To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

and this, only the fifth
of forty-five Mondays
to survive this year
The automobile, the communter's second
home, is also the embodiment of the deep
irony of technology—that it frees and
destroys—but this implication remains
unexamined by Shreve. Other poems find
the speaker in her office, angry, belittled,
and dehumanized by her unappreciated
clerical work.
Like Tom Wayman and others who write
Canadian work poetry, Shreve protests or
mourns but never really probes. Work is
not, the work poets might argue, an intellectual
problem. The trouble is, though,
that the free verse complaint poem is by now
a bit laboured. And the nifty, ironic two
lines of closure we have come to expect do
nothing to ease the weariness of this verse.
Shreve's volume does contain poems that
seem almost to escape cliche. "Lost in This
City," for example, its protagonist a man
"attacking traffic," is about the self isolated
through fear or madness. But even in this
poem Shreve cannot resist the political formulas:
the man's body is "a flailing X of
anger," "anger" the liberal's code word for
insanity.
At one point, in a poem called "White
Out," I am reminded of the famous closing
image in P.K. Page's "The Stenographers."
Shreve's poem: "But the eyes no longer cooperate.
/ figures wriggle and blur / in a
dance these pupils / never learned". In
Page's poem, the "pinmen of madness in
marathon trim / race round the track of the
stadium pupil." If Page's problem is occasional
over-reliance on metaphor, Shreve's
is an almost complete absence of
metaphorical sensibility. One observes in
the older poet a deftness with language and
a music missing in the younger.
Naomi Guttman writes Reasons for
Winter for her parents, with "gratitude and
love," an entirely fitting dedication in a volume
devoted to childhood, the past, and
change. Guttman is, at times, sentimental
in her reminiscences about growing up in
Montreal; but she writes with integrity and
never simply for effect:
Where are you now, white ghosts of plaster?
Moses who stood in the corner, who lured
and repelled us with thick horns?
Where are the bottles, blues and greens,
stacks
of old newsprint, sacks of dank clay,
silver-scraps, cans of agate, where does
everything wait
to be made—in whose kitchen, what trash
heap?
Your figure bends over this page
Even in this short excerpt we can see the
themes that predominate in her book: her
family, her Jewish heritage, her efforts as a
poet to interpret and give meaning to
memory.
Guttman is the kind of poet who must
remain true to her preoccupations if her
poetry is to show strength. When she writes
in the voice (not hers) of an accomplice to
the murder of a policeman, in a poem titled
"Ginette," we are doubtful. The poem reads
like a story chopped up into lines—the
danger for the free verse poet.
For the kind of poetry Shreve and
Guttman (and countless others) write, the
Canadian model is probably the Toronto
poet Anne Michaels. Language is for
Michaels a kind of controlled indulgence.
Shreve and Guttman, if they left Michaels's
excesses behind, would doubtless profit
from a study of her work.
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