Finally, Jan Zwicky:

Alex: Somewhere near the beginning of Louis Zukofsky's long poem "A" he asks:

Can
The design
Of the fugue
Be transferred
To poetry?

My answer to that would be No, but Zukofsky's attempt at finding a correspondence between traditional musical forms and poetry was something that exercised the Moderns quite a bit, perhaps because of the movement away from such forms generally (with free verse and atonal music). I have to say I've never found these efforts very convincing, but it's obviously something that Jan Zwicky has spent a lot of time thinking about.

I don't know about you guys, but when Zwicky says that her poems are written "after" (whatever that means) J. S. Bach,  Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052, or after Bela Bartok, String Quartet No. 6, Sz. 114, I really don't know what she's getting at. I suspect she's just being pretentious. Apparently she has written a book (Lyric Philosophy) explaining where her head's at, but I haven't read it. The promotional material that came with Robinson's Crossing says that Lyric Philosophy establishes the lyric as occupying "that space where music means and meaning is musical." So there you go.

I'm not going to say anything more about this. I don't think it's very important anyway. I only mention it because it is put in play.

I also don't want to say more about it because I think it distracts from the poetry, which I thought was pretty good. Like Borson, Zwicky indulges in a prose memoir-sketch that I didn't like, but her poetry has a stronger sense of the line and a lot more energy than Borson's. The poem "Bee Music" is just a playful game of naming bees: "lunchpail Pythagoreans", "miniature fun-fur kazoos", "little nectar-mules", "scholars of the azimuth", "perfumed geometers of the fields!" This may be my favourite poem in any of these books. These bees aren't like all of these other things, they are little musicians and mathematicians. Why bother with similes when you can insist on the metaphor? The same game is played in the poem "Soup", ("Bolivar of the sinuses, Buddha of the placemat"). This is a poet having fun.

I thought she also showed she could do interesting things with rhythm. The "Broke Fiddle Blues" is an obvious, but not totally successful (at least to my tin ear) example. Much better are the jerky lines in "Another Version" that seem to mimic the movement of a car being dragged from the mud. Another very good short poem. Every poetry collection is filled with hits and misses. How many good poems do you want?

The middle section, including "Robinson's Crossing", was more meditative, musing on memory, history and loss. Zwicky can be vague, but she is also capable of hitting just the right note:

A ghost that hovers just above the tongue.
It's not my childhood
but the place it's gone
that I can't get to.

I thought this was a mature, thoughtful, well-crafted book. I actually liked it better than Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won the G-G in 1999.

Zach: Like you, Alex, I'm suspicious of this "after composer X" business. I haven't read Lyric Philosophy either, but there's something wrong with the poetry if you have to read the theory first to get it.

The poetry, while similar in preoccupations and general technique, is, as you say, quite a bit more interesting than Borson's. Like you, I like her metaphorical exuberance in "Bee Music", as well as in "Bone Song", where bones are "minarets and tendon-spindles" and a ribcage becomes an "orange crate / for my innards." I also had problems with these poems, however. I find the opening of "Bee Music" hackneyed: "Keepers of the secret / sound of sunlight, no job / too small." Also, she overplays the smallness of the eponymous insects, which are, in a poem that uses only about 75 words, "miniature," "tiny" and "little." It gets a bit cutesy-pie. Again, in "Bone Song" she trots out a shopworn phrase: "beauty more than / skin deep." It could be said that the context justifies the cliché, that she is rejuvenating dead phrases, but it becomes a bit of gimmick in this collection. Possibly the grossest example is "Theories of Personal Identity," a list poem that ends with: "The skeleton in the closet. / The writing on the wall. / The telltale heart." But the worst bit of this poem is this mixed metaphor, a clear attempt to salvage overused idiom from the language slag-heap: "the long lost / black sheep who's become / the shoe that fits." The other thing that strikes me about this 'playful' aspect of Zwicky's verse is that it bears a striking resemblance to Don McKay's work. Consider this poem of McKay's:

Fork

a touch of kestrel,
of Chopin, your hand with its fork
hovers above the plate, or punctuates
a proposition. This is the devil's favourite
instrument, the fourfold
family of prongs: Hard Place,
Rock, Something You Should Know,
and For Your Own Good. At rest,
face up, it says,
please, its tines
pathetic as an old man's fingers on a bed.
Face down it says
anything that moves.

McKay is not only Zwicky's husband, but is the editor of this collection. Reading "Soup" next to McKay's suite "Setting the Table" (of which "Fork" is one third) I tend to think these two might have shared a few too many meals together.

Cliché in this collection isn't just restricted to phrase, either. A lot of her poems are, as Alex has said, rather typical Canadian free-verse anecdotal lyrics, the engine of which is the sudden and / or mysterious epiphany. Consider the following:

it was that hasp, I know it now,
though at the time I did not recognize I was remembering,
nor, had you told me, would I then have known why.
-"Prairie"

The smell
was mesmerizing: musty, sweet,
dank, clay-ey; green -
and with a shock I realized
what it was: the same smell
as my family.
-"Robinson's Crossing"

But the hills
I saw then, suddenly, could only be
New Brunswick hills
-"Leaving New Brunswick"

This kind of setup, along with the prosiness of the line, feels like a shortcut to Poetic Truth. One of the worst clunkers in the collection is in "Shabbiness," where we find  "the unwordedness / of beauty pressing up / through ordinariness." This is both prolix and completely lacking in rhythm, never mind intelligibility. It's hard to account for, especially when, in the better poems here, Zwicky shows that she is quite capable of supple and musical free verse and some downright powerful imagery. To the poems Alex highlights, I'd add the "History" poem on page 63, the note about Bartok notwithstanding, for its violent, surreal imagery and dark foreboding mood. But the collection on the whole is far too typical to be exceptional - not, I think, worthy of a major award.

Steven: "Worthy of a major award" is what we're here to show, how a bunch of people come to make that decision, and why. I agree with Zach that this is not the book I'd pick. Its thoughtfulness and the maturity of its sense of play ("There are beaver slides, heavily worn, every eight to ten feet along the bank. I can't stop thinking about all those teeth, how, even while I'm thinking about them, they keep growing") are welcome, but it still feels less like reading great poetry than it does like reading a diary - sometimes fascinating, but largely closed off.

This is my first reading of Jan Zwicky, and I had a hard time figuring out my own reaction to it. We all agree that she handles metaphor nicely, and can write a fine line, balanced and measured and simple as

You could file
a quarter section for ten dollars
all you had to do to keep it
was break thirty acres in three years.

That tough roll of the 'R' as it connects "ten dollars" and "thirty acres", and the double-e of "keep" and "three" are the kinds of things that say this isn't a graceless toss-off, but a thing crafted, even if it's crafted out of homespun..

But you can overdo the homespun. I like to think Robinson's Crossing made the short-list because of its skillfully plain diction, its self-awareness that though its epiphanies are small, they happen in a landscape so empty that even that smallness stands out. Some things, in some place, happened to real people, but that was a long time ago. In the poem "Track" Zwicky lets us know this is a poetry of anecdote. "They're myths, the history gone / the second that it happened." After two full readings, and with the book open in front of me, I still can't remember or picture the people or places of "Robinson's Crossing."

I thought the "History" pieces, even with their obscure little "after-grams" to composers, were the most interesting work in the book. (For me, the clue to the reference to composers is in the references themselves: "divertimento" and "adagio" and "in D minor" try to clue you to the tone the poems should be read in. Other than that, I'm at a loss.) My problem is that these are the real meat of the book, and there are so few of them. Personally, Alex, I'm not satisfied with

It's not my childhood
but the place it's gone
that I can't get to. Something
inside the shroudedness, a holding
still: what history isn't,
but the silence in between the ticking
is.

This is flat and small to me, not something to excite me, to remind me "once again of the immense power of the written word to stimulate...make us reflect on our condition and give us cause for celebration." (From the Canada Council web site.) Published to acclaim, winner of a past G-G, nominated for this prize, I have to wonder if this is what Canada thinks its great poets should sound like. Maybe I just don't get it, or worse, am out of touch with poetry. Am I looking for something that doesn't exist?

I appreciate maturity, but still want some fire.

Alex: Well, seeing as I liked it more than you guys I guess I  should add something in response.

OK Zach, this may not be full of "nerves and blood and faeces" (what you saw as lacking in Borson), and it's light on the "atavistic Anglo-Saxon qualities" you found in Bowling. But I don't think it's that ethereal or over-intellectualized. The repetition involved in noting the smallness of the bees is part of the way that poem works. It's all about finding different names for the same thing. I wouldn't read it as cutesy-pie. You're not just saying this is rock without cock, are you? 

Steven you say it sounds less like reading great poetry than reading a diary. I think this is a criticism we could level at every one of these books, and a great deal of contemporary poetry in general. I felt there was less of this in Robinson's Crossing than in most of the others.

I remember the dog from "Robinson's Crossing".

I agree with you that the lines following 

A ghost that hovers just above the tongue.
It's not my childhood
but the place it's gone
that I can't get to.

are a letdown. That's why I didn't quote them. I was hoping no one would notice. But I thought moments like these were genuine and provocative. I thought Zwicky's questioning of what happens to the past, her imagination of the past as a place that is lost (in this and many of the other poems in the middle section) was quietly effective.

As for the blurbs from the Canada Council and the stuff that comes with the promotional material - don't get me started! Did you read what the Canada Council said about the rest of these books? It's all just a bunch of generic verbiage.

NEXT:  The jury deliberates . . .