A Time for Loving

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

In addition to seven new poems, this volume contains fifty-one selected from three previously published collections. According to the introduction by Reshard Gool, the poet is herein seeking to establish his own canon. Gool’s claim that the poet’s chief concern is to oppose the Puritan ethic and its distortion of sexual love further suggests that Crusz does not undervalue his own importance. Although the introduction quite earnestly proposes that Crusz uses his ethnic origin and “colonial strength” to revolutionize Western values, this volume’s most interesting aspect might be the poet’s failure to integrate Western and Eastern imagery.

The first poem, “How Does One Reach the Sweet Kernel,” exemplifies this failure. In it, Crusz describes the violent efforts required to take the husk off a coconut. The fruit and the process of getting at its milk and meat are treated with heavy-handed sexual innuendo. Moreover, the husk is translated into an image of habitual behaviour. This translation does not derive from the process of splitting open the coconut, nor does it match the claim that plums are inferior fruit since they are eaten more genteelly. Not only are the tropes unsustained and incoherently mixed but the schemes are wooden and confused. What this and other poems effect is pompous sonority. This is because the poet seems to take poetry for granted: his persona is not reflexive, nor does he appear to discover fresh perceptions in the process of writing. Far from being self-questioning, his poems stress nostalgia and autobiographical certainties. Strangely, given the claims of the introduction, Crusz is coy about sex: euphemisms abound where one might have expected frankness. His most effective and moving poems concern domestic life rather than erotic love. Especially interesting are those poems in which the writer’s upbringing in Sri Lanka is superimposed on his daily life in Canada. The clash between the styles of consumption in the two countries is often handled with metaphysical wit and poignancy. Even so, the schematic opposition of sun and snow which governs these poems tends to be simplistic and fantastic rather than integral and positively imaginative.

One thing that makes the poet seem somewhat pathetically disengaged from Canadian existence is the lack of pluralism in his poems. He declares his immigrant sensibility, the lost past, and his growing old in terms of cultural duality. Besides only rarely mentioning other cultural minorities, Crusz seems to ignore multicultural possibilities. By speaking as if Canada is one culture, he limits what he can say about his own ethnic background. This gives a fixed and static aspect to his mostly retrospective poems which further implies that he does not grow by writing. Had he written as if his poetic identity were problematic, he might have made his cultural remarks more pointed. As it is, neither his poetic nor social selfhood appears to possess much potentiality because of his detached and external stance. The result of this lack of intensity is that his poems strike one as virtuoso performances. This impression is also borne out by the fantasy in his poems. When he turns eating an orange into the image of forcing a woman sexually, erotic appetite easily displaces personal and cultural issues. By cultivating images of women’s bodies as fruits to be eaten and of their clothes as husks to be ripped off to reveal the edible almond within, he practices a sexual fantasy that is as rhetorically self-defeating as it is violent. For a poet who satirizes consumer society, his sexual fantasies rely, somewhat perversely, on consumerism. There is a voyeuristic, external character to his poems dealing with people that often seems merely to heighten the gap between Western and Eastern erotic sensibilities.