Franklin's Passage

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.

David Solway is one of the few contemporary poets who can be recognized
as of obvious importance, and in this new volume he has broken
dramatically—and, let me say at once, with dazzling success—from the
work he has hitherto produced. As its title implies, Solway concerns
himself with the fatal third voyage of Sir John Franklin, when 129 men
sailed into Arctic waters—and vanished. However, Solway being Solway,
more is involved than focus on a historical sensation. “Passage” can
also suggest “rites of passage,” birds of passage, and even a small
unit of text. The Arctic journey, in consequence, is a metaphor for
human life, including its triumphs and its follies.

Franklin’s Passage is not, however, an easy book to come to terms
with. Solway shifts startlingly between the Victorian period and the
time at which he is writing the sequence. The “I” of an individual
poem may be Franklin, one of his senior officers, a modern
commentator—or Solway himself. The poems can be in anything from
sonnet form to so-called free verse; verse forms include rhymed and
unrhymed quatrains, ballad-like couplets, etc. The result is an
initially bewildering but ultimately absorbing work that invites us at
one moment to experience the sufferings of the crew and at another to
view the expedition sub specie aeternitatis.

When I encountered Franklin’s Passage, I knew only the basic facts
about the expedition and its fate. Solway prodded me into reading all
the main sources, a task that considerably augmented my appreciation of
his book. Several of the poems, I find, are collages—almost “found
poems”—with passages borrowed from the work of fellow-explorers and
commentators. The exploration of Solway’s text became, indeed,
obsessive but irresistible. Yet this is no trendy experiment. For all
its “postmodernist” trappings, it is a deeply traditional work,
highly memorable not so much for individual lines as for the whole
conception.

I have admired Solway’s poetry for over a quarter-century. An
intellectual and stylistic delight, this is one of his most
challenging—and fascinating—productions.