Contemporary Canadian Poets Revert to Traditional Forms

Toronto writer Barbara Gray reviews three new books of poetry that harken back to traditional forms:

Toronto poet laureate George Elliott Clarke’s Illicit Sonnets is loosely modeled on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, her celebrated series of uber-romantic poems addressed to fellow poet (and eventual husband) Robert Browning. However, Clarke’s sensibilities are far from those of his Victorian predecessor. As he puts it in the first poem, ‘These poems are about her, naked, and I, nude./I’m not flaccid, and she’s no prude.’

Robert Melançon’s For as Far as the Eye Can See is a fluid English translation (by Judith Cowan) of the Quebec poet’s Le Paradis des apparences, published in 2004. In this series of meditative ‘light sonnets’ (composed of four three-line stanzas), the poet chronicles the ‘tiny happenings’ of an ordinary neighbourhood, as the seasons come and go, people and animals (including birds and squirrels) pass through, and days go by….Melançon’s exquisite descriptions bring the setting alive: he writes of trees that ‘become columns, holding aloft //the dome of heaven between walls of wind’ and windows whose squares of light ‘cast/glimmering nets that may catch a face.’

Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton makes radical use of an age-old form in Hooking. The cento is a kind of patchwork poem made up of lines from other poets; it’s meant to pay tribute to the source material, and was popular in Ancient Greece. Dalton imposes an added condition on herself: each cento’s line has the same position in the original poems, so ‘Gauze,’ for instance, is composed of the fourth line from work by writers as varied as Sylvia Plath and Leonard Cohen…At their best, the strung-together lines and phrases have a new, arresting beauty: ‘Dark now, the air a factory black/above the sea’s whisper and the seashore./Who was it said time is an engine of cogs and gears?’

George Elliot Clarke’s and Robert Melançon’s books are available on Amazon.  Mary Dalton’s is available through Signal Editions.

Illicit Sonnets
For As Far as the Eye Can See (Biblioasis International)