I Might Not Tell Everybody This

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Alden Nowlan is one of the best-loved and most human of Canadian poets. As this new book shows, his verse generally arises out of his day-to-day experiences — he can make poems out of anything from chopping onions to a day in court, from seeing his wife coming home with a pile of parcels to visiting a home for the retarded. On the other hand, he can slip in poems on unexpected subjects, like the chilling portrait of Himmler in “The Perfectability of Man” or the troubling unsanctioned stories of Jesus in “The Gospel according to St. Thomas.” But even his personal poems have a curious habit of transforming themselves into dream-like myths. Thus, “A pair of pruning shears” begins with a specific incident, his need to tend his garden, but opens up to become a grave, generalized brooding over the desperate struggle for existence within nature.

Nowlan has been publishing poems for close to a quarter of a century and has evolved his own flexible and inimitable style. I Might Not Tell Everybody This is more meditative and (though not in any academic or pompous way) more philosophical than his earlier volumes. We notice immediately the extended, lumbering lines in many of them, a striking contrast from the short, staccato lines that were once the norm in books such as Between Tears and Laughter (1971). At first these new poems may seem prosaic, but their apparent casualness is deceptive. They possess the quiet authority of a man in the process of responding to everything around him, not only recognizing the context of human life as both glorious and absurd, but unwilling to separate the one from the other. Humour and pathos, the comic and the serious, are invariably interconnected in his work.

Ever since he found his characteristic tone and style, Nowlan has gone his own way, making no concessions to the currently fashionable. This is (intellectually speaking) a more sober Nowlan than we have met before, but the same unobtrusive skill with words and rhythms is evident. He makes poems from the fleeting fancies we all have but either dismiss as trivial or are afraid to reveal. Out of these many simples he creates a complex poetic world. I Might Not Tell Everybody This maintains the standard we have come to expect from him.