Life Cycle: Selected Poems

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

George Whipple’s first collection is an amazing tour de force, an incredibly accomplished “selected poems” instead of a first published book with predictable limitations. George who? I ask myself, where has this man been? Well, he has been in a number of small magazines, he wears an anachronistic fedora, and a number of famous Canadian poets are generous in their dust-cover praise. At 161 pages, the book literally bursts with poetic invention; it’s as if Mr. Whipple can barely contain himself with his almost casual deployment of styles, themes, images, and incandescent musicality. The collection’s main theme is embodied in the title, Life Cycle, and seminally wends its way through six sections, from the childhood poems of “In the Beginning,” through nature and season poems, to poems of creation and spiritual self-transcendence, finally to the “slagheap years” of old age and desperation “In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye.” Most effective is the section focusing on artistic creativity: Mr. Whipple’s depiction of the artistic impulse and expression is brilliantly portrayed in poems about music, painting, and writing. The musical poems almost sing off the page, reading as a musician would read a score, and the painting poem about Tom Thomson is sublime in its complete rendering of Thomson’s life and art — the poem is a visual delight, right down to the sense of brushstroke. Mr. Whipple’s facility with structuring effective line breaks, his prosodic sense, his dynamic images which often attain surreal power, his omniscient rhyming, and this overall control of diction are nothing less than awe-inspiring. I hope Mr. Whipple still has something to say in future collections, because this collection is so comprehensive and so mature.