Variorum: New Poems and Old, 1965-1985

Patrick Van Mil was a freelance writer in Banff, Alberta.

This is a sort of “greatest hits” package of Doug Fetherling’s work over the past 20 years, and, like the current trend in greatest hits packages in pop music, it contains both previous works and unpublished ones to whet the reader’s appetite. Though the poems differ little in attitude and style, there is a marked variation in the quality. There are some very good ones and some very ordinary ones, but they are all consistent in their somber, despairing tone. Fetherling is symptomatic of Canadian poetry’s shift from a rural to an urban focus. Of course, leaving rural innocence behind means that the darkness of urban experience cannot be long in coming, but the attitudes of despair and decay in this and other works have been overworked for too long: T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” said as much as this collection and said it in a more focused way 60 years ago. Isn’t it time for some positive reconstruction, both from our artists and from our other architects of society, instead of another chorus of “Oh, woe is us”?

Fetherling’s poems alternate between true expressions of despair (such as “Gone without Saying,” a poem expressing isolation and the vain hope for direction) and melodramatic and paranoic poems that try to shock but only assault one’s senses with bad taste (such as the abortions of “Experimental Death with 1927”). Fetherling does, however, come up with some good lines and perceptive views: “his face like that of an archaeologist / afraid of what he will discover” and “His colleagues spent their lives / as he did / practising emotions / which fail them now when needed.” Lines such as “the best anyone can do / is to keep things in repair” reveal a certain jaundiced view that is hard to take seriously for any length of time. Despite his attempts, Fetherling is not apocalyptic; with the exception of a few good insights, he merely nags.