Conflicts of Spring

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

This volume of poetry is difficult but rewarding. It begins with a series of poems that explore how feasible it is to consider that nature supports a spiritual attitude towards life. In dealing with such large philosophical and religious issues, the poems have a manner that is disjunctive rather than discursive. They examine ideas while trying to reject rational and theological assumptions and to discard the modern poetic tenet that a poem need only be, as distinct from have, a meaning. However, the poet cannot evade either the appeal of traditional intellectual problems, such as the relation of matter and agency, or the necessity for poetry to bring about meaning on its own terms. This partly explains why throughout the volume there runs the compelling tension between the desire for pure, abstract truth and the desire to register the immediate experience of the sensuous phenomena of nature. While some of the most provocative poems try to show that these seemingly opposite desires are reconcilable, the majority shed doubt upon the possibility of trusting nature and of relying upon it as a model for human love.

In a way, Conflicts of Spring represents a modern attempt to write pastoral poetry. The speaker in the poems is often intent on retiring from urban society to the countryside, and he seeks to find in the cycle of the seasons a typology of healthy psychic existence. But, when they do not borrow established artificial images, his meditations become bleak. His contemplations, while trying to avoid personal fallacies and to face nature freshly, do not give a shape to his experiences that is free from the absurd effects of isolation. A fragmentariness is conveyed by the difficulties of the grammatical style. Abrupt syntactical transitions are matched, moreover, by topical abruptness. The lack of persuasive metrical measure and rhythm corresponds to the broken quality of the syntax and frequently thickens the opacity of paradoxes and ellipses. As the volume progresses, pastoral possibilities grow remote and collage becomes more evident in the presentation of scenes. Bits of scenes are superimposed on one another and human figures are neither presented whole nor seen against a determinate background. One might say that an abstract expressionist viewpoint emerges as the pastoral perspective declines. Certainly, Gustafson shows multiple aspects of various things in a tumbling fashion seemingly in order to seize new images in the disjunctions. By the end of the volume, the poems have given up their attention to philosophical issues and nature. Instead, they depend upon music and painting for inspiration. The result seems to be that art dominates nature and that the poet gives up trying to reconcile the conflicts between art and nature.