Kerrisdale Elegies

Charles R. Steele was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Kerrisdale Elegies is an ambitious undertaking by a writer of acknowledged achievement. George Bowering already has two Governor General’s awards, one for fiction and one for poetry, and with this collection he will be touted for a third. He has given this book powerful parentage; Rilke’s Duino Elegies is one of the great poems of the twentieth century, and Bowering employs it pervasively as sub-text throughout Kerrisdale Elegies. But appropriately, for the exercise in post-modern phenomenological poetics that Kerrisdale relentlessly is, Rilke’s presence is emphatically an absence, an absence metonymically reified by the eleven limestone pebbles “brought across the sky from a cliffside path /at Duino” (Elegy 9) and given away, all but one. This act of homage is less that of the disciple than of the fan or tourist. Duino is domesticated, Rilke transmogrified — “changed utterly.” But no terrible beauty is born.

Do not expect to find in Bowering’s poem Rilke’s elevation into the realm of metaphysics of the fundamentally and inescapably sorrowful character of human existence. Bowering’s phenomenology necessarily eschews metaphysics. He cannot and does not emulate Rilke’s attempt to use his experience as something more universal than self-expression. But without Rilke’s evocation of the meta-subjective, Bowering’s pervasive sense of loss, his questioning of self-worth and existence, his laments about the “awful longing” of life where “we are now dead” and “evaporating /as our heroes did,” where “our eyes bind things /to our desires” — these become somewhat querulous in tone. Rilke transmogrified threatens to conclude in Kerrisdale and Bowering trivialized. Bowering’s parody in Elegy 3 of Wordsworth’s preexistent soul (turned into a Stephen King ghoul) threatens to become the paradigmatic procedure for the entire poem. And perhaps Bowering wishes it to be so.

This series of reflections and meditations on a personal past, on a suburban locality, on middle age, memory, and art, is nonetheless a bold attempt, in its own way serious poetry; but it may well be betrayed by a philosophy that inhabits the ordinary, that trivializes the domestic, that constrains the imagination and the intellect, and that renders memory and language immemorable.