The Gayk Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690-1990

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.

Since the 1970s, David Bentley, the driving force behind the journal
Canadian Poetry, has been publishing essays on Canadian poetry that are
informed by what he calls an ecological approach to reading texts. He is
keenly interested in the relationship between landscape and poetic form,
as well as in the complicated allegiances of British-North-American
writers, whose feet were firmly planted in Canada but whose eyes were
often turned longingly homeward.

The Gay] Grey Moose (the whimsical title refers to the rewriting of a
line in a poem by Joseph Howe, which Bentley sees as neatly
encapsulating the paradox of Old World/New World perceptions) combines
those previously published essays with unpublished work. The central
thesis turns on what Bentley calls the baseland/hinterland orientations,
the former giving rise to poems in traditional forms and the latter to a
more open, processual kind of poem. Like any such contention, this idea
produces some very interesting readings of individual poems and poets,
but it is also somewhat reductivist and restricting at times. One is
reminded of Dennis Lee’s equally interesting and equally reductivist
readings of Leonard Cohen and Michael Ondaatje through the dichotomy of
“world” and “earth” in Savage Fields.

This is a big and demanding book, and if its central hypothesis has
limitations, Bentley is an astute critic and has much of interest to say
about a host of Canadian poets from the 17th to 20th centuries. His
essays should provoke a good deal of discussion among Canadian literary
critics and are well worth reading.