Blowing Dust off the Lens by Jim Wallace
Dust in Men’s Eyes
Turnstone Press was founded in the summer of 1975 in response to the realization that across the country many writers were first being published by small local publishing houses. This opportunity did not seem available to writers in Manitoba. To meet this need and to publish material of specific interest to local people, Turnstone Press decided to put out ten volumes of poetry in an initial series. Supported by a grant from the Manitoba Arts Council, Turnstone Press searched for poets who would reflect the multi-faceted culture of Manitoba.
Blowing Dust Off The Lens by Jim Wallace is the sixth volume in the series, and its unique format is an accomplishment in itself. The cover (both back and front) has on it a photograph of a mural which appears in the pub of Winnipeg’s Vendome Hotel. Various close-ups from this same mural of the old west then appear at intervals throughout the text where they serve to illustrate and embellish images and concepts in the poetry. The book’s designers deserve praise for this attractive format and it is to be hoped that future volumes of poetry from Turnstone Press could incorporate such good designing.
The book’s title aptly sets the western motif of many of the poems. It is lifted from a line in “Gunfight, Ft. Bragg” in which the speaker emulates the gunfighter of old, blowing down the barrel of a: smoking six-gun. The speaker’s twentieth century shooting device is a movie camera and the line “I pretended I was blowing dust off the lens” provides a particularly appropriate introduction to the subject matter in many of the poems. The victims this prairie poet ‘shoots’ are often caught in a stark death-like ‘still’ so that we might understand them more clearly. Blowing dust off the lens is also an act that insures the slice of life reflected is clearly defined, which is, of course, what the poems attempt to do.
In the first poem, “Indian Girl: Main Street,” the poet gives us a grim picture of what the supposedly glorious old west has become. The romantic clichés (ranches, churches, cavalry, etc.) of the old west have all found stark and desolate modern day equivalents:
I do not belong in the churches/
with priestess beerslingers,
Ranches of pinball machines,
And staggering dismounted cavalry,/
who melt the snow with vomit.
It is a picture of despair and alienation, where the modern day hunters drive cars which slaughter victims “on the blacktop plan.” The speaker summarizing the native peoples’ dilemma laments:
We cannot leave our footprints/
anywhere
And see them next day.
Another poem which captures well a segment of the prairie psyche illustrates how the mail order catalogue served as the great equalizer in terms of cultural standards and social class:
Where once we were alike in death/
alone, all naked at the grave
We now are alike in glossy life, a/
life the chain store gave.
The couplets achieve a kind of mocking tone, yet do not blur the serious question of whether or not we are fully alive.
Other poems which seem particularly representative of common prairie motifs are “Winnipeg Winter,” “Gunfight, Ft. Bragg,” and “Nightcars,” this last an interesting enquiry into the nature of twentieth century urban man. Although there are recurring themes of death and suicide in many of the poems, the overriding impression is of the great range of form, content and style Jim Wallace commands. Whether in an intensely personal poem (“God by Negatives”) or in poems with titles which could have been penned by Ogden Nash (“A Woman’s Liberation Speech Firmly Based on Medical Statistics”) the unerring eye for detail and metaphorical use of the prairie landscape make Jim Wallace a poet with much promise. It is to be hoped Turnstone Press will offer him a chance to publish future work.
Terry Angus is the author of Canadians All: Portraits of Our People and The Prairie Experience.