Whylah Falls

Laurence Steven is Chairman of the English Department at Laurentian
University and author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s
Fiction.

“Literature be the tongue you do your lovin’ in.” This assertion,
made by Xavier Zachary, the poet in Whylah Falls’ dramatis personae,
encapsulates the character of this unique volume. The poems are each
part of an overall story, much like Master’s Spoon River Anthology.
There are prose poems, narrative monologues, dramatic vignettes, lyrics
(ranging from Chaucerian through Wordsworthian to blues), ballads,
elegies, and sonnets. Clarke’s usual approach combines intense visual
and sensual imagery of the landscape with the passions and beliefs of
the people in it. In spring “pale / Apple blossoms blizzard,” while
the “garden flutes / E-flats of lilacs, G-sharps of lilies.” In this
quasi-Eden, all manner of love and faith proliferate.

Though each poem is part of a greater whole, many stand on their own as
short capsules of truths, some specific and some universal. The division
of the book into seven parts distinguishes the many ways and places love
occurs in the mythical small black community of Whylah Falls, Nova
Scotia. The first and last parts represent the rejection and the
fulfillment of love, respectively.

The indeterminate historical setting—perhaps contemporary, perhaps
circa 1940s—is not nearly as important as the people, but serves to
set up a backdrop of hardships against which they can demonstrate their
perseverance and strength. The simple beauty and sadness of Saul in
“The Argument” (in Part 2: “The Trial of Saul”), and the passage
of time in a collective blues effort in “Four Guitars” (in Part 5:
“The Martyrdom of Othello Clemence”), are but two examples. There
is, perhaps, nowhere a better sense of “taking whatever comes our
way” than in “The Symposium” (again in Part 2), where Cora tells
her daughter Missy that “life’s nothin’ but guts, muscle, nerve.
All you gotta do is stay black and die.”

The book suggests that as hard as life might be, the mere recognition
of beauty—whether it is in love, land, music, or literature—is the
key to perseverance. The volume’s concluding “Envoy” finishes this
way: “We understand death and life now— / How Beauty honeys bitter
pain.” Canadian poetry needs to hear more from Clarke.