The Exiled Heart: Selected Narratives 1968-1982

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

This selection of Gutteridge’s long historical poems written between 1968 and 1982 shows a consistent interest in giving solidity to the past, and capturing the flavour of life through stories, characters, and phrases. Figures of Canadian history appear here: Louis Riel, Sir John A., Samuel Hearne, Matonabbee, Maquinna, and Tecumseh. Other figures are anonymous, but powerfully realized, such as the pioneer woman who struggles to conceal the savagery of life in the cabin with crude domestic comforts. Another range of characters (in “The True History of Lambton County”) comes from Gutteridge’s own family who migrated from Ulster and England to South-Western Ontario. This is not a gentle land, Gutteridge tells us. His historical Canada, whether in the eighteenth century or the early twentieth century, is a fierce world where natural circumstances and human imperative share a brutal immoderateness. Even the settled artisans of his immediate family live at the slightly frenzied pace of the dance. Gutteridge’s favoured vehicle for conveying this sense of life lived at the edge is the quick, terse poetic line; when it lengthens it relaxes, as in elegiac memories of Gutteridge’s relatives, and we experience the more genial emotions, given room, warming, and coming alive. The title becomes apposite at this point: the heart, allowed to return to fullness, is restored from exile.