The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
The Carpathians - University of British Columbia
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Last Page<br />
Where? Place in Recent North American<br />
Fictions (Aarhus Univ. Press, Aarhus,<br />
Denmark DK-8000; 121 Dankr.), edited by<br />
Karl-Heinz Westarp, opens with the tentative<br />
wisdom <strong>of</strong> Patrick Lane's poem "Indian<br />
Tent Rings", and includes (among its 10<br />
essays) Ellen W. Munley's "Spatial Metaphors<br />
in Anne Hébert's Les enfants du sabbat<br />
Within and Beyond the Confines <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Convent, the Cabin, and the Quotidian."<br />
But the essays <strong>of</strong> most general use to students<br />
<strong>of</strong> Canadian literature are likely to be<br />
James I. McClintock's outline <strong>of</strong> Gary<br />
Snyder's environmental poetics, and David<br />
Kranes' introductory essay "Space and<br />
Literature: Notes Toward a <strong>The</strong>ory <strong>of</strong><br />
Mapping" which provides background and<br />
succinct guidelines for discussing the use(s)<br />
<strong>of</strong> space in literary texts. A perceptive piece<br />
<strong>of</strong> complementary criticism—not explicitly<br />
North American, but ultimately just as relevant—is<br />
Jonathan Bate's Romantic<br />
Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental<br />
Tradition (Routledge, $74.95/$i8.95). Bate<br />
reacts against recent criticism which politicizes<br />
Wordsworth, or laments his lack <strong>of</strong><br />
political engagement, not by returning to<br />
aesthetic hermeticism, but by discovering<br />
in the poet a different ecological-politics.<br />
Romantic Ecology is a short, taut, yet<br />
relaxed, new take on Wordsworth, which,<br />
in such chapters as "<strong>The</strong> Moral <strong>of</strong><br />
Landscape" and "<strong>The</strong> Naming <strong>of</strong> Places"<br />
centres Wordsworth as the author <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Guidebook rather than <strong>of</strong> the Prelude.<br />
David C. Miller reminds us, however, <strong>of</strong><br />
the limitations <strong>of</strong> Wordsworth's versions <strong>of</strong><br />
nature by quoting Aldous Huxley: "Wandering<br />
in the hothouse darkness <strong>of</strong> the jungle,<br />
he would not have felt so serenely<br />
certain <strong>of</strong> those "Presences <strong>of</strong> Nature," these<br />
"souls <strong>of</strong> lonely places," which he was in the<br />
habit <strong>of</strong> worshipping on the shores <strong>of</strong> Windermere<br />
and Rydal."' This passage might<br />
have been an epigraph for Miller's Dark Eden:<br />
<strong>The</strong> Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American<br />
Culture (Cambridge UP, n.p.), a wide-ranging,<br />
generously illustrated cataloguing <strong>of</strong><br />
the metaphor <strong>of</strong> the swamp (and marsh<br />
and jungle) in American painting, writing<br />
and folklore. Miller's attention both to the<br />
physical shapes <strong>of</strong> particular landscapes and<br />
to what artists project on to a landscape<br />
makes the book a useful extension <strong>of</strong> work in<br />
a Canadian context by Dick Harrison, Robert<br />
Thacker, and Gaile MacGregor, while the<br />
far more theoretical investigation <strong>of</strong> "the<br />
picture-making capacity <strong>of</strong> words" found in<br />
Murray Krieger's Ekphrasis: <strong>The</strong> Illusion <strong>of</strong><br />
the Natural Sign (John Hopkins UP, $38.00<br />
U.S.) establishes for such an investigation a<br />
wider context <strong>of</strong> philosophical history.<br />
"I am accustomed to regard the smallest<br />
brook with as much interest for the time<br />
being as if it were the Orinoco or<br />
Mississippi," wrote Henry David Thoreau<br />
in 1850. This principle <strong>of</strong> concentrated<br />
close-up attention to the apparently unremarkable—<br />
Wordsworth's world in a grain<br />
<strong>of</strong> sand—permeates nature writing and<br />
much environmental writing. For the armchair<br />
urban biologist, large-format photo<br />
albums <strong>of</strong>ten provide the main means for<br />
looking close up. Judging by the number<br />
which reach Canadian Literature's <strong>of</strong>fices,<br />
publishers are detecting an expanding<br />
interest in such books. We are <strong>of</strong>ten, in a<br />
journal devoted primarily to literature,<br />
more interested in the text in such books<br />
than in the photographs. In this sense, Kim<br />
Stafford's Entering the Grove (Layton UT:<br />
Gibbs Smith, $34.95 U.S.) sets an exceptional<br />
standard. Surrounding Gary Braasch's<br />
moody photographs, poet Stafford's essaystories<br />
discover sermons in forests and<br />
tongues in trees. Wings Over Water: Water<br />
Birds <strong>of</strong> the Atlantic (Nimbus, $27.95) is at<br />
the other extreme. <strong>The</strong> text (by Stuart<br />
Tingey) is utilitarian, conveying little sense<br />
<strong>of</strong> discovery, while the photos (by Wayne<br />
Barrett) provide the close-ups—<strong>of</strong> a com-