\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWleroy suit with frilled collars. In thiswork Purdy invites us to return to thepast where "all directions are possible."He asks us "Is this the way it was or isthis the way you wanted it to be?" andreplies for us, "This is the way it waswhen nothing moved or changed."The first part, a series of untitled prosesketches, recreates the days of boyhood,the town of Trenton and its familiarcharacters. We see the Trent River, themain streets, Front and Dundas, the localbakery, mill, factories and coal sheds, thehorse-drawn buggies and Model T's.Purdy vividly recalls the activities ofEveryboy: swimming by the railwaybridge, fishing for mudcats, stealing magazinesfrom junkyards, or watching movieserials at Weiler's Theatre. With the poetwe watch the faces around us dissolveinto those of the past: "for a momentyou think you are living backwards. 1 'With Purdy we are both present and detached.He sees himself at six as a strangerin a land of giants, an outsider "tryingto get used to being alive."The poems, entitled "Some of thePeople," pick up many of these charactersof the past described already inprose. Highway 62 leads out of town towardsthe present; we see the cemetery insummer "evergreen" or watch the poetat the funeral of his mother: "naked /on the needle point of now." Otherpoems evoke the days of childhood, thecolour words of preschool, the friendJack who becomes "The Boy Accused ofCheating." Purdy mourns the father whodied when he was two, the stillbornbrother whom he calls the "dead Poet,"and Cousin Don who returned from thewar with shell-shock and "something lost/ the Loss remained with him always."One of the most compassionate portraitsis of Joe Barr, the village idiot whoroamed the garbage dump and waschased and stoned by the children. Unableto express himself, he is described byPurdy: "the doors of his prison opening/ into rooms he couldn't remember /places he couldn't stay." Two poemssuggest the impact of his grandfather onthe child. The dominating old man withhis "260 pounds of scarred slag," undauntedat 90 and "too much for anyman to be," haunts the poet with hisvitality. Purdy remarks: "the veritableflesh and bone of my Grandfather risesfrom the dust, flashes in my mind, livesagain inside the flesh and bone that ismyself." In these poems the tone of elegyis strong, a sense of place lost. As Purdyacknowledges in one poem "What havewe to do with childhood ? / — no onelives there any more."Of the two portraits, Purdy's is themore vital, and intense. Both the proseand the poems have memorable passagesand moments of brilliance. But to someextent the book seems contrived, designedto fill a space on our shelves of Purdy.The poems, many of them well-known,appear in other collections. For would-bebiographers, both this and Susan Stromberg-Stein'sstudy of Dudek are fascinatingsources of information on the formationand development of genius. Forordinary readers, however, they demandtoo much; in a sense we must write ourown biographies of these complex poets.G. MC LAYPOETRY & PAINTINGANDRE-G. BOURASSA, Surrealism and QuebecLiterature : History of a cultural revolution.Trans. Mark Czarnecki, Univ. of Toronto,$20.00.BOURASSA'S DETAILED STUDY of the surrealistmovement in Quebec literaturehad a mixed reception when first publishedin French in 1977. The author wasaccused of over-extending the definitionof surrealism, and hiding his lack oftheoretical method behind a mass of146