Learning on the Job

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Robert Currie is a Prairie poet in the traditional sense; his poems are imbued with a sense of place and time, the Saskatchewan of his youth in the 1940s and 1950s. In a sense, Learning on the Job, Diving Into Fire (Oberon Press, 1977), and Yarrow (Oberon Press, 1980) form a trilogy. The two earlier books described a child’s growing up in Moose Jaw. Learning on the Job looks back upon the poet’s past from the vantage point of middle age. The book can, of course, be read independently of the other two, but the experience is more rewarding if the three are read in conjunction.

The unifying vehicle of Currie’s work is memory. We see the poet as a young boy riding a horse on a winter afternoon, as a college boy on a summer job cutting blocks of ice to be loaded onto trains; the poet, middle-aged now, wonders “How come an old guy like me / is still playing basketball?” Or, “The greying poet has returned / to the trestle he once climbed / with limbs agile as monkeys.” The title Learning on the Job implies a boss of the childhood innocence that imbued Diving Into Fire and Yarrow.

Currie uses a combination of techniques: narrative, monologue, and lyric, to make his point, always in a clear, easy-to-read style. He is especially talented in reproducing the vernacular: the rapid-fire speech of a hog auctioneer, the crude words of a biker’s girl, a monologue by a trigger-happy ex-army major, the mental meanderings of a bored car salesman in church, and the childish talk of grade five school boys — “In Grade 5 / when we took the French Revolution / his buddies used to say / If you ever met a guillotine / we’d have a new basketball / Yeah but who ever saw a ball / with freckles and a brushcut? / Besides it’s too big / to make it through the basket / Hey Eddie how come / your head’s so bloody big? / Is it really fulla shit?” Some of the poems are like the old faded sepia portraits that can be found in the trunks of attics. We see Andrew Onderdonk, who had the government contract for the CPR, standing by the Fraser canyon, “Against the hard face of the mountain /a hard man / his face cupped in his hand / his thoughts blasting granite / Beneath him a sheer cliff / that drops like a guillotine / into the Fraser’s slaughter-pen / His eyes strip away the quartz / where the CPR must go.” In poems like this and “Annie Hoburg, Proprietor” Currie’s writing takes on a stark, almost journalistic nature: “a rotogravure from the spring of ‘83 / the dusty trail and narrow storefronts / where not three months before / two buildings rose alone on prairie grass.”

Although these poems are rooted in the Prairie past, they are never banal or prosaic. A simple activity from boyhood, such as riding a horse on a wintery afternoon, takes on an almost mythic significance. In spite of the harshness and starkness that was Prairie life, we are left with a nostalgia for a past that will not come again, for “the faded trail / wound there once by endless lines of buffalo.”