The Cherry Tree on Cherry Street

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.

The cherry tree of the title grows in George Woodcock’s garden in
Vancouver, a survivor from an orchard that once gave the street its
name. Woodcock is also a survivor—this book appeared close to his 81st
birthday—and in some respects his poetry is a survivor, too.

At first reading, the verse seems thin, close to the simplistic. One
poem, “The Robe of Aphrodite,” reads in its entirety “I only need
to touch / the hem. It’s much too late / to lift it.” Georgian? In a
sense, yes. Yet what we have here is a poetry that is not afraid to be
traditional, avoiding both the large statement and the strident
confession. At the same time, it experiments with what is surely the
central concern of poetry in the 20th century: how to be relaxed,
colloquial, and direct in verse without being banal; how to find the
“language really used by men” (and women!) that remains human and
not the mere babble of TV demotic.

Woodcock writes here out of the intellectual curiosity and emotional
experience of a long lifetime that has produced goodness knows how many
good books. The echoes, and allusions to earlier concerns are
everywhere—to Orwell, to anarchism, to his English and North American
friends, to the literature and art he has absorbed and elucidated. There
is also the continued brooding on old age and life that has preoccupied
him in the moving personal books of his later years.

This is not immediately dazzling verse, but it has staying power. It
can be fanciful (an elegy for the Neanderthals), humorously poised
(“Heavenly Concourse,” a poem on angels he entertained aware), never
pretentious, always wise. One is called “The Old Poet Addresses His
Muse,” a title that will seem hopelessly old-fashioned or dauntingly
unconcerned with passing fashion, permanently valid. In this case,
Woodcock being Woodcock, it’s the latter.