Remembering Mr. Fox

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Christopher Wiseman has been publishing poetry for a quarter of a
century, and is highly respected by discriminating poetry readers,
though he is not as well known as he should be in the rather trendy
world of the Canadian literary establishment. This is partly, I fear,
because he frequently writes about his English origins, and although we
all know about equality, in contemporary Canada some ethnic origins are
more equal than others.

Wiseman deserves recognition for two main reasons. First, he is one of
the most human of poets. He writes about ordinary people, especially
those whom he knew when he grew up in his native Yorkshire. Mr. Fox, for
instance, in the poem that gives this volume its title, is a
nonagenarian living alone in a seaside boardinghouse, ostracized and
neglected. Another, longer poem, “Suite for My Uncle,” records
Wiseman’s farewell visit to a dying relative with characteristic
insight and compassion. Yet, although Wiseman often writes about his own
family and his own biographical experience, these poems are never
limited. “Words to My Grandmother,” for example, is a universally
relevant poem portraying the recurrent conflict between the intolerant
old and the uncomprehending young.

The second reason is that he has developed a poetically satisfying
balance between everyday vernacular speech and the formal patterns of
traditional verse. His poems look conventional on the page—quatrains,
triplets, blocks of blank verse—but the diction and the jagged rhythms
catch an ordinary and decidedly contemporary world. One reviewer wrote
of Wiseman’s selected poems Postcards Home (1988), as “belonging to
the best poetry [that] is understandable to ordinary intelligent
folk.” Wiseman himself belongs with a handful of Canadian poets
(including Don Coles, to whom the volume is dedicated) whose writings
are always readily accessible. Moreover, Wiseman’s art enables him to
achieve profundity and pathos through simplicity and directness.