Nanoose Bay Suite

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

Although the setting in this engaging collection is the west coast of British Columbia, its most interesting features derive not from description but from the poet’s philosophical explorations of the relationship between man, machine, and nature. In referring to sea, rivers, mountains, and animals, the poet conveys a sense of the power of non-human things that prevents him from feeling simply at home with the coastal setting and from presenting it in picturesque terms. When he does describe it straightforwardly in order to make ecological arguments against tourism, he tends to be prosaic, sometimes even long-winded. However, in his better poems, he remains conscious of a barrier that language imposes between the setting and himself, a barrier that can be surmounted only by juxtaposing natural and mechanical imagery, by seeing how machines and tools serve imaginative functions because of their very utility.

In his first poem, the poet speculates about how a young girl whose skeleton he uncovers met her death. His floundering reaction to the violence of the past is partly offset by the way he attributes animal features to the backhoe that unearthed the skeleton and to death itself: the backhoe sniffed out the skeleton with its blind snout, death was the girl’s lover, coiling round her like a snake. The mixed imagery offsets the poet’s sense that discursive words constrict him; it also helps him glimpse how death and violence can be overcome. Hence, the spawning and death of salmon he presents as a sacrament, a myth of selfless protection of posterity. The title of the volume, the name of a bay whose natives were massacred by the Haida, is significant to him because the people who were once slaughtered like fish have returned and flourish. Scornful of fishermen because in their overequipped boats they have a merely mechanical attitude to herring, which leads to overfishing, the poet celebrates airplanes because they reinforce myth and sacramental images by providing the opportunity to view huge schools as vast, twisting pythons. Roberts continually juxtaposes the positive and negative features of nature and machines. Hence, he celebrates the technical knowledge necessary for reducing huge logs to firewood in order to resist the cunning cold of nature. In another poem, he presents the world as a snake perpetually eating itself and moving in a way that defies construction of such things as sea walls. He will not see natural elements free of violence. Looking at the stones on the beach, he realizes their utility as weapons; the stones may be smooth but once they were rough, just as ritual violence now admired for its dramatic splendour was once merciless. Even the sea’s marching against the land deserves the military image of goosestepping. Not surprisingly, submarines that enter the bay have a residual imaginative impact that hauntingly induces fear and pessimism, imaging man’s incursions into nature and self-destruction.

Roberts does not, however, stress only the negative aspects of natural violence. Because violence derives from the interplay of natural and human forces, it can be positive. Boys building sandcastles are not reduced to inaction by the destructive tides. Rather, the sea shows them that they can rebuild as often as the tides can knock down. Machines and tools can even reconstruct myth. Hence, in two poems describing the risky, seemingly impossible maneuvers of water bombers working to extinguish forest fires, Roberts sees airplanes reenacting the thunderbird myth. This volume is well worth reading for the purposiveness with which it mixes imagery and for the way it fuses concepts of utility and myth.