To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

the language of sound as well as the sound
of language. As the sub-title indicates, these
are poems for listeners, and at times they
demonstrate a musical, percussive flair:
"The vanity of bracken in the cracks, /
Budded through the blacktop," "A guttural
glory and gypsy singsong I Rings throughout
the trees" "Soft moths curfewed under fir,
hemlocked / In an archdiocese of trees."
In addition to these resonant moments,
there is an attempt to modulate the unified
voice of lyrical sensibility with the dramatic,
performative qualities of the
masque. Differences in type face and tone
alert the reader to a variety of voices, but
these seem largely undifferentiated, disembodied
components of stationary, meditative
set pieces rather than "moving"
dramatic performances. The exception to
this rule is the sequence "Notes Toward the
Disappearance of a Canadian Family on the
Gulf Islands," which might be called the
"settee piece" in this "suite" of poems; an
item of furniture (the settee) becomes the
focal point of a surreal family drama that
manages to incorporate individuated voices:
"The furniture / Configured / Around all
their conversations." James Reaney once
described Halloween as a kind of folk
drama, a masque-like revelry in which the
audience performs. McWhirter's version of
All Souls' Eve in A Staircase for All Souls is
too stagey for my taste; it is a performance
in which I don't feel invited to play.
Sons and Mothers
David Watmough
Thy Mother's Glass. HarperCollins $24.95
Vibrations: Readings, cassette & CD. The
Writer's Voice n.p.
Reviewed by Tom Hastings
A prolific writer with over thirteen books
to date, David Watmough has described his
overall literary project as, "a fictional autobiography
of Davey Bryant, a twentieth
century man who happens to be an author,
an immigrant and a homosexual." In Thy
Mother's Glass, his latest novel, Watmough
turns his attention more exclusively to
Davey's younger years, presenting a touching
portrait of Davey's childhood in
Cornwall and his labyrinthine physical and
emotional journey towards Vancouver as
an out gay man in the early 1960s.
Here, as elsewhere in this understudied
series, Davey Bryant functions as an alterego
through which Watmough is able to
explore the intersection of sexual and
national identities while converging the
political with the personal in a way that is
more explicitly autobiographical than his
earlier novels and short stories. Like Davey,
Watmough is also a Cornish immigrant to
Canada and Davey's journey parallels his
own arrival in Vancouver as a gay writer in
the 1960s.
This long novel is divided into two main
sections which recount the relationship of
Davey and his tenacious mother, Isabella
Bryant, over a period of 35 years. Davey is
very much his mother's child: like his
"Mama," he is stubbornly independent and
infuriatingly iconoclastic. Not surprisingly,
their initially close emotional bond begins
to unravel as Isabella struggles to come to
terms with her son's homosexuality while
Davey struggles to accept his mother's idiosyncratic
personality. Isabella, according to
her son, "doesn't fit neatly into stereotypes
or national patterns." As a young bride,
Isabella refuses to assimilate her more
urbane personality to the demands of her
husband's conformist rural family and
spends most of her senior years living not
with her husband but her friend Charlotte.
Her son exhibits a similar streak of nonconformity.
A "scholarly boy," Davey is discharged
from of the navy on buggery
charges, travels to Paris with a friend and
suddenly decides to move to San Francisco
with his American lover Ken.
Mother and son's successful journey
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