Complete Poems, Part 2: Original Poems, 1937-1955 and Poetry Translations

Bruce Whiteman is Head of Rare Books at the McGill University Libraries
and author of The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books II to IV.

Among the signs that the academic study of Canadian literature is
maturing is the increasing number of works that are being made available
in proper editions. As recently as a dozen years ago, there were none.
Now we have the 18th- and 19th-century novels produced by the Centre for
Editing Early Canadian Texts, the Pratt edition in progress from the
University of Toronto Press, the long poems issued by D.M.R. Bentley’s
Canadian Poetry Press, and the Collected Works of A.M. Klein, of which
the monumental Complete Poems under review here forms a part. These
various projects provide students and critics with exactingly determined
texts, and are the sine qua non for interpretative and historical study.

Klein is arguably the most important Canadian poet of his generation,
and a writer whose life circumstances were distressingly emblematic of
the situation of many artists in Canada. The heartrending truths of
“Portrait of the Poet as Landscape” are so in part because of
subsequent events in Klein’s personal life and our knowledge of them;
they also say a good deal about the position of the Canadian poet at
mid-century, whatever else they say about any poet at any given time.
The Rocking Chair and Other Poems, in which the poem was collected,
deservedly won the Governor General’s Award in 1948, and remains as
fresh and compelling a book of poems as any published in English Canada
before 1960.

Pollock has produced a finely researched text of Klein’s poetry,
beginning with a group of poems written when Klein was still a teenager
and ending in 1955, when mental illness silenced him. (“How was I to
know, these months in my mother’s womb, / that exit meant ambush?”
runs the third-last fragment in the book.) There are more than 700 pages
of poetry and translations here, in addition to the extensive scholarly
apparatus. The price of these two volumes will limit their market pretty
much to libraries, but every serious student of A.M. Klein will have to
consult them. This edition supplants the 1974 Collected Poems (edited by
Miriam Waddington) and might, if reissued in paperback in the future, be
on the shelf of essential books that any reader interested in Canadian
poetry will have to own.