Sweets

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

The 22 poems in this small volume represent an interesting attempt to write pure poetry. The poems are pure because they are abstract in four ways. Firstly, they are abstract because freed from discursive statement: they shun the rhythms and tones of the speaking voice and the pleasure of syntactic elaboration. Doing without formal grammar and sentence structure as much as possible, the poems also try to be free of logical relations and phenomenal classification. Secondly, then, the poems are abstract because they are removed from the physical world and from scientific knowledge of the world. While largely descriptive, the poems are often governed by fantasy, by words and images piled together regardless of rational and perceptual confusion. In a sense, the poems are deliberately nonsensical. However, more positively, the poems are held together by musical and visual qualities and by the interplay between these qualities. Certainly, a third explanation of the abstractness of the poems lies in the following phrase: “the pleasure of sounds innocently grasped” (p. 10). Here the poet acknowledges that he chooses words for their musical, rather than their semantic, value. But his principles of selection also include imagism and pictorialism. Thus the fourth reason for the poems’ abstractness is that they imitate modern art. The following stanza, with its allusion to “matisse,” nicely exemplifies the musical and pictorial abstractions which the poet works with:

Among the red-checkered table’s crying fish of sunburnt

voices the lemon

seemed a song beside a plate

folded lest carpet lift it

where in leaves

the red oranges rose

a calm plantation by matisse sea (p. 37)

Here the poet imitates an abstract expressionist style, such as Matisse’s. The bold colors dominate the description; they animate things without representing them. The expression of the scene is heightened by the musical elements. Furthermore, that “voices” are “sunburnt” and the “lemon” is a “song” reveals that the poet is trying to emphasize his abstractness by making pictorial and musical abstractions images of one another. It is perhaps an inevitable paradox of this interesting poetic experiment that, in trying to write pure poetry, the poet makes it dependent on the sister arts of music and painting.