Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University. He
is the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

As noted in the preface, this collection of essays on the Canadian long
poem offers the “most recent findings and research into the underlying
structures of this genre.” For example, David Bentley situates the
whole historical gamut of Canadian long poems “both generically and
ideologically between the epic (imperialism) and the lyric
(individualism).” Gary Geddes, using as a reference point Peter
Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, focuses on this “narrative motor”
in Sharon Thesen’s long poem “Confabulations.” Stephen Scobie is
so confident about the established structure of the Canadian long poem
that he chooses for his subject Bronwen Wallace’s “Keep That Candle
Burning Bright,” a poem he admits “is neither long, nor, strictly
speaking, a single poem”; to accommodate this inconvenience, he
proposes that “we … coin a new genre: the short long poem.”

Poststructuralist analysis offers a refreshing perspective on
structural and thematic studies of the long poem, in particular those by
E.J. Pratt. Smaro Kamboureli’s On The Edge of Genre: The Contemporary
Canadian Long Poem (1991) is attacked by Sandra Djwa (“Pratt’s
Modernism, or Digging into the Strata”) and Gwendolyn Guth
(“Virtu(e)al History: Interpolations in Pratt’s Brébeuf and His
Brethren”). Neither Djwa nor Guth can abide the poststructuralist
Kamboureli’s detaching Pratt’s long poems from their modernist
context.

For the student of Canadian literature, this collection might not
entirely live up to the preface’s sweeping claim of “leading to a
deeper understanding of our literary cultures in their local as well as
national contexts,” but it is nevertheless useful. For the student of
Canadian literary criticism, Bolder Flights offers insights into the
fashions and modes of this scholarly activity over the years.