Candy from Strangers

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Diana Hartog has won a lot of recognition in a short time. In 1983, her first book Matinee Light (Coach House Press), won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets, and in the same year, she placed second in the CBC’s annual literary competition for a series of poems entitled The Free Box. Candy from Strangers, this interesting and unusual work, her second, has been similarly well received.

The poet deals with a wide variety of themes. One moment, rooted in a romantic reality, meditating on a rainy landscape: “The dangling / tips of the willow shudder, nursed by the swollen creek;” the next, taking off to dizzy heights of the imagination as she portrays a world of carrots: “As I walk: quivering green carrot tops, everywhere. Cropped short, they gather and move in waves out from under me, spreading across the golf course and plunging over cliffs into the sea.” This often whimsical surrealism does not, however, conceal the darker truths that are allowed to peep through. “The Reason for the Accident,” while humorous, reminds us of our mortality. “Add the dip and swerve of an earthquake and I could be trapped in one of those tiny pitching toilets at the rear of a Greyhound: feet braced wide apart above the whine of the engine, and with no way to see the reason for the accident. Which is why I don’t drink fluids, riding on a bus that’s straddling the San Andreas Fault.”

Hartog is at her best appealing to the visual and tactile senses, attaining a certain plasticity that approaches the sensuous! “But listen! Madame Butterfly is on her last pair of gloves: her cry / hurtles towards the fan on the bureau / where blades slice it scarlet, a smear / of ribbons fallen on the floor”, or, “The purity of your brow, smooth and patented as Noel Coward’s / The prow of your tucked white wing, unsinged, art nouveau. / And those two red eyes set like pomegranate cells, monk’s / unblinking garnets, silicon chips.”

Sometimes it is difficult to get a handle on this poet. One wonders what she is really thinking. Does this ironic wit represent an escape from the harsh realities of the world, a defense against the darker truths?