(1982)
When I was young, poetry reviewing in Canada was very ingrown. Poets reviewed the work of their friends and enemies then, partly because few others were interested in reviewing poetry at all, partly because the poetry world was so small that everyone in it was either a friend or an enemy. However, it was understood that anyone likely to read the review would know which was which.
Writers still occasionally review their friends and enemies, but it can no longer be assumed that the average reader knows it. So I feel it necessary to state by way of prelude that Jay Macpherson not only taught me Victorian literature back in 1960—like all good teachers, she behaved as if it mattered, thus converting my surly contempt for the subject into fascinated admiration —but is one of my oldest and most appreciated friends. Having said that, I will retreat to the middle distance, from which the reviewer’s voice should issue impartial as God’s (though it rarely does) and try to deal with the subject at hand.
Impossible, of course. Re-reading The Boatman, the first of the two books included in this volume, makes me remember Jay Macpherson as I first knew her. I was enormously impressed, not just by the fact that here in front of me was a real poet, and a woman at that, who had actually had a book published —no mean feat in the Canada of those days—but by her wardrobe. She always wore clothes that were by no means “fashionable,” clothes in fact that nobody else could get away with, but which seemed exactly right for her.
It’s the same with the poetry. No one else writes like this. In fact, looking back, it seems that no one else ever did, and that all the fuss about a “mythopoeic school” of poetry was simply misguided criticism. If “mythopoeic” means that the poet lets on she knows about mythologies, the most unlikely among us would have to accept the label. (Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering and Frank Davey, for example.) Although a critic intent on the usual version of this theory might make a case for The Boatman and its involvement with the shapes of traditional stories, Welcoming Disaster would probably defeat him. Its personal and indeed sometimes notably eccentric voice carries the reader far beyond any notions of “school.” Macpherson’s poetry is one-of-a-kind, not in defiance of current convention so much as apart from it. It’s a world unto itself, and from The Boatman’s poem called “Egg” comes the best advice for approaching it: “Let be, or else consume me quite.”
The Boatman has been much written about, but for the sake of those who may not be familiar with it I’ll say a little about it. It appears to be a “sequence” of very short, condensed lyric poems. (I say “appears,” because it was not planned that way; Macpherson is not a programmatic writer, and her work, when it falls into sequences, does so because her imagination is working with a certain body of material, not because she thinks she needs a poem of a certain kind to fill a gap and then composes it.) They are not all of the same kind: some are straight-faced lyrics, some are sinister or comic parodies on the same subjects (pace Blake’s two sets of Songs) and some are puzzle-poems, or riddles. I tend to get on a little better with the straight lyrics. The others are adroit and clever, though they seem to me to exist, as many kinds of jokes do, for the purpose of defusing a profound uneasiness.
The central voice of The Boatman is one of a complex and powerful grief, and its central symbols revolve around separation and loss. Like all hermetic poetry, The Boatman offers the reader multiple choices about its true “subject.” Is it “about” the relationship between two lovers, the relationship between Creator and fallen world, the relationship between author, book and reader, or dreamer and dream, or man and his imaginative world? Why not all? The most potent poems in the book, for me, are those in the small sequence-within-a-sequence, “The Ark,” eight eight-line lyrics that are astonishing for their simplicity and grace, and for the amount of emotional force they can pack into sixty-four lines. They are “about” all of the above, and after more than twenty years of reading them I still find them devastating.
One of Macpherson’s most exquisite poems is in the small section entitled “Other Poems” —post-Boatman, pre- Disaster. It’s called “The Beauty of Job’s Daughters,” and I won’t quote from it because you need to read the whole thing, but it’s an excellent example of what an outwardly-formal, flexibly-handled lyricism can do. It also epitomizes one of the main themes of The Boatman: the “real” world, that of the imagination, is inward.
Between The Boatman and “Other Poems,” and Welcoming Disaster, came a long pause. Macpherson’s total output has been minute compared with that of most other Canadian poets of her stature, and she’s about the farthest thing from a “professional” poet you could imagine. A young novelist said to me recently, “Poetry isn’t an art, it’s a circuit.” For Macpherson, never a circuit-rider, poetry isn’t a “profession” but a gift, which is either there or not there but can’t be made to be there by exercise of will. In fact, the first poems in Welcoming Disaster are about the loss or absence of the imaginative world so beautifully evoked in “Job’s Daughters,” the failure of inspiration, and the futility of trying to conjure it up. As well as its redemptive qualities: “Breathing too is a simple trick, and most of us learn it. / Still, to lose it is bad, though no-one regrets it long.” When the Muse finally shows up, what she reveals this time is not paradise regained.
If The Boatman is “classical” (which, in purity of line, simplicity of rhythms, and choice of myths and symbols, it is), then Welcoming Disaster is, by the same lights, “romantic:” more personal, more convoluted, darker and more grotesque, its rhythms more complex, its main symbol-groupings drawn not only from Classical and Biblical mythology but from all kinds of odd corners: nineteenth-century Gothic novels (and their twentieth-century avatars, such as Nosferatu and Karloff movies), the Grimms’ Goose Girl story (“What Falada Said”, Babylonian mythology (“First and Last Things”), lore of magicians, ghouls, mazes and crossroads. The main movement of the book concerns a descent to the underworld; and, as everyone knows, the most successful recipes for this include a plan for getting not only there but back, usually by means of the advice or actual company of a sybil, spirit guide or boatman. (The boatman in The Boatman is mainly Noah; in Welcoming Disaster it’s his upside-down counterpart, Charon, who takes you not to the world renewed but to the world dead.) In this case the fetish-cum-spirit guide-cum-God-cum-sinister ferryman is a teddy bear, which —again —only Macpherson could get away with.
What’s in the underworld? In Egyptian mythology it’s the place where the soul is weighed; for Orpheus, it’s the place where the lost love is finally lost; in Jackson Knight’s book on Virgil (cited in Macpherson’s notes) the underground maze leads to the king and queen of the dead, especially the queen: it’s a place of lost mothers. There are echoes too of all those nineteenth-century ghosts, from Catherine Earnshaw on down, who come to the window at night, of vampiristic or sinister-double relationships which recall Blake’s Shadow and Emanation figures; of Faustian pacts with darkness. Jungians will revel in this book, though it is hardly orthodox Jungianism. But the important thing is that in the process some poems emerge that would more than satisfy Houseman: they do make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. “They Return,” for instance, or “Hecate Trivia,” or “Some Ghosts and Some Ghouls.”
Welcoming Disaster, like The Boatman, has its more playful moments, but on the whole its tone ranges between the eerie and the ruthless: poems of invocation or rigorous and sometimes bloody-minded self-analysis. Macpherson was never much of a meditative Wordsworthian, if such labels apply. She’s much more like Coleridge: inner magic, not outer-world description or social comment, is her forte.
When I was asked to write this review it was suggested that I include an “appreciation” of Macpherson’s “career.” But what do we mean by a poet’s “career,” apart from the poems? Do poets even have “careers?” Some do, but it’s a word that seems more appropriate when applied to politicians: something pursued, worked at, having to do with leverage and personal advancement and the media-created persona. Jay Macpherson is simply not career-minded in this way. There’s nowhere she wants to get, in the sense of “getting somewhere.” She reminds us that poetry is not a career but a vocation, something to which one is called, or not, as the case may be. She’s still the best example I know of someone who lives as if literature, and especially the writing of poetry, were to be served, not used.