Grasshopper

Bill Brydon was a librarian/journalist in Toronto.

Another prairie book. After our world ends extraterrestrial academics will conclude that the Canadian prairies were a desolate wasteland dotted with storehouses stuffed with unsold wheat and poetry.

The more a popular setting is used and overused, the more iron-clad its cliches become. No matter how serious and sincere the vision, nothing can take the place of invention.

Helen Hawley’s Grasshopper is a serious vision of social and economic decline in the prairies. No doubt it touches on issues that have not yet been properly covered by the CBC. These are conveyed in fragments: fragments of speech, fragments of scene and detail, fragments of thought. The result is a scrapbook of prairie realities, images juxtaposed in old-fashioned ways, rendered in old-fashioned free verse. There is no powerful, sustained writing.

The metaphor of the grasshopper, who comes and goes, sees and is unseen, and leaves no trace, is the poem’s unifying idea. However much feeling was involved in its creation, it is an ineffective and mechanical way of linking the poem’s imagery. The reason is that the overall purpose is never clear. Diverse and chaotic imagery can be made to work, but only if a poem has an easily grasped structure and reiterated message. In Grasshopper the reader is always grasping for the meaning of specific images, never quite sure what he should be comparing them to. This is no fun.

And fun is important. All good poetry is good entertainment, no matter how bleak its tone. The challenge facing all those who strive to use poetry for social comment is to put aside earnestness and write entertainingly. Any moral preoccupations will express themselves unbidden.