Motion's Eye, Collected Poems of Murray Boyce

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

The late Murray Boyce’s only published book, Woodstock, was published in 1972. This collection includes Woodstock and most of the work he completed before his untimely death in 1983. Mr. Boyce started writing in his forties, and, as the quite lovely introduction by his widow, Carolyn Struthers, makes clear, he was something of a renaissance man: a doctor, a world traveller, a naturalist, an amateur musician and athlete, and, finally, poet. The poetic muse took strong hold of Boyce, and, as Victor Coleman points out in the preface to this “collected works, “ he moved further and further into creating poems which needed more developed means of expression — poems characterized by longer lines, “with more attention being paid to the phrase, the musical pulse, or the pulse of the heart and breath.” It is fascinating to view this development, this fleshing-out process in a poet, particularly when so many poets are experimenting with the long line. Boyce was clearly ahead of his time and onto something, because these poems, both long and short, positively vibrate with nature and colour and sounds:

Breast
fire)
orange
you
streak like a frisking mermaid
naked aspens
come erect
waving
in the
light

(From “in may, rain sun flowers oriole.”)

Many of the poems in the second part of the collection — entitled “Motion’s Eye” — are quite visual and full of offbeat humour (“My father’s first cousin Or / put his feet in the oven a lot”), odd rhymes, and what seems to be a kind of unfinished coming-to-terms with memory. The rapid-fire images and quirky narrative line do not mesh all that well: it is as if Boyce would have honed these poems down further, and taken them to their resolution. Victor Coleman has done a good job of editing these poems to read smoothly, but they lack the coherence evident in many of the poems in Woodstock.

There are some splendid poems here and we should offer thanks to Coach House and Victor Coleman for making Murray Boyce’s work available once again. It is a shame that Boyce will not be writing future poems.