Cross/cut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry

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

Cross/cut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry is a smorgasbord of English Quebec poetry. It proves the fact that there is much fervent poetry activity going on in the Quebec anglophone community these days.

Jointly edited by two of Quebec’s more prominent young poets, Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn, Cross/cut is an impressive, beautiful book. Seventy poets are offered as proof of “the variety, abundance, and intensity of their activity,” as Van Toorn states in his long and digressive introduction. I grant that Van Toorn has a lot to introduce: namely, the cultural reality of Quebec, so misunderstood elsewhere, and how the poets fit in. He does this fairly well, although his style is turgid and some of his statements you must take with a grain of salt (such as “Quebec’s English writers [are] labouring in an ambiance of mass exodus”).

Cross/cut does not include a lot of fat. It manages to net 70 competent poets by including only one to five poems each and by reaching in both directions: that is, to the older, well-established poet and to the younger, less polished but enthusiastic poet. Whereas the earlier anthology, Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies (Véhicule, 1977), was more limited in that it emphasized one kind of poet (younger) and one kind of poetry (loosely wrapped), Cross/cut is wider in scope and more ambitious: it’s got it all, from big to small, from Mona Adilman to Noah Zacharin. That makes it both very valuable and liable to grow flaws with age. For example, some of the older poets (Layton, Dudek, Cohen) hardly need be anthologized here; some of the younger ones will never be heard from again (I dare not mention names).

Cross/cut is an important book in its field, and it will be some time before anything as good can be produced. The title acknowledges its limitations. It is an excellent compromise between those two weak extremes of poetry anthologies: it is neither a collection of already known poems nor too pretentiously exhaustive.