The Prinzhorn Collection

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

Don Coles’ third collection is a powerful sequence of poems based on a collection of drawings, letters, and journals made by the inmates of a mental institution near Munich in the late nineteenth century. One of the doctors at that institution, a “worthy” Doctor Prinzhorn, salvaged the collection and it was on display in Munich during the poet’s stay there in 1980-81. The Prinzhorn Collection enables the reader to imagine the impact of seeing the inmates’ work: “Mein Lieber, They are strong stuff.” And so is the poetry “strong stuff” — a deliberate, sober probe into the “borders of despair” and “unmistakable awfulness” of life viewed through the allegedly distorted lens of madness. This isn’t to suggest that the poems opt for the shock effect like the portrayal of madness in Marat/Sade: far from it. If anything, the horror is almost banal: “... the amateur / Metaphysics. Not for me to / Meddle with”. Coles uses the vehicle of the inmates’ art to explore “an entire human-condition” — the best canvas for poetry, “the uncontested rhythms of truth.” These poems crystallize a refined yet playful and raunchy imagination: Coles goes much further than looking at drawings and reading letters and journals, having a reaction, writing a poem; he manages to penetrate the medium of the art and get inside the minds and hearts of the inmates and convey what it must have been like. The poems achieve an oxymoronic calm intensity, an incisive, compassionate beauty which is manifested via the absolute rightness of the words and images: “Those untried judges, those glimmering, / Perfect, deepsea listeners.” One sequence in this collection, “Landslides,” was a prize-winning poem in the CBC’s Literary Competition of 1981. A brilliant collection from a major poet.