The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

This New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English is the first “definitive” Canadian anthology to appear since A.J.M. Smith’s Oxford Book of Canadian Verse of 1960. Like its predecessor, this volume contains an overview of the field from the early Victorians like Goldsmith and Heavysege to the Confederation group (Carman, Drummond, Roberts, Lampman, etc.); the pre-World War II poets (from McRae through Knister, Scott, Birney, and Smith to Livesay and others); the familiar names of the fifties and sixties (Layton, Cohen, Purdy, Atwood, Ondaatje, MacEwen, Lee, Bisset, etc.); and the new poets of the past decade who seem to be the poets of promise (including Pier Giorgio di Cicco, Mary di Michele, Chris Dewdney, Roo Borson, and others).

As with all collections, this new Oxford Book reflects the interests and inclinations of its selection; in this case, Margaret Atwood, author of nine books of poetry, five novels, two short story collections, and a book of criticism, Survival. Unfortunately, her adherence to the thesis of the latter (CanLit expressing only concern with the land, alienation, struggle to overcome geography, male/female power politics, etc.) and her current concern with third world politics have distorted her choice of poems. We have here, I swear, every poem written by any Canadian on the subject of being “bushed,” from Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Lonely Settler” (1825) to Earle Birney’s “Bushed” (1952), R.A.D. Ford’s “Twenty Below” (1956), Charles Lillard’s “Bushed” (1973), and Barry McKinnon’s “Bushed” (1980). There are also similar runs of poems on farming, drowning, women/feminism, right-wing South American politics, and Canadian political nationalism. Although such congruency of themes makes the book both a handy tool for school teachers (“Now this is what Canadian poets really write about”) and a logical, indeed indispensable, companion for the students of Survival, one protests that Canadian poetry, in fact, does not fit into such neat categorizations. Furthermore, by forcing her choices into predetermined subject areas (if it had had one, the book’s index would be very short), Atwood has left out some very fine work. For example, Tom Wayman is represented by three poems: “The Chilean Elegies: 5. The Interior,” “Another Poem about the Madness of Women,” and “Wayman in Love.” There is not one of his poems about working, in spite of the fact that his “industrial poems” are among the most interesting in this genre and contain his best writing. Given space limitations, of course, one can’t expect to find every poem here; but one would expect a compiler to pay more attention to the quality of poems chosen to represent the poets than to a personal and arbitrary set of subject categories. Atwood has sliced through the body of Canadian poetry to fit the Procrustean bed of Survival.

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (according to Survival) is not a bad educational tool, but it fails to do justice to the quality of most of the writers chosen and, as such, fails to satisfy the reader of Canadian poetry.