The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

Had Lowry not written one of the truly great novels of this century
(Under the Volcano), I doubt we should be seeing the publication of his
collected poetry almost 40 years after his death; he had problems enough
getting any of it published during his lifetime. The book contains 481
poems—from juvenilia dating back to 1925 (when he was 16 years old) up
to the time of his death in 1957. The poetry is expertly edited by
Kathleen Scherf (an associate professor at the University of New
Brunswick) and is backed up by the explanatory annotations of Chris
Ackerley. The result is a tribute to Canadian scholarship and to
Canadian scholarly publishing. Ultimately, however, the book must be
assessed on the merits of the poetry.

In my subjective judgment, most of the poems (qua poetry) would have
been better consigned to oblivion, and none bears the hallmark of a
great poet. It seems as if Lowry was always struggling against the
constraints imposed by the forms of poetry, in contrast to the freedom
of his prose. There are some profound lines, some powerful images, and
enough good poems to put together a slim volume of respectable verse, as
Earle Birney did in the early 1960s with his Selected Poems of Malcolm
Lowry. But the real value of the present collection would seem to lie
almost entirely in the insights the poems provide both to Lowry’s
prose and to his character, and Lowryan scholars will no doubt find the
book an essential resource for mining nuggets of enlightenment.

It is interesting that Lowry regarded himself primarily as a poet, but
it is in his prose that the poet is most evident.