Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Canadian Women’s Poetry by Diana M. Relke

REVIEWS Dean Irvine on Sheila Watson’s Five Stories, Robert Thacker on Alice Munro, and Laurie Kruk on stories of Timothy Find­ ley and Alistair MacLeod. They are of uniformly high qual­ ity. Irvine, dealing with the oldest of our avant-garde shortstory writers (Sheila Watson, Anne Hébert, Jacques Ferron, Ray Smith) draws on Watson’s studies under Marshall McLuhan of Wyndham Lewis to trace Watson’s conflicting desires to re­ cast the classical Oedipus material in an artificial form suitable for bourgeois consumer capitalist society, and/or to demythologise . Kruk brings together two stories, Findley’s “Stones” and M acLeod’s “The Boat.” One can pair writers for contrast: say Alice Munro, whose characters mature in a soil of intertwined extended family and affective roots, and Sinclair Ross, whose eroded characters stripped of family name endure in physical and metaphysical isolation. Or one can pair writers to show similarities in their points of view, ideologies, social settings, whatever. Kruk does something more interesting. She takes two very different writers, and, then, by concentrating on two stories with a common theme, the death of a father, she illuminates a shared sense of elemental sacred order. Both of these critical symposia make valuable contributions to the ongoing studies in their fields, and are themselves testa­ ments to the lively spirit of the humanities. TOM MIDDLEBRO’ / Carleton University Diana M. Relke. Greenwor(l)ds: Ecocritical Readings of Cana­ dian Women’s Poetry. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999. 362. $24.95 paper. There is an urgent question rarely asked, and almost never an­ swered, in academic circles representing themselves as engaged radically in restoring social responsibility to effete literary and cultural studies. Why is the global environmental crisis, with its wide implications for justice and for the very survival of hu­ man and nonhuman life, so unwelcome on our busy-list of con­ texts in need of re-historicizing, re-theorizing, or re-politicizing? W hy does it (or old or new forms of its discourse) hold so lit­ tle attraction for either materialist or deconstructive critical 297 ESC 28, 2002 intervention? Indeed, why, in our profession’s diversified and inclusive climate, do emergent ecocritical perspectives seem at best a marginal hobbyhorse (weekend activism?), at worst an object of derision ( “tree-huggers” )? Much of Diana Relke’s Greenwor(l)ds addresses such ques­ tions. More specifically, this book traces the problematic identi­ fication of the female with “nature” (and of both with “other” ) through numerous skirmishes in a long gender “war” in Cana­ dian women’s poetry and literary-critical convention. Relke “ex­ cavates” this vein in a collection of eight more or less discrete pa­ pers (mostly previously published) on Marjorie Pickthall, Con­ stance Skinner, Dorothy Livesay, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt, P. K. Page, Marilyn Dumont, and Margaret Atwood’s Susanna Moodie. The strictly ecocrit­ ical or ecofeminist emphasis o f the separate studies is uneven, varying from tenuous to thorough and compelling. There is, nevertheless, a consistent framework of concern about “ecocidal ” cultural ideologies — in this case as reflected in particular racist, sexist, elitist, and imperialist myths about the natural environment that endure deeply in Canadian literary history­ making. Relke invokes, and exhibits in vigorous close readings of selected poems, several intellectually and imaginatively attrac­ tive “alternative” envisionings of human-nonhuman relations. The more intriguing of these include conceptions of spatial in­ tersubjectivity (via Jessica Benjamin), of orality and spatiality (via Harold Innis and Ian Angus), and of “half-breed aesthet­ ics” (via Dumont). Relke also establishes that Canadian poetry by women cannot be made to fit Frye’s old but surprisingly entrenched theory that nature has been experienced and re­ presented in this country as a terrifying alien “other.” Along the way she confirms anew that “it is difficult to imagine a sophisticated ecocritical theory that does not attend to the tra­ ditional gendering of nonhuman nature as female” (211). Over against postmodernism’s “masculinist” celebration of fragmen­ tation, oppositional dualism, and pure mind, Relke suggests and deploys, as alternative critical metaphors, such feminist tropes as complementarity, embeddedness, interconnectedness, reciprocity, continuity, the material body, and, most ecologi­ cally (interdependently) of all, what Marlatt terms “enmesh298...

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