Talking Water, Talking Fire

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Jim Tallosi’s first volume, The Trapper and the Fur-Faced Spirits, appeared in 1981. Like the present book, it was attractively illustrated by Réal Bérard and came from the same publisher. In other respects, too, the books are similar. Both consist of nature poetry, generally brief notations in verse describing the Canadian wilderness and interspersed with allusions to and recreations of Indian myth and folk-belief.

Such verse is not fashionable in our urban centre; you won’t find Tallosi in Dennis Lee’s The New Canadian Poets, 1970-1985, though in my opinion a number of less talented poets are represented there. Tallosi’s is a quiet, unassertive voice that the metropolitanly-minded can easily shrug off as backward-looking, no longer relevant. But here is a sample: “it is not a high wind / like the one that rides / in tall trees / it is humble / and walks among the roses” (p. 11). A good emblem for his own verse. Tallosi asks us to turn, in his own phrase, “to the little things in our worlds” (p.64). He often catches the spirit, if not the form, of haiku.

Personally, I find these poems refreshing, timely, impressive in their unostentatious directness. At the same time, they illustrate the difficulties of attempting a “pure” nature poetry. They rarely venture beyond straight (sometimes almost diary-style) description. Unlike the best work of Wordsworth or Lampman or Edward Thomas or Frost, and despite the fact that human figures occasionally enter the poems, they never go beyond nature poetry to become “human nature poetry.” I derived great pleasure from reading individual poems but, as I went on, I found myself asking for more. Moreover, Talking Water Talking Fire records no obvious advance over The Trapper and the Fur-Faced Spirits; Tallosi merely gives us more of the same. And this is a pity, however accomplished that same may be. I hope that, in his next book, he will interpret rather than just record the wilderness images he loves and knows so well.