\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWin her eyes an echoof the first tendernessAnd yet, as in all good books of verse,it is the whole, the varied continuum,rather than the individual pieces — eventhe anthology gems — that is important.In Piling Blood one is aware, with a feelingthat grows from page to page, notonly of a general triumph of poeticworkmanship, but also of a depth ofvision and wisdom that few of Purdy'scontemporaries have equalled. Purdy islike one of those apples of vanished varietiesfrom the orchards of our childhoodsthat ripened late and in their lofts improvedin flavour long into the winter.As a poet he ages well.GEORGE WOODCOCK**** BOB BEAL and ROD MGLEOD, PrairieFire: The 1885 North-West Rebellion. Hurtig,$19.95. History, which is an art as much asa science, moves through time on two levels.There is a sense in which general historic insightsare never superseded, no matter howmany new facts may be unearthed, and so westill read Herodotus and Gibbon, Acton andToynbee, for the grandeur of their visions,though we know that in many ways our detailedknowledge of the pasts they wrote aboutis greater than theirs. We are getting to thepoint, in Canadian history, of making thiskind of distinction. Much has been publishedon the North-West Rebellion of 1885, and agreat deal of it of high quality, bringing thewestern Canadian past into luminous focus:e.g., George Stanley's The Birth of WesternCanada and his Louis Riel, Desmond Morton'sThe Last War Drums, Marcel Giraud's LeMétis canadien, John Kinsey Howard's StrangeEmpire and, in another direction of insight,Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear.These books, and others perhaps, will remainas classics of Western Canadian history. Butevery year recently new sources have becomeavailable — diaries and letters discovered,documents and records released for publicexamination, so that, though the generalaspect of the North-West Rebellion may nothave changed, facts and details have emergedthat modify it in various ways. This plethoraof new information released over the pastdecade has made Prairie Fire: The 1885North-West Rebellion a much more closelytextured work than its predecessors. It doeslittle to change our sense of the shape ofevents at that time, and though, largely forform's sake, its authors offer a few rathergentlemanly challenges to some of the conclusionsof past historians, they rarely win theirarguments decisively. It is not as visionaryhistorians with original insights that we welcomethem, but rather as competent researchersand writers who have not set out to correctthe record, which for the most part theyaccept, but to make it more complete. PrairieFire is a book all aficionados of western historyshould not merely borrow but buy. It is goodpopular history, accurate, conscientious andaccessible, and probably the last work of itskind on the subject for some years after the1885 Centennial.Recent reprints include Ralph L. Curry, TheLeacock Medal Treasury (Lester & OrpenDennys, $11.95), an d (i n i ts 3 r d revised form,adding a number of poets born in the 194.0's)Ralph Gustafson's Penguin Book of CanadianVerse (Penguin, $9.95). Under the title TheConfessions of a Harvard Man ($30.00; pa.$ ! 9-95) Paget Press has republished HaroldStearns' 1935 autobiography The Secret IKnow, with an appreciative preface by HughFord. Sometime editor of The Dial, Americanexpatriate in Paris during the 1920's and1930's, reporter, panhandler, and literaryfigure of no small stature, Stearns tells here ofhis campaign against mediocrity, his quest forindependence and judgment, his experimentin bohemian homelessness, and his orderlydesire for home. One looks in vain here formention of Callaghan or Glassco, but onefinds instead something of the milieu in whichthey lived. Stearns writes of his early failureto distinguish a "change in tactics" from achange "in ethics": "I don't comprehend howstubborn and perverse is the heart of man —how we can know the better, yet follow theworse path. I thought that merely to see andknow the good and the beautiful and the truealso means to embrace them gladly. I was notyet really aware that there was the problem ofevil. I was still a child." Now in paperbackare The Oxford Companion to CanadianLiterature (Oxford, $24.95), and The OtherSide of Hugh MacLennan, Elspeth Cameron'sselection of MacLennan's civilized essays(Macmillan, $8.95).W.N.195