Selected Poems: The Vision Tree

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

Phyllis Webb has published relatively few books in her 30-year career as a poet; she is not one of the showier figures in Canadian literature. Nevertheless, she is, and has been from the beginning, one of the most important, as The Vision Tree, a selection of her works from 1954 onwards, amply demonstrates.

What marks Webb out most distinctly, perhaps, is the sheer intelligence of her power. This is not to characterize her as more concerned with abstraction than with the concrete and the emotional, for nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, it means that she insists upon emotional exactitude, wrestling with a vague and bloated language to achieve clarity, brilliance, the “precisely so” of felt reality. And she succeeds often enough to be one of our most deeply moving — and often disturbing — poets.

A part of this is her struggle with the form of poetry, which emerges clearly from this anthology. “I run ragged to elude /The Great Iambic Pentameter,” she says in “Poetics Against the Angel of Death,” and we follow her in her running. Particularly important here are the “Naked Poems” of 1965, employing a stripped minimum of words to create a powerful intensity at once erotic and intellectual, sharply defined visual images, and strange and disorienting games with subjectivity.

Webb’s poetic world is a painful one, so sharp-edged it may lacerate. There is suicide, failure, terror; art may be, as in “Two Versions,” a highly ambiguous affirmation. But beside the pain is a strength, a striving, the possibility of music and love; Webb’s vision, in the end, is healing.

As with most important talents, Webb’s strongest point can become her greatest failing — her intelligence shades, sometimes, into academicism. This tendency is made to stand out in higher relief by Sharon Thesen’s Introduction, which apparently aims at frightening off all readers without a graduate degree in literature and an extensive background in modern criticism; and to some extent by Webb’s own notes to the poems, which are at times more distracting than useful.

Despite these drawbacks, however, Phyllis Webb is an essential poet, and The Vision Tree —though, like all selections, it is by nature incomplete — a good overview of her work.