Customer Reviews

New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English Pb (PBK)

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Published for the first time in 1982 this volume is a reference to those interested in exploring the history of English Canadian poetry and culture for the first time. You may not be impressed by the aesthetic of the early Canadian poets but their human message remains powerful, and documents a far less known side of the growth of the North American identity. Margaret Atwood's New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English is one of the rare gateways available to directly access most of these texts.

Unlike your other reviewer, I found the early poems (pre-20th century - including Oliver Goldsmith!) much the best. I'm tempted to say nothing sang, though I suppose Beginning (p295) was worthy of minor Roethke (what am I saying? all Roethke is minor!); for the rest it's the bland leading the bland, as earth-bound as a wounded snow-goose, until we get to the children of the 40s, when it livens up appreciably. That's the early 40s; by the late 40s (her 'probable chestnut-producers of the future'(!) - she's kidding herself and she knows) she loses it completely. Attempts at satire or social comment which might have added spice earlier (Ichthycide, Foreign Aid, Politics, America) are clunky. And a Canadian of all people should not be writing décolletée as décolletaged!! Unless there is some obscure ironic intent - but irony is sparse in this well-intentioned, nay pious volume (and the other eight words of French in the poem are unexceptionable)

To be asked to update an Oxford is both an honour and an intolerable burden, and these strictures do not extend to Atwood's own work, though it is her prose and prose poems (especially The Tent, wrongly categorised in my view as fiction - to boost sales?) that will survive her. Atwood's Marrying the Hangman is the outstanding piece in the collection; is it poetry though?!

Memo to anthologists: there are no 'great Canadian poems'; there are only great poems. I'd have included Phyllis Gotlieb's marvellous versions of Villon, though as hybrids of medieval France and Yiddishkeyt there's nothing Canadian about them. Spare us from collections of the merely 'representative'!