Selected Poems 1933-1980

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

George Faludy’s poems testify to a life lived with passion and intellectual fervor in the face of political persecution and cultural hollowness. The auto-biographical image that his poems cumulatively present is that of a man confident in his virility and committed to political subversion. As lover and scholar he disclaims traditional morality. He often defines himself through sexual experience, occasionally regarding sexual excitement as consolation for political disappointment. His attitude towards women, partly because he so frequently objectifies their anatomy, is old-fashioned and sexist. It is with a certain irony that throughout his poems he employs sexual revelry to defy political and cultural complacencies.

Faludy also satirizes male sexual attitudes, as when he describes the bland nostalgia of a friend of Pontius Pilate who cannot imagine why the splendid prostitute he went with gave up her living to join Christ.

Not unexpectedly, he does not spare established male writers. In this volume he attacks Milton, Flaubert, and Sartre, among others. He much prefers artists who create from a sense of struggle and frustration. Hence, he impersonates Michelangelo bitterly but creatively resenting the fact that his images do not reach through to the glory of God.

The way Faludy uses women sexually and poetically isnot always creative. In his Second World War poems, sex, rather than defying death, is dominated by it. Sex is administered to him rather than created by him.

The poems he wrote as a political prisoner after the war are moving but not deeply informed by sexual experience. They convey the split between active and passive sides of identity, and the loss of sympathetic imagination, pleasure in the past, and confidence in poetry. Speaking equally feelingly about the pure joy of being and the plausibility of suicide, Faludy testifies to the way meaningless cruelty destroys sexual expression and makes him think simplistically of women as either sexless or whorish. In these poems, the sexual imagery conveys political and cultural violation.

The poems about his dying wife are powerful and unsentimental. They confront death immediately and help the poet come to terms with his need for sexual gratification. A series of frank sonnets records his sexual fascination with a new partner, but his remarks about using sex to reach through to spirit are neither convincing nor carefully sustained.

Later poems effectively capture the alienation that comes from experiencing totalitarian force and capitalistic decadence. Faludy enjoys freedom in the west but resists its materialistic philosophy.

The most remarkable aspect of the later poems collected here is their contempt for North American consumerism and popular culture. However, despite his avowed concern for common people and the value of experiencing the difficulties of civilization, it is not clear that Faludy does more, finally if impressively, than retreat into books and rhetorical experience and into the self-contained world of passion.