Zembla's Rocks

RoseMarie Spearpoint was a librarian with Toronto Public Libraries, and was responsible for children's French selection.

Critic, teacher, poet and theoretician, Louis Dudek iswell known in Canadian literary circles. With several long poems, Europe(1954), En Mexico (1958), Atlantis (1967), and Continuation I (1982), and a substantial body of criticism behind him, Dudek has made an impressive contribution to Canadian literature. Zembla’s Rocks, his first major collection of lyrical poems since The Transparent Sea (1956), is a very personal collection which is disappointing on the whole.

In the preface, Dudek asks the reader to view his poems “as a trace of someone who once existed.” Taken from different times and places, the 120 poems in this collection are divided equally into three sections: “The Air We Breath,” “The Progess of Satire,” and “Cosmogonies.” The poet speaks in three voices: the lyrical observer of everyday life, the satirizer of society and culture, and the meditative poet. Subjects range across the full spectrum of human concerns from cats, to love, to Beethoven. Although some of the lyrical poems and satires work well, a fair number are so brief and ephemeral that they are no more than passing thoughts or simple reflections. “Night lights” and “Like life,” for example, are basically truisms. In poems like “Sleep” and “Retirement,” images fail to convey the intensity of feeling. While poems in straight dialogue verge on mediocrity, straightprose causes many poems to fall flat. Frequently, the poetic experience gets lost in arid abstraction. Like the mythic land of Zembla, Zembla’s Rocks ispretty stark.