Into a Blue Morning: Poems Selected and New: 1968-1982

Maggie Helwig was a freelance writer and Professor of Pre-Industrial Arts, UPRPU, Peterborough, Ontario.

C.H. (Marty) Gervais is a man of many activities — founder of the fine Black Moss Press, book editor of the Windsor Star, and author of two plays, two children’s books, an “oral history” of Prohibition, and six books of poetry. Into a Blue Morning, a selection from the poems he has written over the last 13 years, chosen by Al Purdy (who also provides a short introduction), reflects both the talent that has made such a career possible and the weaknesses thus produced.

There is a danger, when a writer works in a great many fields — some of them only partly literary — that he will never root himself deeply in any of them, that he will remain an intelligent trifler; and Gervais has not avoided this. Far too much of his poetry never rises above the clever and incidental; it is the work of a skillful amateur.

By this I mean amateur in the best sense, and the word carries no overtones of naivety or lack of sophistication. Indeed, Gervais’s major flaw is that his work is too sophisticated, too polished, bright but insubstantial. There are not many images that are not the old, time-worn ones, although the flash with which he treats them may obscure this at first.

Sometimes, too, one suspects that Gervais should not be writing poetry — a number of the pieces, most notably “Riding the Paris Metro” and “Blackberries,” are quite fine, impressionistic prose, with the peculiarity that most of the lines do not reach the end of the page.

Nevertheless, there is something here. Moving beneath the shiny surface is a current of imaginative strength and vision, a solid and tangible emotional basis. In Gervais’s later work, especially, this is beginning to free itself from the cleverness, drawn out by certain themes — women, death by drowning, and, interestingly, toilets (really; the toilet poems contain some of Gervais’s most notable excellences). A few poems, and parts of a few more, verge on the unforgettable — much of “In Memory of Raymond Kristen,” parts of “The Flying Coffins” and “Voice for the Birthplace,” all of “Winter Again,” “The Acrobat,” “Inasmuch As You Leave” — which would have been easily the best poem in the book if Gervais had ended it about eight lines before he did.

As Purdy points out, 36 (Gervais’s age) is still fairly young, and it takes a long time to make a really good poet. “I think,” Purdy concludes, “Marty Gervais has an excellent chance.” Certainly, he is on the right path.