Kenneth Leslie was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, and grew up there and in Halifax. His early poetry was encouraged by his involvement in the mid-1920s with the Song Fishermen, a group of Maritime writers whose membership, including Confederation-period poets Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman and newcomer Charles Bruce, affirmed the lines of continuity between nineteenth-and twentieth-century Canadian poetics but welcomed Leslie’s socialist convictions. He published three books of poetry before By Stubborn Stars won the Governor General’s Award for poetry for 1938. Shortly after moving to the United States he established Protestant Digest (1938-1953; later simply Protestant), a popular monthly magazine of religious speculation and politics dedicated substantially to the battle against anti-Semitism and Fascism. In 1949, partly as the result of a damaging Life magazine photo-spread depicting him alongside supposed Communist fellow travellers Arthur Miller, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas Mann, Leslie returned to Halifax, where he made a constrained living as a taxi driver and substitute teacher. He continued to publish minor periodicals along the lines of Protestant until the end of his life. Sean Haldane edited The Poems of Kenneth Leslie in 1971, but Leslie objected to the volume’s exclusion of much of his political verse; he issued his own comprehensive volume, O’Malley to the Reds and Other Poems, the following year. Leslie died in Halifax in 1974.
TO EILEEN CURRAN
Shaken, torn,
by my yearly getting born,
waiting while my Mother weaves
leaves,
clothing me
as she clothes each naked tree,
and giving me, instead of singing birds,
words,
fiercely warm
comes an early summer storm,
10
twists from all my wintry length
strength.
{1934}
TO ROBERT LESLIE
Shod with impatient wood, on the crest I stand,
my sticks of easy balance in either hand.
The sun has closed a mountain in my face
chilling my thoughts to home fires and the homeward race.
Two ways for home: one undulating and slow,
the other sheer and swift; how shall I go?
My mind sets firmly, choosing the safer path,
while sullen blood cries kin to this steep wrath,
this slope, fir-bristled, spiked with flinty points,
a calculus to be reckoned in the joints
10
of knee and ankle on the precipice
where death would wet my dry lips with her kiss.
What is the news I wait for, treading the snow?
It is for the mind to learn what the veins know.
{1934}
My love is sleeping; but her body seems
awake within itself, secure from ills
of consciousness; her veins are buried streams,
her flanks are ghostly vales, her breasts are hills
of some far planet finding its sure way
beyond the orbit of this night of fears,
beyond the burnished darkness of this day;
my love is sleeping out of reach of tears.
How can her limbs dance motionless, what makes
her lips curve smiling to a crescent moon,
10
what does her hand reach out for, what dawn breaks
beneath her eyelids, to her ears what tune?
I shall not sleep, nor seek that yonder land
where her hand yearns, but not to touch my hand.
{1938}
The silver herring throbbed thick in my seine,
silver of life, life’s silver sheen of glory;
my hands, cut with the cold, hurt with the pain
of hauling the net, pulled the heavy dory,
heavy with life, low in the water, deep
plunged to the gunwale’s lips in the stress of rowing,
the pulse of rowing that puts the world to sleep,
world within world endlessly ebbing, flowing.
At length you stood on the landing and you cried,
with quick low cries you timed me stroke on stroke
10
as I steadily won my way with the fulling tide
and crossed the threshold where the last wave broke
and coasted over the step of water and threw
straight through the air my mooring line to you.
{1938}