Fawcett, Brian: Aggressive Transport

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

On the verso of the title page, the reader of this volume is warned that “This book is meant to be read as the current state of the author’s understanding rather than a collection of aesthetic artifacts.” All this caveat really does is to indicate that the poet is not concerned with the craft of poetry and that he presumes his poems have a documentary value. However, most of his poems are dominated by frustration and lamentation. With little modulation, the poet hectors himself and his readers about the collapse of personal feelings and the contradictions of political ideologies. He is particularly energetic in his generalizations about the ills of capitalism. But his reactions to the irrationalities of the world are too prosaic; they lack the playful and subversive qualities that the great poetry of the past has been able to advance against the worst of evil. The problem for Mr. Fawcett is that he rejects the tasks of traditional poetry, that he does not employ poetry to confront what disgusts him about modern urban existence. Although he deals with poetic myths, such as that of Orpheus, he seems bent on proving that traditional figures and images do not achieve a transformation of ugliness and evil. No doubt, the poet’s intelligence is acute, but he seems to fortify the powers of confusion that he wants to reject by not entering them imaginatively enough. His voice is too discursive; he turns images into slogans; his very attempts to hit out at ideologies become ideological. His sense of anxiety is actually lethargic rather than acute; his discursive presentation of anxiety ensures that we do not feel it. When confronted frequently with expressions such as “Nowadays / the forms of love are a constant puzzle / not the least the puzzle of / should love exist at all” (p. 35), the reader remains unmoved. Mr. Fawcett’s unconcern with aesthetics extends to rhetoric. The poet, then, unacceptably narrows the grounds of poetry, refusing to see in traditional aesthetics a dialectic that can transform the poet’s sensibility into a poetic resource. One of the bitter ironies of this literary reaction is that, in describing personal and social ills, the poet aggravates them. Turning his back on poetic discourse, he takes on the idiomatic discursiveness of the culture he would criticize and, sadly, makes it more powerful than it is.