Book Reviews

The Poetics of Love and Death

Micheline Maylor (Author)
Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems. Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd
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Rienzi Crusz (Author)
Love Where the Nights Are Green. Pasdeloup
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Reviewed by Anderson Araujo

"This is all there is and this is everything," reads the epigraph Rienzi Crusz borrows from Joyce Carol Oates for his latest book of verse. Oates' bold affirmation of existential plenitude bears out the lush lyricism that animates Crusz's poetry. For long-time readers of Canadian verse, Love Where the Nights Are Green will doubtless recall Irving Layton's noted anthology of Canadian love poems, Love Where the Nights Are Long (1962). However, where Layton's collection featured a range of voices, Crusz's is very much his own.

The five sections and more than fifty poems by this self-styled "Sun-Man" shed new light into the "dark antonyms" that inform his poetry: death and desire, ends and beginnings, time and transcendence. Here, love is a "raging chaos." It "hangs exotic and hard / like a bunch of king-coconuts / on the palm of our dreams." No "breed of plums," this. Nature reifies the abstractions of love. In "Karma," nasals and sibilants choreograph the intimacy of nature, body, and art, so that the "valley bloomed / to new poems / written on olive skins," while in "Elegy for an Orange" animate and inanimate nature perform a sensual "chemistry of assimilation." No accident, then, the "green" of the book's title. It encodes metonyms for fertility, growth, transience, and the élan of a reality pregnant with all-too-many possibilities. It is indeed in this hybrid hue that the poet inscribes the "dark diaspora" of the immigrant song, knowing only too well that the "sweet inventions of memory" can hardly hope to "restore the omphalos blood / that sang my green days."

Crusz's sibylline aesthetic intersects the cosmic and the mundane. His poems inhabit liminal, restive spaces. Above all, it is in the mock-heroic "small martyrdoms" of immigrant experiences that his poetry finds a local habitation. And yet, Crusz's poetics of exile eschews facile antinomies. Elegiac laments for "my beloved country" are tempered by wit, irony, and the joys of the adopted homeland, "this igloo of heaven." Rather than dwell on the romanticized travesties and wistful longings that often entangle diasporic narratives, poems such as "Legacy (for Anne)" celebrate the "brown skin," "the music / and fatted calf of the prodigal story." With Eliotic overtones, "Roots" insists that "What the end usually demands / is something of the beginning." Crusz locates this dialectic in the colonial encounter. Rather than read it as a harbinger of cultural apocalypse, the poet digs deeper. At its root, he finds none other than himself-"I, burgher of that hot embrace" between Portuguese and Sinhalese ancestors. Love, as this resplendent collection suggests, may redeem even history, "the bloody equation."

History, too, subtends Micheline Maylor's book of verse, but only tangentially. Full Depth is "a work of impressions" on the death of Canadian avant-garde poet and novelist, Raymond Knister. At thirty-three, Knister drowned under mysterious circumstances while swimming near Stoney Point, Lake St. Clair in August, 1932. His body was found three days later. "Whispers of suicide" would not be far in the offing. Yet, Maylor laudably avoids sensationalizing his death. Here, the Knister myth interweaves with his motley personae, "Writer, cab-driver, farmer, / father, dreamer, lover." The poet situates Knister's widow as the tragic consciousness, delicately enmeshing her gnawing grief-"the silence / of my panic and the colour of / my mouth stretched into a scream"-and tender nostalgia-"The dream of us, limbs entwined / Out from the abyss again this morning." But it is "Dee" (the poet Dorothy Livesay, with whom Knister allegedly had an affair) who arguably makes the poetic sequence her own by glossing the book's title in "Crush": "He was the only man / who considered the full depth / of the half full green pitcher and me." Time, death, love, memory, and imagination alternately stage the presence of his absence.

In lieu of the "easy" narratology of "a mystery or romance," Full Depth shores up "fragments" to fill in the interstices between the brute fact of Knister's death and its many unknowns. Voices, intertexts, impressions, and mythologies jostle in a transhistorical bricolage. In the six sections and fifty six poems that make up the collection, the drowning recurs as an inescapable marker amidst the welter of shifting perspectives. In "The ship," the discovery of Knister's body is stripped bare of euphemisms, "a stiff and bloated mess / decomposing," while in "Lake," the drowning is recast as a rebirth in "water thicker than dreams, warm as amniotic fluid." Elsewhere, however, Maylor pushes the conceit of the lake as "black womb" too far. A case in point is the strange reverie in "Imagine," where "Under the surface he inhales a foreign air / a foetus born." Rare missteps aside, Full Depth charts an extraordinary journey through the eclectic spaces Knister inhabited, from his fascination with Keats, to the bliss of tilling the earth, to his final descent into "the cave of dreamers." Maylor's imagistic poetics and exquisite lyricism ensure an enthralling read.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #198 (Autumn 2008), Canada and Its Discontents. (pg. 117 - 118)

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