Waking in Eden

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

It is hard to relate the contents of Waking in Eden. In some ways,
Virgo’s collection resembles Winesburg, Ohio: there are few events,
and the story titles—“The Teacher,” “The Prisoner,” “The
Merchant,” “The Widow”—suggest a wish for starkness and
simplicity. Unlike Anderson, however, Virgo rarely names his characters,
and is deliberately vague on time and place.

Virgo’s prose is not nearly so difficult to describe. Waking in Eden
is wrought, swollen, imprecise, preachy, and pretentious to the point of
being unreadable. This excerpt matches the book’s entire tone:

“To begin with. A savannah or plateau: the forest above or below, the
hills, snow even, to the West. The landscape of innocence.

“This is the home of Peking Man, of Australopithecus, of the yet
undiscovered, undreamed of, fossil man of the Pampas.

“Our man is wandering, alone. No need to have him an outcast, or
utterly lost. . . .

“His mind is not crowded like ours. It remarks, and remembers,
everything.

“Sometimes he sings to himself, sometimes the land sings through him.
At night he dreams of conjunctions.

“Pain is a strange kind of pleasure. Fear is a style of excitement.

“He carries a weight without knowing it. He carries a stone, too—a
perforated orb which spoke to him out of the world’s fabric.”

Ten years ago Metcalf claimed to be “profoundly sad” about the
decline of poetry. “I’ve thought for a very long time that the very
act now of ‘writing a poem’ is so artificial that it places the poet
in a hopelessly self-conscious position before he even starts.”
Metcalf concluded that “short stories will be the next genre to
succumb.” Perhaps Waking in Eden is the first plunge down that sad
slope.