Active Trading: Selected Poems, 1970-1995

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.

This volume of selections celebrates Gary Geddes’s 25 years of
publishing poetry. He writes primarily of violence, political
oppression, and man’s inhumanity to man, displaying, in the words of
the title poem, a “taste for disaster.” His favorite medium is the
poem-sequence. He spans a broad chronology from prehistoric China (The
Terracotta Army) and a voyage from Renaissance Spain (Letter to the
Master of Horse) to the Canadian forces captured in Hong Kong (Hong
Kong), the attempt to blow up the Canadian House of Commons in 1966 (War
and Other Measures), and recent events in Chile (No Easy Exit). This is
a tough poetry that pulls no punches.

The power of this poetry is not in doubt. With such subject matter,
however, concerns can arise as to whether the power arises from the
artistic skill of the poet or is inherent in the material itself. In
Geddes’s case, any doubter should consider the remarkable sequence
titled “Girl by the Water,” in which the pathetic story of the
unnamed girl’s life and death is told obliquely in a series of
monologues, culminating in one from the girl herself. It is proof that
Geddes is master of the human as well as the inhuman(e).

In any case, Geddes displays a wider range than his more directly
political poems suggest. “The Strap” is an oblique comment on
corporal punishment—all the more eloquent because it is told from the
viewpoint of the disciplinarian rather than the victim. The now
well-known poem “Sandra Lee Scheuer,” about one of the students shot
at Kent State in 1970, is effective because it concentrates not on the
fact of her death but on her ordinary qualities as an average
undergraduate. There is also a thoughtful, meditative poem about Philip
Larkin, and “The Last Canto,” an imaginative canto that Ezra Pound
ought to have written but didn’t.

Geddes is a much more substantial poet than he has been given credit
for—at least in schools and universities. Perhaps this judicious
selection will win him the attention he deserves.