Canadian Writers and Their Works: Poetry Series, Vol. 12

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

In his introduction to the 11th volume in this series of bio-critical
assessments of Canadian writers, George Woodcock writes, “Canadian
fiction and metafiction over the past twenty years have achieved such a
range of form that, though one rejoices in such versatility, it is not
easy to pick out the representative or the typical, if there is anything
typical in such a literary landscape, whose inhabitants are as varied
and unpredictable and sometimes as strange as the fossils of the Burgess
Shale.” Woodcock is here discussing the “literary landscape” of
just the four writers assessed in volume 11—Sandra Birdsell, Timothy
Findley, W.P. Kinsella, and David Adams Richards. But if one extends his
comment to include the writers in volume 12 as well—Neil Bissoondath,
Austin Clarke, Joy Kogawa, Rohinton Mistry, and Josef Skvorecky—the
cultural and stylistic variety that is the strength of Canadian
literature becomes even more obvious.

Now, if only the critics could achieve the same stylistic diversity. No
doubt trammeled by the prescribed format—brief biography, discussion
of tradition and milieu, critical reception, analysis of works—the
essays in these two volumes nearly all read like graduate papers,
deadpan and dead serious. The effort to read them can, at times, be
quite tiring. When, for example, one reads that Bill Kinsella “loves
both the meadow and its larks and the clipped field of the ballpark,”
one wants to throw the stuff away and go back to reading Shoeless Joe or
Box Socials.

There is much in these seven essays that is good—many interesting
biographical insights and occasional brilliant analyses. It’s just
that one wishes the writing were not so stilted, so predictable; that
the assessors would lighten up a little or at least learn something from
their reading of such exceptional prose stylists as Joy Kogawa and
Timothy Findley. For, increasingly, as the writers assessed become more
contemporary, the greater the need to “promote” them rather than
merely “study” them.