The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Bullock has for 50 years (divided almost equally between Britain and
Vancouver) been writing surreal prose and poetry, as well as translating
from French, German, and Italian. He is arguably the most proficient
surrealist in Canada today, and certainly the most prolific, having
authored more than two dozen books. He is also a skilled artist, having
had shows in Western Canada and in Britain.

Stewart’s aim, in this first critical study of Bullock’s work,
“is to give a comprehensive (if necessary selective) view of Michael
Bullock’s poetry and fiction over the course of half a century. . . .
He is the author of a body of subtle and ingenious work that deserves
wider recognition.” Stewart proceeds by tracing the phases of the
author’s writings, from the early poetry period of
“imagism/expressionism/surrealism” in Transmutations (1938), Sunday
is a Day of Incest (1961), and World Without Beginning Amen! (1963), to
the more polished visions of the later works, particularly the most
recent fictions collected in Randolph Cranstone Takes the Inward Path
(1988) and The Invulnerable Ovoid Aura and Other Stories (1991). This is
perhaps the only logical approach possible in the study of a writer as
prolific as Bullock, and probably the best, since themes, symbols, and
even characters occur and recur with increasing frequency.

Stewart quite correctly sees nature as the source of much of his
subject’s imagery. Bullock’s “nature,” however, is deeply
transmutational —it is as “natural” for flowers to grow out of a
man’s hand (The Man With Flowers Through His Hands, 1985) or for
rivers to anthropomorphize into women, as it is for a lush garden to
sequester secret treasures. Stewart makes the point that although
surrealist writing is esoteric, Bullock’s fantastic images are couched
in a concrete and precise language that has been polished and honed over
the writer’s long career. The way to read Bullock is to allow the
images to wash over the senses, entering the mind through the
imagination—images such as those in the poem “The Incandescent
Word” ( from World Without Beginning Amen! ): “You hold the key that
turns the lock on day. / you have the eye that sees beneath the skin. /
Yours is the hair that ties the magic knot, / that nets the falling
rain, the blood, the dust.”