“The Visitants” by Mirian Waddington

Miriam Waddington occupies a peculiar—some would say an undefinable—position in Canadian literature. She has published eleven books of poetry (and a number of other books) since the appearance of Green World in 1945. Her latest book of poetry, then, comes well along in her writing career. In the past her work has been characterized by a determined avoidance of fancy or abstract language. It traditionally has been full of simple concerte words rooted in local and often prairie realities. Waddington has long and deservedly been known as an accomplished lyric poet who speaks with freshness and clarity of the places and people she has known.

In her newest book she moves out into new territory, perhaps goaded by critics who, even as they admired, have not always approved of her writing. Waddington, they have said, writes good, sometimes stunningly good poems, yet always the range in her writing has been too small. Memories of the prairies, indignation over social injustice, romantic love—these are all well and good, we hear, but: why must she hold to the limits of lyrical writing? It’s not surprising that Waddington resists such judgments, and that she resents her exclusion from major Canadian poetry anthologies. It surely would gall any writer of talent and long accomplishment to watch the rapid rise in the reputations of more recent but no more deserving poets.

It may be that The Visitants in some ways is a response to her detractors. She risks a lot here: if the book doesn’t impress, she can expect only stronger rebuffs.

As her title suggests, Waddington sounds a more prophetic note now. Though such passion is hardly new to her poetry, earlier on she was more personal and depended primanly on vivid, intense images. Now, in her desire to address ‘larger’ issues in a more direct way, she sometimes speaks in a public voice, one that enters more readily into irony and assertion. As a result, a few poems are too prone to give instructions and issue commands. Others get trapped in allegory or plain flabbiness.

The opening of “Honouring Heroes” shows what happens when the voice becomes so aggressively certain, so unquestioningly imperative, it loses most signs of life:

has anyone counted
the lands he has surveyed,
the tombs he has rifled,
or even how many lions
he has shot with that
mounting courage so much
admired and envied?
How many wives has he had,
and how many children
has he abandoned and buried?

The poem offers not so much an enquiry as a declamation. We get easy sarcasm where we should find passion, what should be sizzling is not even coy. It may be that contrived questioning risks falseness: is she actually asking or is she only pretending to ask and as a result playing in ‘bad faith’?

We run across this same satiric flatness in an earlier gibe at “aeroplanes sent by / the prime minister / of remote control / from the province / of pipelines and / the land of final / resolutions.” These lines refuse to be poetry; they squatly sit there, dull and mulish as the very things they are meant to ridicule. The satire shows no sting, no fierce rub of imagination.

Several poems do work well as satire. In “When the Shoe is on the Other Foot for a Change,” the mocking of cliché, the fresh handling of metaphor, and the sturdy vernacular jump up in the poem. So does the skill of Waddington’s tight but irregular rhyming, so common in her earlier poetry. (Watch the rhymes between “heavy,” “unleavened,” “lead,” and “death” or the echo that moves from “decay” to the breezy “go away,” and from both expressions to the word “clay” way back in the seventh line and even to “away like water” in line six.)

Fall in love?
I can’t you’re
too old your
body is cold,
your life runs
away like water
off clay your
body is dry
as old bread,
your hands spidery
red your lips
mouldy and grey,
your words are
heavy, unleavened
as lead and you
smell of death
and decay.
Get lost, shoo, vamoose,
go away.

Waddington’s growing feminism, which figures so facetiously in this poem, emerges in “Conserving,” where it works a bit more soberly by catching the appalling sense of desperation in wasted lives. Here we read of ordinary suburban wives, “the harem girls,” out walking their dogs, women who have “heard strange murmurings,” who have dreamed strange dreams. Stacked up in their regular routines, “they are working hard / To conserve the small heat / in the rooms of their lives.” But, returned home, they are “burning their dreams / in suburban fireplaces.” These lines work because they are not emptily extravagant. They draw on simple resonant words and heightened imagination to carry the experience.

The best of The Visitants—and there are many good parts—resemble Waddington’s earlier work. Her strong images and almost primitive metaphors push back into this latest book, almost as if resisting her attempts to find something new. So we find descriptions of “the fertile toad / of the yellow / swollen day, / you are yellow; / the shrunken / pearl of the / loudly yellow / night;” of “sun-bars” at windows “that open and close / like shutters on the floor.” We also discover an old lady without a fairy prince (this part of the poem, the part about the prince, is badly forced I’m afraid) who goes home, lays out her next day’s clothes, and “fills / a hotwater bottle / shaped like a toad.”

The strange mixture of corny metaphors shoved past imaginative discovery, and metaphors that win us with their rightness, occurs when in “In a Summer Garden” we find that dead musicians “turn the key of C / in the door of the sky” but where (god be praised) they also “throw down / capfuls of sound, rich / and shining as cherries.”

In at least one way, The Visitants represents a modest breakthrough for Waddington. In it she has included several poems on aging and death. They are not, all of them, consistently effective, but most show a winning whimsy in handling the words and rhythms of speech. The more colloquial voice loosens up the poems, giving them a greater sense of ease. The good-humoured acceptance in these poems can accommodate informal, even vernacular, language. My favourite among them, “Old Woman in a Garden,” combines sharply realized images of nature with a simple playfulness. Here’s what happens to an old lady, “satisfied with the sun”:

He won’t
grow up or go
away he will always
be yellow-eyed
and young
with a honey tongue
and a bee-striped smile,
he can’t go away,
he is here to stay,
and every morning
he brings her
a breakfast tray
with a cupful of light
and a saucer of day.

When the poem slides into the sing-song sound of “he can’t go away, / he is here to stay,” it approaches the magic of nursery rhyme, the charm of a child’s world. Then, in what clearly represents a departure from Waddington’s normal writing, she ends this poem with a simplicity so quiet it almost peters away:

There she is
kneeling in the garden,
an old woman
in a red garden hat;
what is she thinking of
as she scratches the earth
and plants her few
small seeds?

It’s as though Waddington has now reached past metaphor to finger these utterly naked words, these unassuming lines. She refuses to claim grand events or to make life something it is not: it is, simply, these things—an old lady scratching the dirt and planting her seeds. Nothing more, there is no more.

It occurs to me that Waddington is not (not yet at least) at her best when she hits a commanding public voice. In that role she sounds like she’s wanting to claim what she herself is not convinced of. Her false questions and imperious statements resist being challenged. Or, more probably, they only provoke challenge by not inviting readers into them: these are lines that deny our entrance, that even resist entering us. Fervid public poetry can still be written in our time despite a contemporary distrust of it. But it won’t work when it falls into cute or strained tones, into thin or flabby expression.

In a way it’s too bad Waddington has leapt into a new mode in The Visitants. Her deepest impulses and her most compelling talents, I think, can be found in her intense poetry of celebration. She excels in recording the simple, elemental powers in life. Often as not, those poems she does best live off the past, in memories of lost life and in voices that are a little more personal. It’s striking how often the same holds even for the new poems on old age; they too draw on an intimate voice musing over its losses. Waddington’s forte, so far at least, lies more with elegy than satire; it thrives more on invoking the past than provoking the present. Or it may just be that she is breaking into a new stage and that she hasn’t yet caught up with herself. ■

Dennis Cooley’s second book of poetry, Fielding, will be published in the fall by Thistledown Press in Saskatoon. He is the literary editor of Arts Manitoba.