The Lover's Progress

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.

Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in prose in the century of Milton
and the Puritan revolution; Hogarth, reflecting the contrasting world of
the 18th-century, engraved The Rake’s Progress. Over two centuries
later, David Solway, responding creatively to Hogarth, writes The
Lover’s Progress in a sequence of accomplished, elegant, yet decidedly
contemporary poems.

Hogarth’s art is his deliberate model, but, as he notes in his
preface, Solway “wanted to tell the story of a representative or
emblematic figure in our own anarchic era.” The character he creates,
though distinct from Hogarth’s rake and Solway’s own poetic persona,
nevertheless contains aspects of both. This enables him to move readily
and creatively between an 18th-century model and a modern protagonist.

The poems are absorbing in themselves (Solway conveniently provides a
prose itinerary to gloss the successive “States” of his subject’s
“domestic melodrama” and his enforced journey through time). But
dedicated readers of Solway’s earlier work, especially Modern Marriage
and the other volumes chronicling his travels in the Aegean, will
experience a pleasurable shock of recognition by meeting new renditions
of his recurring personal themes.

At the same time, he creates a sardonic portrait of the 21st-century
boredom-haunted pleasure-seeker “between the airport and the dark
casino.” It is a world where a sexually famished Odysseus awaits his
Nausikaд in vain, where Arion is equipped with camera and “heavy
metal Walkman,” where Stravinsky’s mephistophelian Nick Shadow has
shrunk into “just Nick,” an adroit waiter at “the Apocalypse
Café.”

In less experienced hands, The Lover’s Progress might make for
depressing reading, but Solway is as effective with words as Hogarth
with his engraving tools. The poetic tone changes from comic to serious,
from exuberant to austere, from the Byronically romantic to the chastely
classical. Solway is slowly being recognized as a consummately skilled
poet, one of the finest in Canada, and this volume will confirm his
growing reputation.

The Lover’s Progress is illustrated with images by Marion Wagschal.
These did not, for me, notably reinforce Solway’s subject matter, but
they contribute to an attractive piece of book production.