Tasks of Passion: Dennis Lee at Mid-Career

Louise H. Girard was Head of Book Selection, University of St. Michael's College Library, Toronto.

Given the facts that Dennis Lee is an important poet as well as a critic of some note but that so little has been written about him, this work is almost a must purchase for any academic library and for many public libraries. This book is difficult to categorize, however, because it is a combination of criticism, panegyric, and reminiscences. Although there seems to have been some attempt to unify the work around the idea of Dennis Lee’s “detachment of self’ (as evidenced by George Bowering’s poem with that title which in a sense serves as an introduction and by references to this idea in a number of selections), on the whole the book is diffuse and uneven. As far as the diffuseness is concerned, this is somewhat to be expected given the wide range of Dennis Lee’s activities. And, in fact, there are sections on Dennis Lee as editor, as writer of children’s books, as poet, as prose writer, as philosopher of language and poetry. The book also includes three selections by Dennis Lee (this is what really justifies the purchase!). One of the selections, “Polyphony, Enacting a Meditation,” is an elaboration of ideas on cadence first presented in “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space.” The second selection is related to the first in that it is the correspondence between George Bowering and Dennis Lee about “Polyphony.” The third selection, “Riffs,” is a love poem in which a man communicates his feelings about his lover and their relationship during her absence, knowing that shortly after she returns they will part forever.

As noted above, the quality of the articles is uneven. This would seem to be due partly to the fact that many of the articles were written by friends and acquaintances of Dennis Lee (Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Marian Engel, Irving Layton). Some contributors devote more space to their relationship with Dennis Lee than to his work. Others keep their comments very general. Fortunately, there are some notable exceptions, namely: Ted Blodgett, “Authenticity and Absence: Reflections on the Prose of Dennis Lee”; Sean Kane, “The Poet as Shepherd of Being”; Ann Munton, “Simultaneity in the Writings of Dennis Lee”; Stan Dragland, “On Civil Elegies”; and, to a lesser extent, Robert Bringhurst, “At Home in the Difficult World.”

Finally, as a work of criticism this work is also limited by the fact that it has no index, but it does have a chronology and a bibliography of the works of Dennis Lee.