A Stand of Jackpine: Two Dozen Canadian Sonnets

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

In 1981 when Milton Acorn and James Deahl were sharing an apartment in Toronto, Acorn proposed that they submit to Unfinished Monument Press a chapbook entitled A Stand of Jackpine: Two Dozen Canadian Sonnets. However, Acorn returned to Prince Edward Island, and the project didn’t get underway until the summer of 1986, when the poet returned to Toronto. Simultaneously he began work on Whiskey Jack and The Uncollected Acorn, but died before any of these publications went to press.

Jackpine is really a posthumous tribute to Acorn. Ten of the 12 sonnets that comprise his section can be found in his other publications. The book is really a collection of his very best sonnets in the jackpine format: “Spell Against Madness,” “Completion of the Fiddle,” “The Unlighted Hour,” and “A Letter to my Red-headed Son.” The remaining sonnets include two originals, “The Naked Goddess” and “To Jim Deahl: 1985.” The book is Acorn in microcosm, with his basic themes of love, love of life, society’s ills, scorn, bitterness, but always with that hope and vitality that characteristically infused his work.

James Deahl’s sonnets tend to be more formally constructed than Acorn’s. He adheres to a regular line length of ten syllables, whereas Acorn varies his line lengths considerably. The two longer sonnets, “The American Sonnets” and “Pittsburgh,” are songs of America. Deahl (an American by birth) portrays the American experience, the naive dreams of the newcomers to the new world — “Temple Goddess, mysterious and pure, / your triple-layered robe tempts all who dream”; but the dream quickly turns to reality among the steel mills, railroads, and the Depression years — “New York / Pittsburgh / Chicago, the darkest / skin lies blistered on these mean streets. Singing, / scorching, the fire dancers shimmer on this / common lusting land.”

The two short sonnets are tributes to Acorn. Using Acorn’s own imagistic patterns (he was taught the form by Acorn), Deahl pays a beautiful tribute to the “people’s poet”: “By this worn moon I see you’re Island-born / face red as clay from an undercut cliff / where gusts rasp fresh as salt. On silver nights / when a ghost tide booms off the south shore / I’ve heard you called a rock god, sovereign and / elemental as the natural law that / laid these hills, these fields, white in shifting light.”