The Floating Garden

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.

D.G. Jones has always been fascinated by gardens, the flowers and birds
that inhabit them, and the human beings who tend them. But “floating
garden” also suggests “floating world” (the phrase is used in one
of the poems), the oriental symbol in literature and art for the
insubstantiality of our experience. And again, Oriental references are
common in Jones’s work, and no more prominently than here, where
allusions to Chinese poets and painters are especially frequent.

One of these gives a clue to the character of the whole book: “during
the Japanese occupation, I’m told / Ch’i Pai-shih painted shrimp.”
Ch’i Pai-shih was a great painter of the earlier part of this century
who continued to paint into a venerable old age. Jones is not yet
venerable in that sense, but he is now elderly, and the freewheeling,
assured, even serene meditations that make up this book can be
recognized as an aging vision.

The temptation, of course, is to retire to cultivate one’s garden,
floating or otherwise, and to some extent Jones does that. He
concentrates on the small details (Ch’i Pai-shih’s shrimp) seen
while puttering in his garden or exercising his dog, and there is
nothing wrong with that. But he cannot ignore the disturbing pressures
from outside, coming as they do through the intruding media of
newspapers and TV, and the basic serenity of this book is punctuated by
references to unemployment, overpopulation, political violence, the
tyranny of the stock market, and the intellectual and aesthetic banality
of the computer age. The title of one poem-sequence, “How to Faint in
the Recession,” is once again indicative.

The book divides into six sections: five are poem-sequences, one a
collection of individual poems. They have the same delicacy of
perception, the same surprising shifts of tone, the same quietly
brooding quality that his readers have come to expect. A worthy
successor to his earlier volumes of verse.