Correct in This Culture

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Correct in This Culture is a satisfying volume of poems that traces the themes of alienation and the desire to belong, on the one hand, and the need to retain one’s identity and integrity, on the other. As the values of his early days in a rural Mennonite community continue to clash with those of the city, Enns seeks through his poetry a tentative vision of life in a land which is new but far from Edenic, and in which man’s best method of creating meaning may be through the creative use of words. The collection opens with “Mother Tongue,” a series of deconstructive poems which, although not specifically set in the prairies, are reflective of similar poems by western poets such as Robert Kroetsch. The following three sections build upon the implications of the book’s title and upon the thematic suggestions of the “Mother Tongue” section. These poems are notable for their original depiction of familiar images and events and for their cataloguing of detail, which characterizes much prairie poetry. Enns’s voice modulates between the humorous pathos of “Laugh and the whole world” —

and the controlled outrage of a poem such as “Revolution.” It is the voice of a poet trying to locate himself in a paradoxical land and culture and beginning to succeed in doing so.