Tom Thomson and Other Poems

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 is made up of selections from three earlier books—Life
Cycle (1984), Passing Through Eden (1991), and Hats off to the Sun
(1996)—plus 19 new poems.

George Whipple writes within a verse tradition that has attracted some
notable Canadian practitioners in the last few decades but is little
known and has earned scant recognition from literary commentators. It is
a literate, elegantly written poetry that, without unduly emphasizing
rhyme or complex verse forms, is not averse to traditional metres and
regular stanzas. Intellectual without being (in the dry sense) academic,
it concerns itself with the arts, especially literature and painting,
and insists on writing in which intelligence ranks on equal terms with
emotion. Besides Tom Thomson, this volume includes poems addressing or
about Matisse, Emily Carr, David Milne, Simone Weil, Arnold Schoenberg,
Milton Acorn, and Gwendolyn MacEwen.

In illustration, here is the first stanza of Whipple’s “Apples”:
“I bite an apple by Cézanne: / indelible/inedible, a diffident /
half-truth of expectation and surprise: / the taste of red, the feel of
round.” Elsewhere, he displays a formidable technical expertise
(“Judas” is not merely a villanelle but one in trimeter rather than
pentameter) and an interest in the appearance of a poem on the page
(“Christmas Tree” reproduces the shape of its subject), as well as
revelling in exuberant metaphor (angels become “feathered astronauts
with harps,” subway-riding commuters escape a snowstorm wearing
“white epaulets of snow” and are described as “obsequious black
ants with mufflers round their throats”).

Whipple is also a religious poet (titles include “First Communion,”
“A Hymn to God the Father,” “Advent,” “Second Coming”), but
his religious vision is characterized by an imaginative originality—in
his heaven, Isaiah and Al Jolson are found “walking arm-in-arm.”
Throughout the book, although showing himself as a dedicated craftsman,
he knows that “art’s its own reward” and that “The work is all
that matters.” An accomplished poet who deserves to be better known.