newlove’s unblinking vision, as her discussion of The Cave shows. Her analysis of “The Engine and The Sea” as repudiation of the stance he attempted in “The Pride” allows for all the despair the later poem contains, but her reading of the rest of the book, argues that Newlove’s comic sense of timing, his compassion, and his exact, though often non-“poetic” vocabulary work to complicate the tone and outlook of the whole. “Throughout his work there is a larger difference between the terms disappointment and defeat than most critics would acknowledge,” she laconically observes, noting as well how often Newlove “sees despair itself as a personal indulgence” (p. 29). The love poems intrigue her in their insistence on facing the culpabilities of self, on not simply blaming the other, and on continuing to seek hope and happiness despite their elusiveness.

            In her reading of Lies, Bartley suggests that “the challenge but also part of the fun of Lies comes from allowing the ambiguities and puns of the poet to work” (p. 38) Few critics have used the word “fun” when describing their experience of reading Newlove’s poetry, yet it is, I think, accurate. Even when, as in “Like A River,” Newlove savagely exposes modern humanity’s aimless spiritual wandering, he performs his craft with such intense delight in that performance that the reader is drawn into a complex response in which his angry sadness at the argument of the poem is juxtaposed to a kind of joy at how Newlove is once again bringing his magic to bear. Bartley is fully aware of the negative aspects of the poems of Lies, but as her reading of the centrally important “Notes from and among the Wars” reveals, she is sensitive to the whole range of Newlove’s “fluctuating moods…in his constant exploration of society and his relation to the cosmos” (p. 45). “Throughout Lies,” she points out, “Newlove despairs of language but refuses to abandon it” (p. 46). Moreover, the final poem of the book insists on making “a positive statement”: “The title ‘That There Is No Relaxation’ echoes the sense of perseverance in the line ‘A little more and a little more’ which is repeated four times. Speaking in rapid terse sentences Newlove reveals his fear of possible defeat but also his determination” to keep exploring, seeking, writing poems (p. 47). Because she has critically registered something of the full complexity of Newlove’s poetic, Bartley has written one of the best essays on his work.

            In “Newlove: Poet Of Appearance” Brian Henderson suggests that, for Newlove, “things or events themselves are only manifestations, mere appearances” as are the words that attempt to represent them. “We live in a world of harsh phenomena. It is, in Kant’s terminology, only the neumena which are true. How do we get at them? Newlove’s answer: by negatives. We discard what is untrue by a process of elimination, a kind of Gnostic path to knowledge.”[9]    As Henderson sees it, Newlove profoundly distrusts appearances, especially the appearances of art, of poetry itself; yet he also desires perfection. “It is one of the tensions which make his poems work. He must continually temper his Romantic desire for the world to be a place for hero’s with irony and the smell of the real appearances of things…” (p.10).

            Henderson sees Newlove’s appropriation of colloquial language as an important tactic of Romantic temperance. Moreover, “because of his great distrust of language Newlove eschews metaphor. Metaphors are especially lies. A thing is what it is, not some other thing” (p.11). This is perhaps too categorical; one wants to know what it means when Newlove does allow a simile or a metaphor to surface in certain poems. At any rate, Henderson perceives in Newlove a disappointment in the lies of appearance, but a recognition that the disappointment is also a lie. If Newlove is akin to Stevens in some of his poetic philosophizing, he also appears to accept Williams’ famous dictum “No ideas but in things,” which leads to “a poetry of tentative acceptance by refusal” (p.12). And one aspect of refusal is the fragmentation of form, while another is the seeking of structure through “sound association and suggestion.” Despite certain “gnostic” perceptions, Newlove joins Stevens in finding reality “the only thing we can know, even if (unlike Stevens) it is not the perfection sought” (p.13). Therefore, he will, as he says, “swallow it whole and be strong.”[10] Again, like Williams, Newlove seeks an “intensely felt language where words occupy right spaces in a ‘vulgar’ phrasing and rhythm” (p.14).

            After pointing out that “because of its fragmented nature, a Newlove poem is a concentration of attention rather than an artifact; it is a process of adaptation as opposed to a symmetrical product” (p.14), Henderson begins a series evaluative commentaries on specific poems. These are interesting, if open to argument. Although his essay is often as fragmentary in construction as the poetry it seeks to discuss, Henderson nevertheless offers challenging arguments concerning Newlove’s poetic and intriguing comments on individual poems.

            A more deliberately fragmented essay is my “John Newlove: More Than Just Honest To Spare; Some Further Approaches, “ in which I argue, as I will hear, that the energy of Newlove’s performance positively cancels the often negative “content” of his poems. The essay also offers readings of poems ignored by other critics, such as the clearly comic “letter” poems and the specifically Heraclitean poems which begin with quotation with that philosopher of process.[11] The essay does not seek to deny such earlier critics as Frank Davey (who says in his short essay “John Newlove” that Newlove’s work “displays a self-loathing only slightly less strong than his loathing for the human race and its wretched and treacherous planet”[12] and Atwood, but rather to augment their views with some glimpses of the more positive, even “comic,” vision of Newlove’s work.

            Bowering’s essay “The Poetry of John Newlove” in A Way With Words is a revised and expanded version of his perceptive review of Lies, already mentioned. He, too, sees the black comic aspects of Newlove’s poetic, as well as the maturing of Newlove’s vision until, in Lies, it achieves an impersonal distance which is all the more haunting for its refusal of self-pity and the confessional mode, that is, for its insistence on a large historical perspective rather than a limited, lyric (that is, too subjective) one. In this larger essay, Bowering also argues the value of the earlier realistic poems and offers a (more than usually) sympathetic reading of “The Pride,” which he finds is “arguably the most momentous poem written by anyone in [Newlove’s] generation”[13] and analogous, in its attempt to deal with our true history, to Williams’ In The American Grain.

            This is also the view of Susan Wood in her “Participation in the Past: John Newlove and ‘The Pride,’” in which she argues that this poem “offers a clear account, even in its failures, of [the] quest for a personal, living sense of an identity based on awareness of the past.”[14] Wood offers a close reading of the poem from this historical perspective, one which adds greatly to our understanding of the changing viewpoint of the narrative voice and the narrator’s increasingly personal encounter with the past he seeks to know. She is moved by the incantatory power of the poem yet cannot “ignore the reality [Newlove] depicts” in other poems, with their “dead Indians, dead settlers’…and a present in which the Indians, isolated from the white crowds on the small town’s sidewalks, ‘play pool: eye on the ball.’”[15] In this, she appears to agree with Newlove, who has written only one “The Pride” but many of the other kind of poem.

            Possibly because Newlove did not publish any new books for almost ten years, criticism of his poetry fell off during the 1980s. W.J. Keith, in his Canadian Literature in English, suggests that all Newlove’s poems “are united…by the theme of discovery within history”[16] and adds that in his work, “we can watch items from the Canadian past forming themselves into a coherent tradition” (p. 10).  He suggests that Newlove’s material is so fascinating and so important that it is easy to overlook his considerable technical expertise,” adding that “throughout his work, and especially in the historical poems, he shows an extraordinary capacity to produce the memorable and resonant statement” (p. 110).

            E.F. Dyck’s 1989 article, “Place in the Poetry of John Newlove,” brings a rhetorical perspective to the study of Newlove’s poetry, arguing “that place in prairie poetry (represented by the work of John Newlove) is a topos of invention of both argument and style (figure).[17] Invoking the grand traditions and the tools of rhetorical analysis, Dyck applies them to Newlove’s oeuvre and to readings of particular poems in order to demonstrate “that Newlove is a prairie poet in a rhetorical sense” (p. 74). His insights are especially helpful in his readings of three major poems. “Ride Off Any Horizon” is analyzed at length in terms of its “employment of the large trope of irony (including, as it does, a continuing doubleness and duplicity)” (p. 76). Dyck’s readings of this poem, “The Double-Headed Snake,” and “The Pride” are full of insights and particular discriminations, and they earn the attention of any critical reader of Newlove’s poetry. He is especially interesting on the flaws of “The Pride.”

            Dyck also offers a lengthy and rewarding analysis of The Green Plain, Newlove’s “master prairie-poem” (p. 84). He contrasts it with The Waste Land, “whose title it parodies. Whereas Eliot celebrated (in a mournful way) loss, Newlove celebrates (in a mournful way) recovery; where The Waste Land marked an apogee of poetic despair, The Green Plain marks a perigee of muted hope” (pp. 84-85). Dyck shows how The Green Plain reinterprets much of what has come before, both in Newlove’s and others’ works” (p. 85), and argues that its conclusion moves beyond modernistic despair to resolve itself in the image of a tree in a fruitful plain. The old centre (Yeats) has not held: Newlove’s centre is not an attempted recovery (like Eliot’s) of the old images now lying about in ruins; Newlove’s centre is the imagination (p. 87). Dyck’s essay is valuable precisely because it demonstrates how different approaches can add to our understanding of Newlove’s poetry.

            As this brief overview of the criticism (which ignores, perforce, many intelligent review articles) shows, Newlove’s poetry has fascinated and provoked critical engagement from the beginning. The fact of the critical response is one more testimony to the power of the poetry.

 

Newlove’s Works

 

In 1962 Robert Reid and Takao Tanabe printed three hundred copies of Grave Sirs in Vancouver. Only about half of these were bound, and if Newlove’s note in my copy, which adjures me “not to mention it,” is any sign, he now wishes it were beyond critical recall. In this Newlove is being a bit unfair to his younger self though living up to his reputation for tough self-criticism. Although the poems of Grave Sirs are no match for his later work, they are nothing for a twenty-four-year-old author to be ashamed of. Indeed they begin to explore themes that will haunt his later work, while their variety signals a writer capable of many poses and voices.

            One obvious reason the older Newlove disdains this book is that the poems lack consistency of technique: the young poet is still finding his way in his craft, and some of his derivative experiments do not quite work. These poems also contain more tropes than he would later allow in his work. Yet the first poem, “Already the Lies,” which contains a simile of some subtlety—“Already the lies being to quiver like lizards / in my head,”[18] which suggests that like the changing colours of a chameleon the lies are a form of camouflage—looks forward to Lies (1972) in its view of lying as inevitable yet as something to be fought against. This bleak little speech is followed by the lightly comic “Poem for a Friend,” which celebrates in somewhat pretentious archaisms the human capacity to enjoy the world as it is. Other poems reveal other themes he will explore in greater depth later. These are obvious practice pieces, and that is finally, how best to describe the whole small book.

            Elephants, Mothers and Others (1963), although still clearly an apprentice effort, offers convincing evidence from a very early stage of his career that Newlove is a poet of many voices, speaking in a wide range of moods—self-pitying, nostalgic, sardonic, celebratory, lustful, sad, happy, bitter, accepting, ecstatic even—and a variety of complex and subtle tones. Naturally, his control of the various possibilities within that range will increase as he matures, but the variety of these poems is itself a sign that the poet is far more complex than many of his critics have allowed.

            Newlove calls himself “a comedian” (Moritz, p. 9), and it is a useful categorization, reminding us that if he is often grittily and even savagely realistic about people’s lives, he nevertheless writes as a student of the human comedy. Some of his work is not funny at all, some approaches slapstick tragedy, but much of it, even when the vision it articulates is very black indeed, is full of wit and a comic energy of affirmation that cannot be denied. The poems of Elephants, Mothers and Others, even when they are still apprentice pieces, cover a lot of poetic territory, and some of them have warranted reprinting in later collections.

            The first one, “The End Justifies The Means,” is one such poem, and an early example of how Newlove finds pretexts for poems in earlier, and in this case well-known statements. In fact, he denies the famous aphorism, and by playing with its terms, shows why:

 

The end does not

justify the means, there is no end.

The means are not justified or

unjustified, they exist.[19]

 

“Means” becomes “meanings,” and then “meanness,” and these are neither “justified” nor “unjustified,” but simply “…exist / in  you” and finally “…go round you, to no end.” In its plain speech and its subtle play with syntax and meaning, this poem exemplifies Newlove’s maturing poetic.

            The second poem, “The Photograph My Mother Keeps,” explores a subject Newlove will return to often: his memories of boyhood in Veregin, the whole problem of roots in a specific social place. The paradox he will grapple with again is that “no part of that me remains” except “The photograph my mother keeps / in her mind…” (note Newlove’s perfect control of the line-break here); yet he is forced to ask—not answer—“and what have I got to do with myself / of that time and place, / except that I am still the same person?” (No. 2). So the pattern of escape/no escape is established here, though it will be explored in greater detail in later poems.

            “The Arrival” is a brilliantly controlled example of open verse, as Phyllis Webb’s careful reading of its line-break shows.[20] It is also a good example of Newlove’s open-eyed recognition, if not quite acceptance, of all that surrounds him in the world: the cleansing ocean, “the sun / just setting,” and “…the sea-going garbage / of civilization …” which too-fat gulls gorge themselves on. Despite finding himself “…noting / as if they were trivia” the birds and garbage, he concludes with pleasure:

 

and noting the trees whitely flowering

took off my clothes and calmly bathed.

(No. 3)

 

Although aware of the signs of civilization’s decay, he nevertheless sings exuberantly of his delight in having arrived where he can bathe in the midst of beauty. Even though the tone of this poem is not present in Newlove’s other work as often as the more recognized tone of despair, it is certainly undeniable when articulated as clearly as it is here. Thus it is interesting to note that the title of the next poem, “On Her Long Bed of Night,” sets up bleakly romantic expectations which the poem subverts at every turn. Indeed, this witty and intelligent series of descriptions slides easily among various perceptions to argue through them that the colloquial phrase “no matter” is the matter of the poem. Like “The Arrival,” this poem demonstrates Newlove’s increasing technical mastery; when at the end of part 3, the speaker says “nothing urgent here,” we believe him because the rhythm says it too. Although the poem appears to be an objective description, the final section shows how compassionately present to the woman the speaker is:

 

Not my child

Nothing of me

in this fragile blonde girl

 

I wish it were but it doesn’t matter

it never matters

                        thinking myself

how lovely & lonely her thin face is

she on the bed fallen & me in the chair

(No. 4)

 

Of course, it all matters; otherwise it would not be the matter of the poem, which is precisely the “thinking myself” into a sense of communion, community, with this woman, his friend.

            As these analyses show, Newlove is already, in his second small collection, writing subtle poems. Of the rest, some demand attention, including “My Daddy Drowned” (No. 6), a brilliantly ambiguous exploration of the potential psychological cruelty involved in the art of writing in which the tone never allows the speaker off the hook but grants him an awareness both frightening and almost comic in its refusal to evade the truth about the self. “Verigin” (No. 8) is a poem about roots and routes of ancestry, and the duplicity involved because ancestry begins in a double (mother/father) and keeps doubling further, the further back you go. Along with “Veregin III” (No. 14) and its boyhood memories, this poem points towards the next book. “Arrogant, Unkind” is the first of many of such poems of self-accusation, yet the speaker’s request that his friends “be with [him] a little longer, / though [he] can offer no promise of change” (No. 9) suggests a human desire to overcome alienation no matter what its circumstances.

            “Before the Big Bend Highway” (No 11) and “Not Moving” (No. 12) are poems of the road and the ironies of the travelling life. They are contemporary hobo poems: no longer able to ride the rails, the new traveller hitchhikes and meets a “mad old man” who insists his guest read “Ezekiel to him, Ezekiel / whom he loved, Ezekiel who prophesied, / he said, The End of The World” (No. 11), or who crouches, “smoking / nervously / at midnight / 100 miles / to go // & cold / & afraid / on the side of the road // the only animal // not moving / at all” (No. 12). This is another theme Newlove will explore in greater detail in Black Night Window.

            “Funeral,” with its rhythmic re-presentation of the voice of “my / mother that is, or  / whoever you like…,” might be an explanation for these close, tight-lipped, contained poems: “Don’t / cry, don’t show anything, don’t / don’t let them see it,” she says, and “…Don’t expose yourself, / don’t let them laugh.” The poem’s power derives from Newlove’s ability to catch precisely the tone of these adjurations while allowing other possibilities their place: “(and what my uncle said is / a different matter)” (No. 17). “For My Friends, Obscurely” is a toughly comic statement of purpose, which begins by refusing the literary romanticizing of such poems as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127, in order to attempt something apparently more ordinary:

 

I will praise my friends

telling such lies about them

that you will never believe the truth.

 

Better for you.

(No. 19)

 

In its concern with lying, and the possible dangers of “truth” (or is it just “fact”?), this short poem sounds a major theme of Newlove’s work. “Smelling Your Blood” (No. 21), with its insistence on the many dangers of life and its freewheeling process of association also looks toward later poems on the same subject. Full of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable, questions, it artfully mimes the way in which we think about our friends.

            “J.S. Bach” is worth noting only because it seems to be something of a sport in Newlove’s work. It is easy to see why the poet would admire Bach’s kind of perfect music, but he chooses to praise it in a highly romantic, hortative language. The poet asks this “beautiful music” to “halt my nervous stammering” (No. 22) and then concludes with a fine, if somewhat overwrought, epic simile. Against this, the cool humour and sense of process of “White Cat V” (No. 25) is much more what we associate with the Newlove poem. Once again, as in “Funeral,” Newlove’s line-breaks provide the sensation of the talk he is recording and allow it to open up beyond the ostensible subject, the possibly sick cat. “Elephants” (No. 26) is a joke, no more, but perhaps important because it reminds us that Newlove is capable of one-liners just like everybody else.

If, despite its individually successful poems, Elephants, Mothers and Others is still an apprentice effort, Moving in Alone (1965) clearly establishes Newlove as one of the most important poets of his generation. Newlove offers a clue about the poems of his major books in the interview with A.F. Moritz, who suggests that Newlove “seems to construct a book in the same way as he constructs an individual poem” (Moritz, p. 11). Newlove’s own comments are helpful here: “History in Moving In Alone is very local, it comes from a very small area. Toward the end of Lies, it deliberately tries to encompass both world and time” (Moritz, p. 11). Indeed, these deliberately shaped volumes map a shift in focus from personal history (Moving in Alone), through Canadian history and North American history (Black Night Window and The Cave), to world history (Lies), and then, perhaps, to a kind of cosmology (The Night The Dog Smiled). Within each of these books, there are many other threads—the personal and the philosophical, especially—but the sense of expanding historical vision is undeniable.

The first few poems of Moving in Alone are personal and contemporary—poems of desire and loss—but they are also parts of a mosaic in which the attitudes struck in the present are rooted in the life of childhood, which is remembered so vividly in the title poem and others. Still, what first strikes the reader of these poems is their almost visceral immediacy of voice, how they speak directly to various audiences, which overlap and always include, at some level, that reader. They are arguments, exhortations, explanations, attempts to fill in the gaps. Equally, they are carefully crafted poems, examples of how rhythm, sound, tone, and invention cohere to form a shaped articulation of human possibility.

“With Whom Should I Associate,” the first poem, is based, Newlove says, on a “quotation by Confucius about desire” (Bartley, “Interview,” p. 146). The speaker says he will associate with “suffering men”:

 

                                …For all men

who desire, suffer; and my desires

are too great for me to hold to

alone…

(p. 9)

 

It seems, in fact, that people suffer from desire, which is why the speaker seeks the company of others—or, more important, their acknowledgement—for he realizes that “the greater their desires, / the more they understand of me” (p. 9). Desire is a condition of being human, and so, in the following gentle poem of outlawry, “Then, If I Cease Desiring,” he celebrates “how young [he] was,” and the “famous moments” of youthful desire. He does not wish to “cease desiring,” but rather to keep moving, not fall into a stasis of living. The final stanza is quietly affirmative:

 

You may allow me moments,

not monuments, I being

content. It is little,

but it is little enough.

(p. 10)[21]

 

The ambiguity here is instructive: many readers respond to his work in terms of how “little” is allowed him, but I feel that his placement of “enough” as the final word in the poem supports his earlier statement of contentment. At least there are “moments” of contentment to balance all the other moments of “suffering.”

            One kind of suffering is intimately connected to sexual desire, and the next few poems lyrically explore its variations. Such “blues” songs of the pain of love belong to an ancient and conventional tradition, and it seems natural that a young poet would try his hand at the mode. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Newlove renews tradition through his uncompromisingly austere poetic: the plain idiom, the refusal of conventional tropes, and the mastery of open verse combine to create great emotional intensity. The poems concern loss, how desire is not enough when its objects are the wrong people, at the wrong time, and anyway, as Newlove says in “She Reaches Out,” the other is always “someone else” (p. 11)—there is always some degree of alienation, despite all attempts to reach out and break down, or through the barriers that inevitably separate people.

            Newlove’s famous mask of self-pity hovers over these poems. The four “songs” in “No Use Saying to Whom” modulate from third to second person, each shift directed by increasing passion. the final couplet, almost repeating the first, focuses the pain: “No use saying to whom these / songs are addressed; you know” (p. 12). Illicit love, a grand theme of lyric poetry from the troubadours to country and western singers, is given a new twist in “Nothing Is To Be Said,” where the physical crashes into the poem—“Your tongue thrusts into my mouth / violently and I am lost”—and leads to the persona’s recognition that “I am criminality, there is / nothing I dare do.” But it is the comedian who provides the antiromantic turn of the final stanza:

 

Ah, I can’t go home

and make love to her either,

pretending it’s you.

(p. 13)

 

This is definitely not the standard lover’s plaint! Yet it realistically makes new a usually ignored aspect of illicit romance. Newlove’s speakers find themselves unloved though still loving; they feel sorry for themselves; they are forced to recognize kindness where they thought to see love (“You Can See” [p. 16] and “This Is the Song” [p. 17]); they are stupid and wily and awkward and afraid—both of love and of the lack of love—and they are very human, their speeches striking us as truthful to the possibilities of the moment and the person. There is a charming ingenuousness to the confession of faults in “This Is the Song”:

 

The foolish playing at love

that comes upon me when

someone is kind (or I am

suckered in again) or just

any stupid prettiness

confronts my young lust

disenables me too, deceiving

as I use it on myself

(p. 17)

 

Newlove’s control of the line precisely focuses the shifts of feeling: “someone is kind” or he is, but then the next line’s shockingly comic colloquial self-accusation is balanced by the possibility of justice in “or just” which, until the syntax of the next line makes it an adjective, is a predicate noun in conjunction with “kind.” This balancing of syntax and line subverts a simple reading throughout the stanza, creating a duplicity of statement, and therefore of implied motive in the speaker, which fully supports his later claim that he is “wilier than the fox” when describing “the holes in” himself “as if truth were a virtue” (p. 17). And just what are we to make of that denouement? He has “truthfully” displayed his faults; is he virtuous?

            These are lyrics—they offer momentary glimpses of emotions in action. A quick study of despair is simply that: the articulation of that moment’s feeling, and good or poor insofar as it captures the feeling or not. “Seeing Me Dazed” catches its speaker at a low point and makes us feel his “numb mind” as it “shuffles / through its depression” (p. 22). This phrase is, by the way, a good example of how Newlove does imply metaphor through minimal means: the verb “shuffle” combined with “depression” conjures up a hospital—the numb patient moving slowly through antiseptic corridors—and a breadline—the down-and-outer seeking some small handout—or it simply strikes the reader as a poignantly precise term for the feeling being described.

            Love can lead to anger, too, as the savagely witty “Love Letter” demonstrates. This poem is almost totally tone, and the tone is almost wholly a function of the prosody, how the line and stanza breaks play against the syntax to create surprises and angry jokes, of which the most cynical and painful is the final word, which is only there, we realize, because it is the conventional closing of a love letter. Yet the solitary word “love” (p. 24) followed by a period is simultaneously a denial of what it signifies and an affirmation: that is, so much anger must have a source. The poem is comic, but it is an example of the “laughing to keep from crying” school of humour.

            “Four Small Scars” is specifically a poem about signs and how they can be so easily misread. Again, Newlove’s control of line and syntax creates a profoundly complex statement out of simple language. It is a good example of what contemporary poets mean when they insist that a poem means exactly what it says. Although the poem reads almost like a syllogism, the logic it upholds is the logic of emotion, where the insistence that some mistakenly call one thing by another’s name slides into an admission that anger and love, say, cannot always be told apart; indeed they often join: one scar

 

is  token of my imprecision,

of my own carving, my anger and my love.

(p.25)

 

And that “imprecision,” is placed as it is for greater emphasis, becomes the human factor that makes differentiation so difficult.

            Phyllis Webb quotes Robert Duncan on the “candor” of the short line,[22] a candour which can be felt in Newlove’s  “You Know”:

 

You know I can’t talk

When all that goes on.

 

Would you have me lie

to please you?

 

I cannot lie. I would

to please you.

(p. 27)

 

Addressed to a personal “you,” this also addresses the poet’s readers. Apparently lacking any context, the poem actually has many. The “all that goes on” partly refers to the previous poems of love, lust and loss, but it also points to the world of normal affairs in which each reader lives. And although the lover/poet would like to lie “to please you,” he “cannot.” This is the bedrock of Newlove’s poetic. Nevertheless, as many of his poems will demonstrate, he does not lack imagination, nor the ability to perceive a situation pitilessly and compassionately, in recognition of its human truths.

            Webb adds that the short line can also signal “terror,” [23] and this is certainly true of the outrageous comedy of terror and errors that is “The First Time.” Again the syntax and prosody push the poem through its human manipulations to its final moment of fear and refusal, a refusal manifested here, as in other poems, other situations, by the speaker’s thinking himself away from the moment and its implications:

 

Oh, she said, oh that was

good, was it good for you?

And oh I said yes, trying to think

of anything else at all.

(p. 28)

 

            “Lynn Valley: Depression” is a kind of first take on many of the poems in the later Black Night Window, including the title poem, but where they eschew all but the perceivable facts, this poem is garrulous and personal, a kind of runaway monologue filled with “the creature noise.”[24] The poem is a horribly funny example of “a literary creation of myself” (p. 32) as a voice whose mesmerizing power has nothing to do with whether or not “…you think / I mean something (no / the fact is that I am more enamoured / of the act of writing than of the act of meaning // (or being))” (p. 31), but is dependent upon shifts of tone to compel our attention, such shifts within, and between poems as the rest of the book displays. “For Judith, Now about 10 Years Old,” is a deservedly famous example of Newlove’s capacity for candour and compassion. The short lines here mime the hesitancy of the act of remembering with such specificity the awful facts of “the scalding water” and “the smell of it, // the smell you had” (pp. 34-35). Yet the poem’s refusal to elaborate on the facts is precisely what signals its empathy with its subject. “Eight Dollars Will Do It” (p. 38), a short narrative about economic necessity, also refuses to elaborate upon the specifics of an event. But here the final line opens up possibilities the rest of the poem avoided, as it had to. On the facing page, “Stay In This Room” looks at poetry-making as a kind of vampirism and recalls “My Daddy Drowned” (in Elephants, Mothers, and Others). The poem seems to be addressed to both a muse figure and the audience, yet, unlike a normal love poem, it speaks in desperate need and makes extreme demands. Indeed the tone throughout is one of insistent demand: “stay in this poem, stay with me!” (p. 39).

            Full of tension and barely suppressed fear and rage, “The Flower” stands with Newlove’s finest work. A story of pain, told in pain, it provides a perfect example of how Newlove works with perspective in his narratives of character: the poem begins with controlled description from a distance and then moves into a kind of involvement that implicates both poet and reader. The first stanza is suspenseful because suspended; we do not know why the speaker attends to the rain, the buzzing clock, nor why, in stanza 2, he describes a fertility frightening in its intensity. Something is going to happen, but what? Stanza 3 further defines a setting and its alienated observer, increasing the tension with its subtle hint that we might share with the speaker the nature of interlopers but refusing to say why. Why is the world, the sudden contingent violence of the fourth stanza which creates a new victim so quickly, “…wrecking his face, his head, / poor hit hurt head” (p. 41)? The alliteration and repetition suggest the psychological ramifications of an accident, which the next stanza clarifies, showing us how the accident changed its victim and drove him to deny any further possibility of change. Here the line-breaks, especially in the final two lines, and the rhythms provide the tone of paranoia, while the simile of the victim’s eyes “like some secret / coupled badge” with its implied reference to the “cops” of stanza 3, provides an image of that paranoia. The poem then regains some narrative distance to speak of operations and hospitalization but suddenly returns to the earlier images of rain and flowers growing so profusely they terrify. The victim’s hallucinations transform the flowers into diseases and weapons in an act beyond metaphor and therefore insane, but at this point the poet has pulled us in so far that these transformations are ours as well. Thus, though the poem appears to pull back to the outside world in the final stanza, it is a world infiltrated by the paranoia of the poem’s subject: the speaker’s reference to “My flowery clock” (p. 42) reveals how fully he has been drawn in to the victim’s vision. But we have been implicated too, insofar as we have been moved to accept the poem’s vision of the cops as dangerous, the flowers as irrepressible, the whole scene as frighteningly out of control. Although the poem’s rhythms and images are violent, there is an undercurrent of compassion: it is an elegy for the brother to whom it is dedicated, a man lost though not yet dead. The anger rises above the fear to declare a kind of love for all such victims, and we share it because we have been assimilated into the poem’s point of view.

            “The Singing Head” (pp. 47-48), a fantasia on a prairie Orpheus—which, with its precise rhymes and rhythms, insists on praising life as it happens under whatever circumstances—introduces a series of poems on travelling across Canada’s landscape. What Newlove means by “praise” is variously modified in these poems, but the intent is there, if only, it seems, by the pressure of its absence. Indeed, “East from the Mountains” begins with a song, albeit a “…single, faltering, tenuous line of melody / displayed by a thin man’s lungs / unsurely, halting in the winter air…” (p. 50). It asks, how can one sing to and of the prairie: is there anything to say, really? But the poem’s negatives connect positively to assert that huge space’s hold on the mind and its inhabitants’ living voice of being there, however “tired and halting” their song (p. 51). “Rogers Pass” (p. 52) transcends simple imagism through the analytical, sardonic commentary of the I (eye). “In the Forest” uses double-spacing to slow the poem down, creating a mood of holding back fear by willing thought against it. But thought betrays by thinking us into the surround, “…the animals / that may sulk there” (where “sulk” focuses the speaker’s fears as “stalk,” the expected term, does not), and creating a tension in which neither going nor staying is possible. The tension explodes in the “unthinking” convulsion of “run, run, run” in the final line (p. 54). “The Well-Travelled Roadway” and “By the Church Wall” give us other views of the remembering “I,” who saw so much but also had personal problems that prevented him from truly belonging to the moments he records. In “The Well-Travelled Roadway” (p. 55) the mood is sadly nostalgic because “I” cannot name the dead animal, having problems enough with his own name. In “By the Church Wall,” the “I” speaks his alienation and its roots in “the boy’s terrible wish to be good and / not to be alone, not to be alone / to be loved, and to love” (p. 56), yet his analytical language acknowledges that such self-argument is all he has, or is: “…formulating / one more ruinous way to safety” (p. 57). This is not as despairing as it seems: the present participle and “one more” both suggests this activity continues, is an act of living. And the placement of the too sardonic “Where Are You” (p. 58) immediately following, further undercuts the self-pity, with a hearty laugh. Travel is, in fact, a way of life, and, like “The Singing Head,” Newlove can praise the land, the life, he travels through. Two very different forms of praise are “A Letter to Larry Sealey, 1962” in which he finishes a trip “…scribbling on paper towels, / afraid of the ostentation; broke, tired, happy” (p. 62), and “Good Company, Fine Houses,” where the Beat poet of the previous poem scorns the bourgeoisie, no longer in comic terms but rather as a seeker who has encountered immanent god-power in the mountains and recognized its terrifying strength while you “in your consequential houses” (p. 63) are safely kept from such knowledge.

            “I Talk to You” may be about the act of poetry. Like the later “Crazy Riel” (in Black Night Window), it proceeds by punning wordshifts to a recognition that such questioning talk full of “peculiarities and particularities” (p. 71) is all there is. “Resources, Certain Earths,” the first of Newlove’s large poems on the Canadian past, is a poem of articulate, argumentative recognition of such “peculiarities and particularities” as they touch the poet’s sensibilities and lead to the gnomic assertion that to “swallow [the past] whole” is to “be strong and complete and be saved” (p. 74). The poem states this, but does not perhaps fully convince us that it has enacted it; later poems will more fully engage the materials touched upon here. “Veregin, Moving in alone” (pp. 82-83), is the final poem and a kind of summing up of the poetic and perceptual discoveries of the other poems in the book. The single long sentence of stanzas 3 to 7 enacts the accumulation of fragments in the memory as they are focused by one particular desire. Then the next sentence of the final four stanzas moves through fear to love to loss, especially loss now of the remembered then. Though specific, the images and names focus emotional shifts in the act of remembering: this is primarily a poem of subtly delineated moods, and a fitting conclusion to Newlove’s first major collection.

            If Moving in Alone signals Newlove’s new mastery of craft, Black Night Window (1968) represents a consolidation and extension of that craft. In Black Night Window, Newlove brings his technical control to bear on an ever-widening range of material.

            Brian Henderson argues that “Black Night Window is an ectype of Newlove’s pattern” in individual poems: “Beginning in terror and through willed adaptation we end in acceptance” (p. 16). Whether or not we agree that this is the pattern of all Newlove’s poems, we can see how the movement of the book toward its finale in “The Pride” is a movement from personal and historical alienation to an attempt at integration. The poems of Black Night Window are among Newlove’s best-known and most analyzed works, which is why I am going to pass over most of them, in order to discuss some of the later, less well known ones. Nevertheless, they demonstrate Newlove’s growing range of material and formal exploration.

            The title poem, for example, is both a superb example of the Imagist poetic and a step beyond it. Based on the first stanza of “Lynn Valley: Depression” (Moving in Alone, p. 30), the new poem shifts from idea to thing, yet it actually moves to a large philosophical analogy. Or it does not. Its duplicity lies in its controlled tone: although “dead twig” is accurate and the phrases “the moon dead, / the wind dying” are true to experience and how we speak of it, Newlove’s placement of them emphasizes all the connotations of death as a concept. The final three prepositional phrases simultaneously insist upon and resist any wider meaning:

 

in the trees

in this valley

in this recession

(p. 11)

 

That imagination can make us feel that appearances are real is the burden of “Yellow Bear,” and the implications of that may explain why Newlove is so chary of metaphor and simile. Beginning with a denial of Eliot’s “Little Gidding, v,” Newlove insists that it is not the memory now (“the end”) that counts, it is the action then (“the start”): “no image but the tree running, / suddenly before my sight // becoming a bear.” The imagination is a powerful transformative process and frighteningly transcends the safe comparison of the simile:

 

it was my imagination

began it, thinking, That is like

 

a bear waiting at the top

and watching it become the animal.

(p. 13)

 

If this is indeed the power of poetic metaphor, the poem implies, then one should be wary in using it. And Newlove’s poems show just how wary he is.

            “Crazy Riel” (pp. 18-19), which I have analyzed at length elsewhere,[25] is the first poem in the book to deal with Canadian history, yet it does so in an utterly subjective manner, its narrative movement dependent not on the historical story but on the linguistic association in the poet’s writing mind. The much longer “Ride Off Any Horizon” is similarly structured by the exploratory process of its composition, a process its repeated refrain insists upon: “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall / where it may” (p. 34). The “measure” this poem attempts is large, covering both space and time. The refrain is exactly repeated at the beginning of the first five sections, all of which explore aspects of prairie life and death. Only in the sixth and final section does Newlove alter the lines, to carry us to another place that might be measured differently yet is equally human and inhuman, equally a space to be filled, with words and with people desiring words and people. The narrative voice continually adjusts its distance from what it speaks of, these modulations of focus allowing a wide range in tone from nostalgia to sardonic irony. The poem shifts back and forth between personal memory and “vision and history” (p. 34), but the voice is sometimes more involved with the vision than with the memory.

            The first three sections deal mainly with the prairie as the settlers knew it. Sections 4 and 5 contrive to shift focus through the satiric comedy of present-day small-town rituals –

 

the boys and girls

are practicing against

 

each other, the men

talk and eye the girls –

 

the women talk and

eye each other, the Indians

play pool: eye on the ball.

(p. 36)

 

– to a sudden shocking expansive illumination of the violence of white settlement:

 

Ride off any horizon

and let the measure fall

where it may –

 

and damn the troops, the horsemen

are wheeling in the sunshine,

the cree, practising

 

for their deaths: mr poundmaker,

gentle sweet mr bigbear,

it is not unfortunately

 

quite enough to be innocent,

it is not enough merely

not to offend –

 

at times to be born

is enough, to be

in the way is too much –

 

some colonel otter, some

major-general middleton will

get you, you –

 

indian. It is no good to say,

I would rather die

at once than be in that place –

 

though you love that land more,

you will go where they take you.

(pp. 36-37)

 

Carefully playing syntax across his line and stanza breaks, Newlove seeks to speak from within the historic scene only to recognize his distance from it and from the “people I will never understand. / Admire them though I may” (“Crazy Riel,” p. 18). The tension here emerges from the contradiction that he does not wish to, and yet must, articulate: between the destructive acts of his people then and his desire now to become “their people [i.e., Indian], come / back to life” (“The Pride,” p. 111). “The Pride,” as many critics have argued is seductive in its delineation of this desire, but it also tries so hard that its very positiveness creates a paradoxical sense of failure. In “Ride Off Any Horizon” the image of assertive pride is quickly undercut by the officious language of British law, which is immediately rendered empty by the shift to the slang of the conquering army (someone “will / get you, you -- // indian”). The language of heroic ideals resurfaces only to be drowned in the coldly pragmatic expression of white power. Newlove achieves great pathos simply through juxtaposing these various kinds of discourse, which contain in their expression all the implications of the relative power of their origins.

            Only after this scene of primal historical loss does Newlove turn to the spiritual emptiness of the contemporary cityscape. Suddenly, the rest of the poem becomes a demonstration of fullness: in “vision and history” the vast spaces of the prairie are packed with material for the imagination and the spirit, material which “the concrete horizon” of the city, “stopping vision visibly” (p. 37), prevents us from seeing. The final section of the poem delineates the real loss, which is the loss of the past. The paradoxical affirmation of the poem is its insistence that to know one’s past, including all its absences, is to make it present and a presence in one’s life. Such knowledge is “the measure” the poem articulates.

            Many of the shorter poems are part of what Newlove will call “A Long Continual Argument with Myself” (in Lies). Ranging across self-pity, anger, guilt, sardonic good humour, sly wit, and, always, unblinking clarity of insight, they engage us through their direct speech and subtle nuances of tone. “Brass Box, Spring. Time.,” for example, is a kind of list, very much a poet’s list, each thing named and distinct, as the periods in the title signal. Yet the desperately comic accumulation its one long sentence articulates falls apart in the final couplet following the repeated conjunction conjoining nothing: “I have a brass box for cigarettes, / when I have cigarettes” (p. 46). Though the poem is about loss, the tone is significantly that of the stand-up-comedian, as is that of the next poem, “Just About Forty Degrees Off Course,” which examines in detail a “comparison to stuff yourself with” (p. 47), only to dismiss the validity of such a simile with a coarse phrase: the poet will hold to plain speech.

            “What Do You Want, What Do You Want?” blandly articulates the ultimate macho fantasy and subverts the whole stance by arguing it through to its logical, self-defeating conclusion, shorn of supporting “romantic” rhetoric: “I want a lover / who suffers indignities” (p. 48). “Book II:65” (pp. 54-55) is a different kind of argument, moving from Herodotus to Canada with witty double entendres on politics and sex only to suddenly shift tone to personal reminiscence, and an insistence that the signs of memory (here the coat he and a lover made love in) contain memory. The end of the poem maintains the light tone of the beginning, but, no longer mocking, it gently accepts change.

            “The Old Man” is interesting in its presentation of a different kind of memory. Like certain contemporary fictions, notably those of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, it represents a double narrator: the older person remembering and telling the behaviour of the younger self. As a poem, it refuses the expansiveness of narration, giving instead two complimentary images: the first three stanzas describe the situation with his father under attack “in the sawdust yard,” but does not tell us what happens; the final stanza confesses the speaker’s love, not at the action itself so much, but at “hearing him tell / how he made them run!” (p. 57). The poet, here, is honouring the power of the word. “Kamsack” is another poem of personal memories, which moves through its three parts from easy candour through recognition of alienation by language from his Doukhobor peers to ambiguous enjoyment of self-pity at being unloved combined with perception as to why self-love cannot be matched by another’s love, except perhaps that of a dumb animal – “that red dog, damn fool / running and barking / away toward the town” (p. 61).

            Newlove can be strongly satiric when he wants to be, as “Canada” (p. 74) and “Like a Canadian” demonstrate. The latter is an intriguingly subversive antitext to “The Pride,” as it asks, “What does a person want / out of life: images?” and then goes on to attack many of the things Newlove himself has written so movingly about. The poet says he feels “like a Canadian // only when kissing someone else’s bum. / It’s a hard life … // … Tough. / But not as tough as living with the Crees” (p.75). This cryptically sardonic conclusion separates the poet from the heroic figures of the past much as “Samuel Hearne in Wintertime” (pp. 84-85) does, but its jokey tone implies greater resistance to “the romantic stories” of the past (“The Pride,” p. 111). This is another, psychological example of “The Double-Headed Snake” (pp. 42-43), where the cynicism and the romanticism do not so much cancel each other out as coexist in uneasy balance, a tension the poet will never be able to break. It is important to recognize that the many contradictory stands the various poems take are simply one mind’s re-presentation of the all-too-human capacity to enter every mood available to us, and, in a poet’s case, to articulate each one.

            Even in The Cave (1970), a book many critics feel is narrower in focus than Black Night Window, there is a wide range of mood and tone. Although many readers feel the bleak vision of The Cave’s opening poem, “The Engine and the Sea,”[26] dominates the book, this is not the case. Rather, to reverse Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, the case is the world,[27] in all its ramifications. Although many of the poems continue to articulate subjective moments in the lives of their speakers, two significant shifts occur in others: towards greater historical objectivity, a presentation of the actions of others in time and space, and towards the shared psychological landscapes of dream where anything can happen. (Both these tendencies will increase in Lies.) One significant feature of The Cave is its many short, though not obviously lyrical, poems. “The Fat Man” (pp. 78-84) is the only poem longer than two pages; most fit easily onto one page.

            “The Engine and the Sea” is a bleak poem, offering, not a contrast between the natural life of the ocean and the mechanical life of the city, but a deadly parallel of predatory desire in a mechanically determined universe. Humans and animals alike are trapped by repetitions of “History, history!” and thus the final sentence ambiguously refers to them both: “Under the closed lids their eyes flick back and forth as they try to follow the frightening shapes of their desires” (p. 10). But even here, Newlove implies the need to wake up from the nightmare that is history,[28] and to open one’s eyes and see clearly, at his poems insistently do. The further implication is that those who are awake need not necessarily lead mechanical lives but can choose how to live. Of course, as many of these poems demonstrate, what we might choose to do is remember, and that is “a foolish act” (“The Double-Headed Snake,” in Black Night Window, p. 42), especially when what we remember is loss. Still, it is what many of these poems do: hold onto moments of loss and paradoxically to what has (thus not) been lost.

            “These Are Yours” is such a poem. Its ten fragments map how loss remains in terse speech addressed to the lover now gone. It begins in anger, which understated humour tries to control, but the images about the speaker fall to nothing, which the three short lines of part 4, each separated by a line space, carefully mime: “Haven’t got / much left / now” (p. 12). The next fragment calls attention to the failure of language: words are only “Shiny remnants / of our future dreams …” (p. 12),  yet the poet must continue to use words, to speak of what occurred, of how he feels, of how he projects his feeling onto the whole countryside, of what remains, and finally, like one of Samuel Beckett’s protagonists, of how he cannot go on and will go on: “My time is past; / but still I must continue” (p. 13) – talking about it, anyway.

            The next few poems continue to talk about “it,” that is, about various aspects of love lost and found, and though some are sad and resentful, some are happy and grateful, like “Warm Wind.” In this poem, contentment in walking with one’s lover is enough even to withstand the speculative vision of Armageddon:

 

What if the world does end,

and we are only stained shadows

the sidewalk photographed? Today

 

I hold you and have a happiness

that makes me human once again.

(p.15)

 

Indeed, as the final line of the middle stanza implies, the speaker would be happy enough if the end came now, for that atomic photograph would capture them as they are “today” – together.

            “You Told Me” is a complex series of repetitions that accumulate contradictions, not clarifications. More important than the truth is the fact that “you told me the truth”; just as the “nothing” that “happened” is clearly something meaningful. “I cannot seduce you” because “you” are honest even as “You lie / in your bed, my bed …” Both “you” and the speaker ask “What do you want?” but this is no longer the blandly comic query of the poem of that title (in Black Night Window). No, what a lover wants, this poem implies, is for the beloved to change as he wishes, but what “you / have taught me” is to learn to “be myself again” because “Nothing / can stop you from being what you are” (p. 16). If there is some frustration felt at this discovery, nevertheless the poem expresses its complications and a kind of exhilaration in working them out.

            That exhilaration can be felt in the other poems here, poems so plain in their speech it seems silly to offer interpretations of them: they mean what they say. The problem is to suggest how they make such plain meaning luminous and resonant, how they renew ordinary language by using it precisely and concisely and with a musician’s ear for nuance. At the end of “One Day,” for example, after moving from perceiving to thinking to writing and remembering, the speaker pulls back and actually offers a simile to his lover (who in this context, as Roland Barthes would tell us, can be lover, text, and reader, at least)[29]

 

I try to write.

The Gulf Stream touches

England as

you touch me.

(p. 25)

 

Apparently simple, this is complex in its implications. Does the Gulf Stream touch England or only move around it? Either way, it is close and it warms England, just as “you” do for “me.” But there is also a temporal statement: “you touch me” now, and at the same time the Gulf Stream touches England. Finally, the stanza insists that only because “I try to write” do “I” fall into such comparisons. Which is not to deny the gentle love it invokes, but is to qualify both why it happens and just how useful it is.

            Newlove has said, “Desire is what I write about, mostly” (“Interview,” p. 146). This is true of the love poems as well as of the visionary poems of history and memory, where the writer desires to say what he sees so clearly. “A Young Man” juxtaposes both kinds as it circles about desire, its failures and successes. In Part I, “you tell too much,” but who is you: the writer’s self or the others he turns into his art? “I have / been told” is equally ambiguous: have “I” been told by you, or am “I” being told in the poem, a possible reference to the inescapable autobiographical element in any fiction? Both “I” and “you” could be aspects of the poet, who is still young, still living in desire, the “dream / of the perfect moment occurring” (p. 27). Part 2 suggests how closely poems and dreams are allied: “I have had so many lines; in dreams / I have fixed up so many mistakes…” These mistakes are his, and they possibly cause him to lose a lover, but the dream/poem, in fixing them, has “… made it / so she turned…” and came to him as he desired, asking “why [he] had waited so long, loosening.” But the next stanza confuses the issue: is it he or she who is “unable to sleep,” and is it in his dream or in their affair that she asks him “so many times…/… Why did you wait?” He cannot answer the question except by referring to a vision of death, which claims us all. This vision, which holds him still, waiting, is of the perfect (that is, finished, static) moment of his burial. Given the vision, the poem now cryptically claims us all:

 

The places of our decisions

will be found

in pure places, the perfect moments

endured, exalted the ordinances!

(p. 27; emphasis added)

 

Are these places the moments—infinitely extended, and therefore “perfect”—of vision, like that of the previous stanza? At any rate they are sacramental moments (one meaning of “ordinance” is sacrament); they are to be endured, and they are not his alone but ours. Part 3 speaks for us, then, not just him. It begins by dismissing part 2: if it is “A Memory / or dream only” and if “the past does not exist,” then there is no truth to it. But truth is precisely what the poet desires, because it is the “scaled gauge” by which we “judge.” What, however, do we judge? The poet says truth “is enough,” but the poem can only assert this if we accept part 2, with its shift from sexual life to universal death, as the evidence that truth is both relative and the measure of our actions. Thus the poem remains determinedly enigmatic, its contradictions the signs by which it asserts its inclusive humanity; yet the subtle rhythms and syntax create a tone that draws the reader into its mood, accepting its claims even if not wholly comprehending them.

            One of the things Newlove’s poems argue is the difficulty of really knowing an other. “Doukhobor” movingly asserts the necessary incomprehension which exists between people. Its thirteen couplets are one long questioning of the poet’s art: “who will be able to say for you / just what you thought…” (p. 34) or felt or perceived? The poem seems to argue no one can “say” for anyone else, yet the similes by which the man’s death is asserted and the images by which his memories are imagined contradict each other and call that question into question. The poem’s paradoxical stance is that we cannot know an other yet we can imagine ourselves as other, and such imagining is the work of an art. It is a strangely compassionate poem, prefiguring it its willingness to attempt to get inside another’s mind the larger effort of “The Fat Man” (pp. 78-84).

            “The Prairie” comes at the problem from a different perspective, that of one’s despair over language as a medium sufficient unto the desire to truly communicate. Using repetition and association as he did in “Crazy Riel,” Newlove says “the words do not suffice” and goes on trying to make them do so. The long first sentence, with its angry shifts from “compiles,” through various forms of massiveness to piles of words and “of buffalo dung” which mark the passage of men and beasts, leads only to a recognition that all this telling is only “invented remembrance”—a form of fiction. What does the poet, despairing of his words, desire? To be “the other’s / twin, impossible thing, twining / both memories, a double meaning,” but all he manages is “…never / to be at ease, but always migrating” across the prairies, “seeking some almost seen / god or food or earth or word” (p. 35). By building up to “word,” this order implies that language is our best hope for achieving understanding. Although the poet wanders uneasily, he never gives up his quest for the desired words that will miraculously suffice, and that refusal to quit is the poem’s hope.

            Newlove confronts death in its multitudinous guises with everything from wisecracks to elegies. In The Cave, he ranges from the curt, sardonic poems of death at sea, like “Atlantic” (p. 49) and “God Bless You” (p. 52) to visionary sermons like “The Last Event” (pp. 38-39) and “The Dream Man” (p. 43). “The Last Event” maps the evasions by which we connive to allow “the businesses of death and war” (p. 38) to continue, on both the political and domestic fronts. A prose poem, it attacks the flashy false art in which “words impart mastery,” for words should make us honest, able to perceive “that last animal event” (p. 39) as it really is. Refusing easy outs, the poem appears harsh, but in the integrity of its vision lies its hope for and affirmation of art.

            “The Flower” is a deservedly famous poem, assuming the place of an apologia in Newlove’s canon. It insists that the tenseness it displays is the mainspring of true poetry, that understatement and implication are more powerful than hyperbole: “The flower / is not in its colour, / but in the seed” (p. 46). Sometimes the seed is buried deep: the paired poems “Otter’s Creek” (p. 54) and “The Words” (p. 55) simultaneously make and unmake aphorisms; they resist interpretation yet compel emotional engagement. They are best described, perhaps as poems of shamanistic transformation; identifying with the animal, the speaker will “be pleased to know nothing” (“Otter’s Creek,” p. 54), thus achieving a sacred ignorance.

            Two poems called “Dream” deal with watery death. Both insist on the potential for life in the middle of death, but first is human in scope—“thin transparent egg strings / fold in layers on dead eyes” (“Dream [‘Green sea water washing over’],” p. 56)—while the second moves from a vision of earthly apocalypse to one of galactic indifference—“the red and brown vine-tangled land is empty” but “… great galaxial wheel rolls smoothly in its unhuman / silence that contains all sounds …” (“Dream [‘The luxurious trembling sea’],” p. 62). In these dream poems, and others in Lies, Newlove moves away from the commitment to minimalism of “The Flower” to a richer, more colourful and even tropic language. They also tend to invoke the famous figure of the drowned poet in their images of death at sea,[30] yet because they insist they are dreams, the sea in which the poet “dies” or is lost is that ocean of uncontrolled images (of desire?), the unconscious.

            The images in “The Fat Man” are anything but uncontrolled, yet the fat man’s imagination as imagined in this poem is full of the imagery-escaping-control found in bad dreams. A tour de force of sliding point of view, the poem simultaneously maintains a judicious distance from its subject and enters his subjectivity. Avoiding the excesses of both satire and sentimentality, the poem partakes of both, achieving a kind of compassionate comedy of contemporary manners. Part 1 begins with an analytically precise description of the man and his flowers in the rain, establishing the character of the speaker as well as the outward picture of the fat man, then ends by slipping into the fat man’s thoughts. In the second part, the point of view slides easily from the fat man to the observant speaker and back again, and sometimes, as in the couplet Newlove says mocks his “own … feelings of pessimism and gullibility” (“Interview,” p. 145) – “Even the worst of dreams / sometimes fails to come true” (p. 82) – encompasses them both. Part 3 begins with the observer but joins the fat man by line 3 and stays with him in his self-pity into part 4, where he imagines how quickly his memory will fade after his death. Part 5 suddenly brings us back to the observer who, the past tense informs us, is recalling this incident from his memory. To the observer, the fat man “was dead already” yet he also “… walked down the tunneling street, / a tarpaper blob retreating with flowers, home / to sleep and dreams and his apple-pie wife” (p. 84). This contradiction between derogatory dismissal and sentimental cliché is the most problematic aspect of the poem. Both renege on the claims to imaginative comprehension of another which the rest of the poem asserts, creating an ethical and epistemological insecurity, which is chilling in its implications.

            “The Cave” is, as Jan Bartley points out, “a difficult poem to understand,” with its overlapping philosophical, domestic, and science-fiction imagery. Bartley believes its vision is “finally optimistic” (“Something,” p. 37), and I agree, partly because of the way it uses the expansive imagery of science fiction to break out of the darkness of the first cave (which is surely, among other things, Plato’s cave) into the larger, more magnificent and open one of the whole universe. Although it begins with death, and includes the entropic claims of ageing, it moves “beyond” those to imagination’s resurrection at the end. Its rhythm, repetition, assonance, and consonance beautifully express a love of beauty; the poem is so full of light that its tone argues against the death it casually admits. Hope glimmers in all the light beyond Earth, and perhaps beyond death, too. The final lines sing affirmation in the expanding universe of the living imagination:

 

                                    … Beyond the planets,

beyond the dark coffin, beyond the ring of stars,

your bed is in the shining, tree-lit cave.

(p. 85)

 

            Displaying the usual assortment of lyrics sad and sardonic, satiric and savage, Lies (1972) also contains a number of longer works which, unlike the earlier long poems of memory or vision, have some of the qualities of Borgesian fictions: that is, they include the discourse of both fiction and essay in the context of the poem sequence. These pieces, often written in a prose notation, are the ones which led George Bowering to argue that Newlove had shifted beyond confessional poetry, which asks us “to feel bad because the poet’s world is so terrible”: “Newlove says the world is terrible, and just as terrible for everyone else …”[31] This is true, but not wholly true: these poems say sometimes the world is terrible, sometimes the world is lovely, but always the world is there, and we live in it and should accept that. One of the lies the book explores and exposes is that we can escape through dreams to other, better worlds. That enigmatic fable “The Pool” deals precisely with this desire. At first, “… in his dreams he came once to a clear sunken pool / in the middle of the forest of pines, water / from an older continent …”[32]: it is an Atlantean place of still “magic” in which the meditative mode is prime. But within this dream “he lay down to sleep” (p. 18) and dreamed of walking out of the forest to a war-ravaged city – under attack by other humans or possibly aliens (the images have a science-fiction tinge) – and this leads to the short final section:

 

He woke up, sweating and cramped,

and said, I won’t wake up,

and woke up.

(p. 18)

 

The final return is not to the pool world but to our world, present in the poem only by its absence: it is here, the blank space after the final line, that is everything not in the poem and to which the poem’s protagonist at last wakes up.

            Still, the imagination is granted its place: we sometimes try to make the world acceptable by agreeing to share a vision of it. This even works occasionally. Like most of its poems, the book’s title is ambiguous in the extreme. “Company,” a fictional essay on the need to share lies, is an experiment in depersonalization. Its blandly objective portrait of a hopeless loser paradoxically affirms “its” humanity through denying it. Once again Newlove achieves simultaneous distance from and intimate commentary on “its” feelings, partly by allowing shifts of mood and behaviour from section to section. Sometimes the portrait is utterly despairing: women turn away from it; “company is disgusted by it” (p. 21); it has no friends, really. But then it can exchange tales with others of its kind even if “to remember without lying is difficult” (p. 23) and upsetting; it can still dream of other places, the Pacific islands, say, where no one will know, and therefore avoid, it; “When there are no friends / at least there must be companions occasionally” (p. 24). All of which leads to the hope (and sudden compassion) expressed in part 10:

 

Perhaps something will happen.

Perhaps something good will happen.

 

Perhaps it will meet someone it knows

or someone who knows it.

Him.

 

They would talk together about the past.

They would agree with each other.

They would drink beer and smoke and talk confidently

about women

until closing time.

 

Then they would part,

not contradicting each other.

(p. 25)

 

You are a person when you are recognized as one by someone you share company with, even if it involves not seeing the possibility of lies on either part: this is a human need. “Company” achieves its objective of making a social loser a valid subject of poetic sympathy, but there are some problems: it goes on too long and could dispense with sections 3, 7, 8, and parts of 9.

            “Harry, 1967” is a more devastating poem because its concision, speed, and blackly comic slapstick achieve a haunting compassion missing in “Company.” “Harry, 1967” is a narrative of taking away; it proceeds by negation, each sentence removing more from poor Harry, except his name, the repetition of which is the central means of establishing him as a character in the poem. The descriptions of him and his one lie, or dream, are also important. Thus he strangely grows as a presence in the poem even as it diminishes him. Newlove’s sense of comic timing makes the poem work. Each stanza/paragraph builds to a punchline, usually comically expressed loss, except in the tale of Harry’s vision, where the blandly unqualified statements call themselves into question partly by their isolation—the pauses between the stanzas inviting dismissal. The poem marvellously mimes the performance of a stand-up comedian, who always waits for the laugh before proceeding. Nevertheless, the dream Harry is somehow affirmative, even in the silly images of his heroism which at least signal that Harry did have an imagination of sorts once. Without imagination, a person has nothing, and so, even if “it’s useless to see things that can never happen” (p. 75), it is humanly necessary. The final line places Harry in a horrifying limbo where nothing is possible. Because of the comic tone of the rest of the poem, the deliberate, careful objectivity of “Harry just can’t anymore, that’s all” (p. 75) is all the more powerful in its implications.

            A different kind of fiction, the black comedy of paradox “Or Alternatively” is clearly about its narrator’s state of mind, despite the apparent omniscience displayed in most of its twenty sections. In witty prose, it explores the process of paradoxical acceptance and refusal, acquiescence and rebuttal, which is pure day-to-day life. In a way, “Or Alternately” is a somewhat manic annotation to the book’s epigraph from The Commentaries of Pius II: “Lies and perjury were so familiar to him that he often deceived himself and told the truth when he thought he was lying.” Part I announces the terms of the game this poem plays; the other nineteen sections offer exasperated commentary on it as it carries one along. The poem begins with an entrance to the playing space, and a statement of the problem:

           

He moved into the room, alternately believing in everything and in nothing; every philosophy, every theology he could find comforted him when he first came to it; later, each would seem useless or, worse, ridiculous; he was unable to make himself forget.

(p. 63)

 

Part 3 makes specific reference to the epigraph, applying it to the self-in-transit of the poem:

 

                        The lies accumulated and fed each other; it became difficult for him to recall their correct order and which ones he had told which groups of people. Some he believed himself.

(p. 63)

 

The result of this is the comedy of the following sections, beginning with the single sentence of part 4—“He lay in the hospital of philosophy and sulked” (p. 64)-in which the final word perfectly renders the childish, all-too-human emotional state of the character. This “hospital” is life itself, as the rest of the poem makes clear, presenting a sometimes satiric, sometimes cruel, sometimes slapstick comedy of mostly domestic behaviour. The exasperation reaches a climax in parts 11 and 12, where the point of view shifts to the first person as the narrator loses his battle to maintain distance from the problem: he sees the futility of “reading books, making notes, notes, writing words, words—words for God’s sake!” (p. 66). This simply does not seem adequate as a response to impossible choices, yet the poem, by its very existence, implies that perhaps “writing words” is one of the few honest responses available to us. The narrator is not at all sure of this, and asks instead, “Why can’t I draw?” (p. 66) as if any other art would do better. The following sections manifest a sense of frustration at being always between choices but unable, finally, to choose. Parts 19 and 20 are one sentence, and they present a final, intolerable paradox:

 

 

One changes oneself—

 

—but expects all others to remain unchanging and unchanged.

(p. 68)

 

The ambiguity is nicely held here. Is one simply changing or does one will to change and therefore will others “to remain unchanging” which is of course impossible except perhaps in one’s perceptions of them, which then become the worst of lies. The poem refuses to resolve the question, yet its comic tone and clear presentation of the problem are affirmative; this is the human comedy, after all, even if it is sometimes grim.

            The two other long poems of Lies are not fictions; neither are they comic, even in the black modes of “Company,” “Harry, 1967,” and “Or Alternately.” In different ways, both “Notes from and among the Wars” and “Quotations” are historical meditations on humanity’s capacity for internecine destructiveness. As Bartley points out in her particularly fine reading of the poem, “Notes from and among the Wars” is an exploration of “the fallacies and vulnerabilities of either the poet or the human condition. The central theme is the desire to dream versus the impossibility of sustaining dreams or transcending reality by means of dreams” (“Something,” p. 44). Although he wishes “…to dream / through our centuries of blood” (p. 40) and through all that phrase implies, instead the poet forces himself to see these centuries for what they are and to say what he sees. Yet, despite the many horrors the poem exposes, the prayer of section 14 speaks for us all with a kind of exasperated irony:

 

The torture goes on forever as we in perpetual motion

breed and destroy ourselves for any reason

even intelligent ones

All of which we have always known

in despair and amusement at ourselves

(p. 45)

 

The balanced contradiction “despair and amusement,” is paradigmatic of Newlove’s stance in so many poems, and it is definitely a statement of the waking mind. Dreams express desires, but the desire to escape reality is no longer viable, and perhaps never was. In the final, ambiguous section, the poet avoids “infinity / with questions” (p. 48), and the final questions simultaneously acknowledge and refuse the temptation of dreamed escape:

 

Would you want to fly? knowing

below and as you fly

in the green concealed pit

the hunters with their sighted shotguns lie.

(p. 48)

 

The rhyme sweetens the verse, but the words “concealed” and “sighted” suggest the brutal deviousness of the real world and insist we recognize that deviousness in ourselves.

            “Quotations” insists on the same recognition, but it is a much more experimental poem. As Newlove explains,

 

                        …that poem is made out of quotations from about 130 books welded together. Because I wanted them to come randomly so that they could have come from any civilization, at any time, in any part of the world, and see what the result would be. It was a sort of survey of our history, and it became full of death.

(Moritz, p. 11)

 

The poem is effective because it unites so many different voices from all “our centuries of blood,” and what they say, contradicting and supporting one another, is appalling. These fragments, “welded” together, arbitrarily ignoring syntax and grammatical sense, swell to a near-cacophonous chorale of cruelty and suffering. Newlove’s method of juxtaposition allows each voice its place, but places them all so each one reflects on the others, calling both them and itself into question. If they do not speak lies, at least they clearly demonstrate that no one has the truth. Since even the voices of historical commentary contradict one another, the whole quest for simple answers is also called into question. The quotations tell us, and it is Newlove’s “voice” in them all saying this, that there are no simple truths, anywhere. The poem begins and ends with references to dreams (another connection to “Notes from and among the Wars”), which contradict each other. The burden of the first statement is that we live in lies, not in “the world as it is” (which is always our disappointment, as he says in “Remembering Christopher Smart” [The Cave, p. 57]):

 

We only came to dream.

It is not true, it is not true –

that we came to live on the earth.

(p. 83)

 

But the final lines of the poem suggest that without dreams life is impossible. Both statements sound like Newlove; by discovering “his” voice in other voices, Newlove once again achieves his stance of balanced contradiction, which is the stance of the human, never able to choose finally, always wishing he could.

            Although there is much that is uncompromisingly bleak about Lies, it is balanced by the comic tone many of its poems display. Moreover, a few poems present images of felicity and pure affirmation. In “The Hero around Me,” the poet thinks “of the hero as man in combat only,” and then discovers another possibility:

 

The day came, but not as war.

Fields of grain around me were crystal,

the sky polished, endless gold and blue,

and in the still heat a meadowlark

twisted its sculptured tune around me

once, quickly, a deft feat of superior magic,

and all time stopped, world without end,

and I was as a tree is, loathing no one.

(p. 11)

 

Beauty exists, and the poet recognizes it. Recognition of such moments (even if they may not be monuments) is one responsibility of an honest poet, as he implies in “A Long Continual Argument with Myself.” “As if,” he says, “there were nothing to hope for”—sounding what many think is the basic Newlove note. But no, he continues, and the vision is of human glory in human love:

 

when a stranger woman smiles and kisses you

at someone else’s kitchen door, as if

that tree of gratitude for humans would not bloom again—

 

which will:

silver in the silver sun.

(p. 25)

 

Finally, the last poem in the book, following hard upon “Quotations,” reiterates the cri de Coeur of “Resources, Certain Earths” to “Let me swallow it whole and be strong” (Moving in Alone, p. 74). Hortative and contradictory, “That There Is No Relaxation” keeps returning to its central prayer, “A little more and a little more” (p. 94), as it insists that to be alive is all we can ask for and, truly, what we desire.

            This sense of life as valuable is to be found in The Night the Dog Smiled (1986),[33] in the almost mystic balancing act of “The Green Plain,” and in the darkly glowing affirmations of the poet’s art in such poems as “The Weather” and “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Of course, Newlove has not gone beyond his visions of human desperation, nor will he ever do so; other poems in The Night the Dog Smiled, like “The Cities We Longed For” and “One Thing,” continue his explorations of humanity’s talent for corruption.

            Nevertheless, “The Green Plain” is significant for the way it allows both the negative and the positive their simultaneous place, and moves through balanced acknowledgement of both to full affirmation of the world and our being in it. Usually Newlove has asserted such balance by including in his books poems of both kinds; here the single poem contains and maintains all the possibilities.

            “The Green Plain” was published separately in 1981 and deliberately structured as a book.[34] Although the poem has fewer lines than “Notes from and among the Wars” or “Quotations,” say, the 1981 chapbook carefully uses the page as a unit of notation, placing each short section on its own for our greater contemplation. Each fragment demands separate attention, yet the poem is cumulative in effect, weaving the individual parts into a complex vision full of resonant reflections and echoes both within itself and outward to Newlove’s and others’ work (in its structure it is similar to Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems: a book of coalescing fragments that echo their context in the tradition). Like “The Cave,” it uses a kind of science-fiction imagery of interstellar space, as well as hints of vast time, to achieve a sense of immense distance, while simultaneously using the first-person plural pronoun to create a strange intimacy with its material and with the reader. We are implicated in its vision, in all its awfulness and glory.

            The poem confronts the usual human problems of Newlove’s poetry, this time questioning the universe as it expands to contain our vaulting imaginations and desires. Much of what it says echoes earlier poems, but the tone is gentler, more compassionately accepting. In the first stanza, the poet says, “… We praise constancy as brave, / but variations’ lovelier” (p. 19). Later he asks, “How shall we save the symmetry of the universe? – / or our own symmetry, which is the same” (p. 20), but the poem keeps insisting that the symmetry he speaks of must be discovered in variation. He invokes the galaxies, the far stars and near forests, looks at spring and the ancient days of the dinosaurs, and unites all these phenomena in his quest for significant change. I am reminded once again that one of his favourite philosophers is Heraclitus, who said, “Everything flows and nothing abides.”[35] This quest leads to paradoxical recognition, as in

 

                                                            But confusion. The world

flows past. It is hard to remember age. Does

this always world flow? Does it? Please say it does,

not time.

                        Do not say time flows.

Say: We do. Say: We live.

(p. 22)

 

This section moves from a tone of querulous uncertainty to a certain assertion of faith. Through such shifts of tone, the poem continually surprises us into affirmation with it. And because it never seeks to hide the terrifying aspects of life in the universe, the poem masters the terror. “Everything is always here, / and burning” (p. 22) the poet says (once again acknowledging Heraclitus), but he can accept that. The final section creates from three separate nouns a sentence of immense metaphoric power, which celebrates the connections from universe to world to us. It is one of Newlove’s most lovingly beautiful affirmations:

 

Stars, rain, forests.

Stars rain forests.

Sew up the lives together. There is

this only world. Thank God: this World

and its wrapped variations

spreading around and happy, flowing,

flowing through the climate of intelligence,

beautiful confusion looking around,

seeing the mechanics and the clouds

and marveling, O Memory . . .

(p. 23)

 

            Newlove has always read widely, and his epigraphs have always brilliantly illuminated the texts they preface. Here is the epigraph to The Night the Dog Smiled:

 

Unless I understand the conquests of Alexander as a dying soldier’s pain and thirst, unless I grasp the ideas of the Inquisition as the torn body of the heretic, unless I feel that these Sufferings are my own, unless in other words I have charity, in my ideas of evil are empty.

            Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity

 

How fitting that the first poem, “Driving,” should speak of both “I” and “you” and manage to break down the difference between them: precisely an inscription of the charity Russell writes of, and also a sign of how the book as a whole will continually refuse us easy outs or identifications. Indeed, it is the way Newlove handles the concept of “voice” and “speaker” in these poems that reveals the continued expansion of his poetic, and its growth in grace and charity.

            All of Newlove’s collections have been meticulously organized, and The Night the Dog Smiled is no exception: the order of these poems leads the reader into and through a human labyrinth of desire, fear, terror sometimes, love too, and even hope. Newlove’s grand theme of the (dis)grace of human history (how humankind has always found excuses for its destruction of nature, of knowledge, of other human beings) is still the ground of his poems, but there is a new note of optimism, or at least of the desire to discover reasons to believe, because one cannot, in the final instance, deny the need to love. Thus, “A Crescent” tells us, “despair is not a policy” (p. 12), even if, in “A Room,” “There is a silence / … of waiting for the end, / of killers waiting for their victims’ permissions / before the knives descend” (p. 13).

            Indeed, the next poem, “The Permanent Tourist Comes Home,” is almost a paradigmatic image of the whole book. Beginning with the observation that “To the oppressed / nothing is left but song,” which leads to the adjuration, “okay, okay, obey, / since your only function is to die,” the poem next shifts to a statement against speaking only in “moulds.” The third section raises a lovely “apparition” of “my small mother” only to deliver her message that “Father’s dead” (p. 14). Then “I” wakes up, but then, or now? In the fifth part, the speaker will speak against that death with love, but neither “he” nor we can be sure with what effectiveness. Still, the poem can move forward, to this finale:

 

Well, to die in the Spring

and be buried in the muck

seems reasonable. Enough

of this. The mountains are bright tonight

outside my window, and passing by.

Awkwardly, I am in love again.

(p. 15)

 

It may be awkward but it surely helps, and it can happen again and again, to which many of these poems testify. Still, the pressures against love, even against charity, are many, and the poems register them, often with curiously comic effects, as in the paranoid vision of a dentist in “Big Mirror.” But the voice of that poem, its clipped mania, marks it as craftily “other” from the poems surrounding it, the carefully self-pitying complaint against aging, “Cold, Heat,” and the poetically charged statement of poetics, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”

            There is a wide range of other voices, here, however, and together they add up to a refusal to deny pain alongside an expressed desire to find in love a means of transcending it. “Concerning Stars, Flowers, Love, Etc.” sardonically defies those who say “make it easier. Tell / me something I already know.” Watch Newlove’s assured prosody, his ability to make the open line work, his control of repetition and sound:

 

Make it easier, they say, make it easier. Tell

me something I already know, about stars or flowers or,

or happiness. I am happy sometimes, though

not right now, specially. Things are not going

too good right now. But you should try

to cheer people up, they say. There is

a good side to life, though

not right now, specially. Though the stars

continue to shine in some places and the flowers

continue to bloom in some places

and people do not starve in some places

and people are not killed in some places

and there are no wars in some places

and there are no slaves in some places

and in some places people love each other,

they say. Though I don’t know where. They say,

I don’t want to be sad. Help me not to know.

(p. 17)

 

This poem is a profoundly disturbing essay in black humour with a moral bite, which pulls us in much further than the average satiric hook by so intertwining the “I” and the “they” that we cannot slough our own responsibilities as speakers to and for what “they say.” As “White Philharmonic Novels,” a stunning poem in ten parts, will say: “I made these voices. / The arrangement is all” (p. 68). This is true of every poem, and of the book as a whole, as well as of that particular excursion through a chorus of demanding and suffering and desiring humanity.

            Still, if the texts insist that we have to know what is wrong, some also express the possibility that we can also discover some things that are right. In “The Green Plain,” the desire for a new vision is answered, if only tentatively, within the poem itself. This is surely one of Newlove’s most important poems, for it manages to incorporate the kind of arranging of other voices he had already achieved in such poems as “Notes from and among the Wars” and “Quotations,” while extending their vision to include that charity Russell insists upon. But “Syllables [via Sanskrit]” and “White Philharmonic Novels” are equal to “The Green Plain,” and move to even more complete declarations of love. All three join that small group of major mid-length poems in our literature. They repay many readings not only with increased pleasure but with an ever more profound sense of what it is to be an alive and desiring human being.

            Having given us visions of the universe and ordinary humanity, and even some small and gently humorous poems about friends, Newlove turns again, in the book’s penultimate piece, to offer us a vision of craft separated from charity and compassion that is chilling in its unsentimental rendering of aesthetic madness. “The Perfect Colours of Flowers” is a prose meditation on “art,” which carefully and in the subtlest detail describes the slicing of a baby into thin strips which, when held up to the light and looked through, “distorted and disarranged and enriched everything, like some new paintings I have seen” (p 70). It is a stunning piece of writing, frightening in the intensity of its precise and unwavering presentation of the amoral artist at his work. It is important that the speaker is not the person who makes the equipment with which he can then slice the baby up; but he is impressed, and so admires the work that he never seems to notice the murder it entails. Yet the shifts of the narrative, its twists and asides, all work to complicate what it says, as it draws us into its view of things. This brilliant, savage, and frightening piece of writing achieves a deadly stasis in the perfection of death – for its solipsistic speaker. But it cannot do so for us, and that is why it is not the last word in The Night the Dog Smiled nor in Newlove’s own writing life.

            Newlove’s continues to write powerfully affirmative statements on his art. In “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” he says, “This is a business of trying to make things permanent,” and concludes with an argument of profound desire:

 

All the couples of Shakespeare’s sonnets

make sense to me. It was another love

other than the Dark One he reached for.

 

Us.

(p. 41)

 

Yet he has not forgotten Heraclitus, nor the flow of this only world, and in “The Weather” he acknowledges flow and change in himself as well “The Weather” is one of Newlove’s finest poems, a confession of past failure, a celebration of the necessary desire to try again to say things right, to reach out and touch that other lover who is the artist’s audience. And, significantly, in the plainest language, acknowledging ageing, death, and all the weather of living, it does. As the final poem in The Night the Dog Smiled, it puts the case of charity up against the “art” of “The Perfect Colours of Flowers.” It is simply a beautiful work embracing chance and change, and it gets us all back into the middle of our own human living:

 

I’d like to live a slower life.

The weather gets in my words

and I want them dry. Line after line

writes itself on my face, not a grace

of age but wrinkled humour. I laugh

more than I should or more

than anyone should. This is good.

 

But guess again. Everyone leans, each

on each other. This is a life

without an image. But only

because nothing does much more

than just resemble. Do the shamans

do what they say they do, dancing?

This is epistemology.

 

This is guesswork, this is love,

this is giving up gorgeousness to please you,

you beautiful dead to be. God bless

the weather and the words. Any words. Any weather.

And where or whom. I’d never taken count before.

I wish I had. And then

I did. And here

the weather wrote again.

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Primary Sources

 

Newlove, John, Grave Sirs, Vancouver: Robert Reid and Takao Tanabe, 1962.

________.  Elephants, Mothers and Others. Vancouver: Periwinkle, 1963.

________.  Moving in Alone. Toronto: Contact, 1965.

________.  Notebook Pages. Toronto: Charles Patcher, 1966

________.  What They Say. Kitchener, Ont.: Weed/flower, 1967.

________.  Black Night Window. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970.

________.  The Cave. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970.

________.  Lies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972.

________.  The Fat Man: Selected Poems 1961-1972. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976.

________.  and John Metcalf, Dreams Surround Us. Delta, Ont: Bastard, 1977.

________.  The Green Plain. Lantzville, B.C.: Oolichan, 1981.

________.  The Night the Dog Smiled. Toronto: ECW, 1986.

 

Secondary Sources

 

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972.

______. “How Do I Get Out Of Here: The Poetry of John Newlove” Open Letter, Set 2, No. 4 (Spring 1973), 59-70.

Barbour, Douglas. “The Search for Roots: A Meditative Sermon of Sorts.” The Literary Half-Yearly, 13, No. 2 (July 1972), 1-14.

______. “John Newlove: More Than Just Honest Despair; Some Further Approaches,”

Essays on Canadian Writing, Nos. 18-19 (Summer-Fall 1980), pp. 258-61.

_____. “Weather Reports: ‘Stars, rain, forests.’ “ Rev. of The Night the Dog Smiled.

Essays on Canadian Writing, No 36 (spring 198), pp. 90-94.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1975.

Bartley, Jan. “Something in Which to Believe for Once: The Poetry of John Newlove,”

Open Letter, Set 2, No. 9 (Fall 1974), 19-48.

_______.  “An Interview with John Newlove,” Essays on Canadian Writing, No 23

(Spring 1982), p. 135-56.

_______. “A Way With Words. Ottawa: Oberon, 1982.

Davey, Frank. From There To Here: A Guide To English-Canadian Literature since 1960. Erin, Ont. Porcépic, 1974.

Dyck, E.F. “Place in the Poetry of John Newlove,” Canadian Literature, Nos. 122-23

(Autumn-Winter 1989), pp. 69-91.

Henderson, Brian. “Newlove: Poet Of Appearance,” Essays On Canadian Writing, No. 2 (Spring 1975), pp.9-27.

Heraclitus, Heraclitus. Ed. and trans. Philip Wheelwright. New York: Atheneum, 1964.

Jones, D.G. “Moving in Alone: A Review Article.” Quarry, 15, No. 1 (Sept 1965), 12-15.

_________. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature

Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1970.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: The Bodley Head, 1960.

Keith, W.J. Canadian Literature in English, New York: Longman, 1985.

Lecker, Robert, and David O’Rourke. “John Newlove: An Annotated Bibliography.” In

The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors. Ed. Robert Lecker and

Jack David. Vol. VI. Toronto: ECW: 1985, 67-128.

Moritz, A.F. “The Man from Vaudeville, Sask.” Books in Canada, Jan. 1978, pp. 9-12.

Purdy, Al. Rev of Lies. Wascana Review, 8, No. 2 (Fall 1973), 70-72.

Webb, Phyllis. Talking. Dunvegan, Ont.: Quadrant, 1982.

________, Douglas Barbour, and Stephanie Scobie. “Talking the Line.” Writing, No. 4

(Winter 1981-82), pp. 22-25.

Wilson, Milton. “Klein’s Drowned Poet: Canadian Variations on an Old Theme.”

Canadian Literature, No. 6 (Autumn 1960), pp. 5-17.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractus-Logico-Philosphicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F.

McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

Wood, Susan. “Participation in the Past: John Newlove and “The Pride.’” Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 20 (Winter 1980-81), p. 230-40.

 

 


[1] Quoted in A.F. Moritz, “The Man from Vaudeville, Sask.,” Books in Canada, Jan. 1978, p. 12. All further reference to this work (Moritz) appear in the text.

[2]  See his comments on this in Jan Bartley, “An Interview with John Newlove,” Essays on Canadian Writing, No 23 (Spring 1982), p. 137. All further references to this work (“Interview”) appear in the text.

[3]  D.G. Jones, “Moving In Alone: A Review Article,” Quarry, 15, No 1 (Sept. 1965), 12. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[4] D.G. Jones, Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1970), pp 167-68. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[5]  Margaret Atwood, “How Do I Get Out Of Here: The Poetry of John Newlove,” Open Letter, Ser. 2, No. 4 (Spring 1973), 59. All further references to this work appear in the text. This essay first appeared in French, in Ellipse No. 10 (1972), pp. 102-18

[6] Al Purdy, Rev. of Lies, Wascana Review 8, No. 2 (Fall 1973), 70.

[7]  George Bowering, “Where Does The Truth Lie,” rev of Lies, Open Letter, Ser. 2, No. 4 (Spring 1973), 74. This review now forms part of “The Poetry of John Newlove,” in Bowering’s A Way With Words (Oberon, 1982), pp 121-34.

[8] Jan Bartley, “Something in Which to Believe for Once: The Poetry of John Newlove,” Open Letter, Ser. 2, No. 9 (Fall 1974), 19. . All further references to this work (“Something) appear in the text.

[9] Brian Henderson, “Newlove: Poet Of Appearance,” Essays On Canadian Writing, No. 2 (Spring 1975), p.9. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[10] Resources, “Certain Earths,” in Moving In Alone (Toronto: Contact, 1965), p.74. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[11] The “letter” poems include “Love Letter,” “A Letter To Larry Sealey, 1962” (both in Moving It Alone), “Dear Al,” and “Letter Two” (in Black Night Window); the Heraclitean poems are “It Is In Changing,” “The Sun” (both in What They Say), “War Is Both Father,” and “You Can Not Step Twice” (in Black Night Window).

[12]  Frank Davey, From There To Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature since 1960 (Erin, Ont.: Porcépic, 1974), p. 205

[13] Bowring, “The Poetry of John Newlove,” p. 126.

[14] Susan Wood, “Participation in the Past: John Newlove and ‘The Pride,’” Essays on Canadian Writing, No 20 (Winter 1980-81), p 231

[15] Wood, p. 238.

[16]  W.J. Keith, Canadian Literature in English (New York: Londman, 1985), p. 109. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[17] E.F. Dyck, “Place in the Poetry of John Newlove,” Canadian Literature, Nos. 122-23 (Autumn-Winter 1989), p. 69. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[18] “Already the Lies,” in Grave Sirs (Vancouver: Robert Reid and Takao Tanabe, 1962) n. pag.

[19] “The End Justifies The Means,” in Elephants, Mothers and Others (Vancouver: Periwinkle, 1963), No. 1. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[20] See “Talking the Line: Phyllis Webb in Conversation with Douglas Barbour and Steve Scobie,” Writing No. 4 (Winter 1981-82), pp. 24-25

[21]  It is probable that Newlove was alluding to Phyllis Webb’s poem “Moments are Monuments,” which appeared in Even Your Right Eye (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1956).

[22] Phyllis Webb, “On the Line,” in Talking (Dunvegan, Ont.: Quadrant, 1982), p. 67.

[23] Webb, “On the Line,” p. 67.

[24]  Cf., “Crazy Riel,” in Black Night Window (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), p. 18. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[25] Douglas Barbour, “John Newlove: More Than Just Honest Despair; Some Further Approaches,” Essays on Canadian Writing, Nos. 18-19 (Summer-Fall 1980), pp. 258-61.

[26] In The Cave (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), pp. 9-10. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[27] Wittgenstein’s famous first proposition is “The world is all that is the case” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosphicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961], p. 7).

[28] Cf. Stephen Dedalus’ remark, “History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (James Joyce, Ulysses [London: The Bodley Head, 1960], p.42).

[29] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), passim.

[30] Cf. Milton Wilson, “Klein’s Drowned Poet: Canadian Variations on an Old Theme,” Canadian Literature, No. 6 (Autumn 1960), pp. 5-17.

[31] Bowering, “The Poetry of John Newlove,” p. 134.

[32] In Lies (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), p. 17. All further references to this work appear in the text.

[33] This discussion of The Night the Dog Smiled is a revised and expanded version of “Weather Report: ‘Stars, rain, forests,’” rev. of The Night the Dog Smiled, Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 36 (Spring 1988), pp. 90-94.

[34] The Green Plain (Lantzville, B.C.: Oolichan, 1981); rpt. in The Night the Dog Smiled (Toronto: ECW, 1986), pp. 19-23. All further references to this work appear in the text. In The Night the Dog Smiled, “The Green Plain” is compressed into five pages.

[35] Heraclitus, ed. and trans. Philip Wheelwright (New York: Atheneum, 1964), p. 29. And see my comments on Newlove’s Heraclitean poems in “John Newlove,” pp. 272-76.