“Heaven’s Door” by Gregory Grace

It seems almost an article of faith for some readers to reject any volume of poetry which might be called “surrealistic” as pointless, futile or derivative, without recognizing that it is poems—not poetic schools of thought—which may or may not be genuine. One common source of this reflex response is a fear of experimentation, a dread of being shaken out of a carefully constructed world. In dealing with Gregory Grace’s Heaven’s Door, I want, then, initially to suggest that rejection of this poetry of the irrational on principle may be itself irrational, a flight into a kind of intellectual autism, where sonnets or tight ironic structures or projective verse—whatever fixity the reader’s development has found a home in—perform the function of the schizophrenic’s ritual patterns of behaviour in attempting to deny the risks and responsibilities of history.

Experimentation is a deceptive term in that truly new forms are very rare. What looks new is usually a revival of some neglected innovation in the past. George Herbert wrote concrete poems in the seventeenth century. Stream-of-consciousness has been traced back to Jane Austen’s Emma. W.D. Griffiths himself credits Dickens for the montage effects which seemed so novel and striking to modern film-goers. Surrealism comes into literature through Andre Breton in the early part of this century via Freud, who, in finding symptoms of deeper emotional patterns, in surfaces of human behaviour, was himself indebted to European romanticism. In Canada there has been talk of surrealism from time to time, particularly on the West Coast. The emergence of poetry in this mode on the prairies may have a special kind of significance.

In the first issue of Arts Manitoba Robert Kroetsch speaks of the “dreamed condition” of much apparently realistic prairie poetry, as memory transforms materials which once seemed ordinary into something magical, and as vanishing ways of life are patterned into or subtly suggest mythological configurations. The opposition between realistic and surrealistic poetry may not be as great as it looks. Surrealism has laid its claim to the territory of dream, but that claim may be disputed. Both kinds of poetry present fictive versions of the objective world, whose function is to modify our consciousness and therefore our ways of interpreting that world. The difference between them lies not in function, but in the greater distortion of the objective world in the surrealistic poem, really a distortion of certain conventions (not in themselves illegitimate) in the use of poetic language. Surrealism especially modified the convention of normal associations. Breton’s group filled a flower vase with toothbrushes. Grace speaks of a whore sprawled drunk on a sidewalk as “mud/ stink of fat grey flower, fragile/ thick muscle of song.” In both cases there is an attempt to find a fresh appropriateness by violating the old, apparently stale expectations. We are wittily forced to rethink the functions of vases and toothbrushes; made aware that what seems like human refuse may speak to us of strength and beauty: beefy song and rare flowers.

The kind of judgement to make about Heaven’s Door should not be ideological, then, but rather one which comes from approaching the poems on their own terms. When we do that we see a major division between dramatic and personal poems. The former are nearly all spoken by representatives of middle-class Canadian life, often in middle age, and are intimations and whispers from the irrational dark chambers of the mind that the order, security, and stability of those lives represents not some vital cosmic end but some personal dead end. Possessions own their possessors; careers consume identities; the reasonable seems increasingly crazy. The nightmare knocks on the door. Here is “Meditation of a Middle-Echelon Civil Servant”:

I am a man at the edge of space trying to decipher the meaning of my hands, trying to decipher the meaning of money. I want to choose the shapes
my face will take: my eyes distant and lopsided, my mouth a small fixed appendage
someone stuck here by mistake. I try to do what I think best for my wife and children. The explosion
I had been planning for so long never arrived: my clothespin fingers
snapping at me. The money I owe for the car and the mortgage is what I am, perhaps. I want to hide
on the other side of the wind and sleep.

The personal poems present a wider range of associations and reflections and considerably more tenderness. (One of the things I don’t like about the anti-bourgeois poems—despite their persuasive claustrophobia—is a persistent coldness towards their subjects.) In “Toward a Definition of One Particular Angel” we have a brief example of this greater depth:

She sleeps on the highest branch
of a winter birch tree:
she is the difference of space
between the sky and the tree:
she is as thin as a thought
in the deep of a rock. quick
as a leaf turning into itself

Here I find most of the strengths of Grace’s poems. The language leaves a sense of energy to spare, both in the easy formation of the metaphoric definitions and in the rhythms, so much a function of tactful spacing and punctuating.

Not all the poems are as successful as this. Often a good poem is weakened by a lack of restraint so that a word, image or line would have been better left out. For example, the two-eyed giant at the end of “A Visitation”, begins a movement of thought that makes a joyous and tender love poem of delicate touch seem weak and even silly. Similarly, the forceful conclusion to “The Elmtree At My In-Laws” is partly ruined by a preceding sentence that makes neither good formal sense nor good surreal nonsense. The middle-class satiric pictures have fewer stylistic lapses but, read as a whole, they tend to lack range in feeling and content.

Nevertheless, this volume has to be seen as another of many tributes to Fred Cogswell’s imagination as creator and editor. It begins with a long and ambitious poem, “Portrait of Anybody’s Uncle”, which seems to me representative of the volume in the surprises of its energy, invention, and pacing. Gregory Grace has written an authentic book of poetry which stands out significantly from most of the small volumes published in this country every year.

Ian Adam is a poet and critic who teaches in the English Department at the University of Calgary.