Street of Dreams

Bruce K. Filson was a freelance writer and critic residing in Chesterville, Ontario.

The title juxtaposes two elements foreign to one another: “street” is the physical, plain and straight; “dreams” invokes the ephemeral, unusual and rich in spirit. For some time now, many Saskatchewan writers have pulled off just such a trick: infusing the banal facts of prairie existence and its (supposed) cultural deprivation with the haunting of the mind, the spirit, the personal and eventual cultural myths of their times. Gary Hyland — as so many others have done, including his own Moose Jaw poets group — adds to the growing corpus of prairie literature in its most persistent genre, poetry, and in its most common anthem: introspective narrative, dealt out in vestiges or glimpses, torn pieces of insect wings found in little boys’ pockets by the grown men they have become.

Here we find the usual stories: making snow angels, playing Monopoly, chasing girls on bicycles, playing tricks on adults. And the cast of tough immigrants: “A bright floral apron riding the waves of her skirt /Mrs. Pomoski walked her tiny garden aisles”; Mr. Kroski who tells the kids he sprayed his corn “wiz-arzanic”; Nazi Millar and Mr. Binner. It’s all here — pure prairie league. One new dimension not found elsewhere in this kind of writing: detached self-portrayal along with texts that can detach and remove themselves from their own meaning. Or is that two dimensions?