Lawren Harris in the Ward: His Urban Poetry and Paintings.

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.

A first response to this book is likely to be positive. Gregory Betts has had the seemingly good idea of juxtaposing Harris’s early paintings of the working-class Toronto of his time with his poems commenting on conditions of life in the area depicted. It is a handsomely produced book, well-designed, with good colour reproductions and attractive print. Yet, closer examination reveals it as a botched job.

The poems are politically simplistic, spiritually pretentious, and too often technically inept. Harris never mastered—perhaps never understood—the subtleties of free verse. Specimen: “Every evening / In an old cart / Three members of a French family come / To collect the garbage / For the pigs.” I indicate line breaks, but this is obviously prose—and flat prose at that. Such verse could legitimately be quoted as evidence of a rich man’s uneasy social conscience, but not as poetry. Another specimen: “Girls go wrong, / Wars come along … / Nobody gets anything. / Everyone is defeated….” Harris had a tin ear for words and rhythms.

The paintings are much more interesting. One gets the impression, however, that Harris is (properly) more interested in colour, shape, and mass than in illustrating poverty. The rare figures in his cityscapes appear picturesque rather than downtrodden. Poems and paintings never meaningfully interconnect.

The editing is decidedly odd. Betts shows no respect for the construction of a painting as a whole: all the reproductions turn out to be details from paintings. He has an idiosyncratic prose style (“In the small of Toronto between the two great wars …”) and is not always in command of punctuation and grammar (“The paradoxically cynical-optimism of these lines …”). He tells us that some of the poems were published while others appear for the first time, but doesn’t indicate which are which. No present locations for individual paintings are offered, so we cannot check the originals. He presents intimate details of Harris’s rackety personal life, but provides no sources, and no list of recommended further reading.

In short, this is one of the most frustrating books I can remember reading.