Barbed Lyres: Canadian Venomous Verse

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

1990 was a vintage year for Canadian satirists. This volume stems from a
timely contest for funny, angry verse sponsored by This Magazine and
edited by Ellen Vanstone.

Typical targets include the Meech Lake constitutional conference, free
trade, the Senate, and the gst. More whimsical topics ranged from
Brian’s chin (“Chinocchio” by Victor Emerson) to the balding head
of a certain cbc anchor (“The Anchor With No Coverage”). A recurring
line, with variations and an obvious debt to T.S. Eliot, is “Do I dare
to eat a Meech?”

Poetry feeds on poetry, and W.B. Yeats inspired the following: “The
feds lack all conviction, while the banks / Are full of passionate
intensity / . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /
Slouches towards Ottawa to be born?” Early Birney’s famous “Case
History” inspired a clever new version by Stephen Grant.

There are some marvelous rhymes, including “banked on . . .
plankton,” and “There once was a man from Shawinigan, / Who was out,
but aspired to be inigan.”

In her foreword, Margaret Atwood calls this collection a tribute to a
tradition of wittily phrased, morally indignant dissent. Certainly the
spirit of satire is alive and well in Canada, a point nicely underlined
by the cartoons of Aislin, a.k.a. Terry Mosher. Barbed Lyres is a
welcome antidote to the troubles of the times.