Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem ed. by Frank M. Tierney, Angela Robbeson, and: Dominant Impressions : Essays on the Canadian Short Story ed. by Gerald Lynch, Angela Arnold Robbeson (review)

952 Reviews poetics', which is disjointed, accumulative, ironic, and metaphorically daring, as it summons a vision of selfhood in the midst of cultural fragmentation. This precariously integrated vision Trehearne calls 'integritas', adopting James Joyce's term. The search for an authentic unity amid cultural chaos is a familiar Modernist ambition ('Thesefragments I have shored against my ruins',lamentsT. S. Eliot'sFisher King), but I am not sure why Trehearne favours the theologically loaded term 'integritas'. As he presents it, however, its Latinate splendour is beset by modern ambiguities. Poetic/cultural/psychological unity becomes a pressing need only because it is absent, and so it is as much an expression of anxiety as the cure of that anxiety. Although it sounds triumphant, it participates in an aesthetic of loss that may replicate the chaos that it is meant to counter. In lyrical poetry, this produces a paradoxical need to 'integrate without unifying', as expressed in the puzzle of 'impersonality' (another of Eliot's maxims) whereby self-afBrmation must be sought through self-effacement. Trehearne shows in patient detail how the four poets undertake this project, with two of them (Page and Klein) eventually falling silent and two (Layton and Dudek) advancing to a more 'personative' style. Trehearne begins with a grand gesture of rewriting Canadian literary history. He shows that the celebrated dispute between two poetic schools, one led by John Sutherland and his magazine First Statement, the other by Patrick Anderson and his rival journal Preview, is factitious, since the two groups actually had much in common. They were all forties poets. Perhaps this is so, but Trehearne makes more of this mi? nor scrap than it deserves; after all, we are talking about a few articles written in the flimsiest ofjournals read by a handful of friends. I do not dispute Trehearne's point, only his need to spend fortypages proving it. He is fond of clear-cut distinctions that he has trouble maintaining. He limits himself to Montreal, but not really, and to a single decade, but with the proviso that it extends from 1942 to 1954. This limitation then forces him to study Layton's weakest poems, since Layton found his poetic voice only in the mid-fifties, while Dudek's best work, Continuations, was written in the 1980s, yet is examined here. Trehearne sometimes overstates his case in an inflated style that grows pompous ('eloign', 'selvage') or self-congratulatory. Still, the book deserves congratulation. It is extremely impressive in its research (archives, variants, letters, and critical articles) and in the acuteness of its analysis. Trehearne writes with an authority that he earns. University of Calgary Jon Kertzer Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem. Ed. by Frank M. Tierney and Angela Robbeson. (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers, 21) Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 1998. v+192 pp. $25. Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story. Ed. by Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson. (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers, 22) Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 1999. vi+i68pp. $22. Reappraisals is a stylishly presented series that stems from a yearly symposium held at the University of Ottawa. The series aims to create a body of criticism on neglected Canadian writers or themes, and the two volumes reviewed here, nos. 21 and 22, focus, respectively, on the Canadian long poem and Canadian short stories, both of which are genres somewhat neglected by the critics in relation to Canadian literature as a whole. Bolder Flightsis a tightcollection ofthirteen essays, chronologicallyarranged by the publication dates of the long poems under consideration. The introduction helpfully summarizes the essays but offers no overarching analysis. The individual contribu- MLR, 97.4, 2002 953 tions, while dealing with disparate topics and adopting different critical positions, none the less form a coherent whole. The first essay, by D. M. R. Bentley, noted expert on the Canadian long poem, offersa helpful survey ofthe genre; it ends with a conservative plea against post-structuralist dismissal of the long poem. Indeed, this topic is revisited frequently in the firsthalf of the collection, becoming most noticeable in the two pieces on E. J. Pratt. These essays, by Gwendolyn Guth and Sandra Djwa, which take Smaro Kamboureli's critical text On the...

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