Back to his own work
STEVE LUXTON, the former head of DC Books, has published a poetry collection with a focus on nature
When Steve Luxton emigrated with his family to Toronto from his native city of Coventry, England, he was 11 years old and bringing a few exotic preconceptions about Canada along with him. “I had this vision of a land of spruce trees,” says the poet, now 66, as we talk in an N.D.G. café. “I remember thinking, ‘Toronto is an Indian name, this is going to be a really natural spot.’ I ended up living in an apartment building next to a huge garbage dump by the polluted Humber River. So I was disabused of those notions pretty quickly. But that ‘something else’ stayed in my imagination, and it’s still there.”
Through the following decades — time spent studying in Canada and the United States, teaching in CEGEPs and at Concordia University, and running a small but influential literary press — Luxton nurtured his affinity for Canada’s wilderness, imaginary and otherwise, maintaining a parallel career leading organized canoe trips and drawing repeatedly on nature in his writing. His new collection, In the View of Birds: New and Selected Poems (DC Books, 109 pages,
$16.95), gathers works spanning 1985 to 2010, linked by their rural settings.
The poems are finely observed, lyrical and funny in equal measure, revelling in their subject matter without romanticizing it. Mink Song inhabits the mind of the titular animal stalking its prey, “unerring ears pricked/for the patter of tender mice feet,/exultant thump of rabbits/relieved they’re/delivered from me”; What the Landscape Wants paints a picture of the countryside as a kind of noble pet, loyal despite all we’ve done to hurt her: “Still/the landscape loves us .../ It lunges/after us longingly/like a dog after/a familiar pickup truck.”
Still, for all his obvious connection to the world of nature, Luxton is reluctant to call what he writes nature poetry.
“When people hear the term, it comes with a slightly pejorative spin,” he says. “It’s perceived as sentimental. And traditionally in a lot of Canadian poetry, because of the frontier experience, the vision of nature has been one of a hostile and inimical world. So it’s had a kind of double negative whammy against it. But more recently the environmental movement has brought a view that’s more shamanistic — nature as Other, but you’re also part of it. My stuff is more like that.”
In the end, Luxton says, nature poetry would be a misleading label because his poems are not about nature per se. “What I’m really writing about are conflicting human impulses,” he says. “For example, with the predators in my poems, the minks and things, I’m really isolating elements of myself, the id as opposed to the superego.” Is he aware of creating symbols while writing? “No. It’s a separation I only discover afterwards, thankfully. It’s not as if I’m always thinking, ‘Is that person a wolverine, or is he a gopher?’”
While Luxton clearly isn’t one for explicit political stances, I wonder whether the reader is meant to glean an underlying environmentalist message in the poems. “It’s in there, I suppose, but it’s implicit. I’m not an environmentalist; I’m more of an amateur naturalist. I was that little boy who collected stones. My advantage, if it is one, is that I’m both a city guy and a country guy, always have been. It’s just that I tend to respond more to the lasting and elemental imagery you get in nature.”
CanLit adepts will know that there is a lot more to Luxton than his poetry: He has long been the kind of tireless proselytizer/practitioner/editor/teacher/mentor without whom a country’s literary culture would wither and die. He inherited responsibility for DC Books from its founder, Louis Dudek, and ran it with his friend, the late Robert Allen, finally stepping down last December after 25 years.
For all DC’s deserved stature — among other distinctions, it published the first books by Heather O’Neill and Dimitri Nasrallah — Luxton professes relief at being out of the publishing fray. “The margin was always like this,” he says, holding his thumb and index finger as close as they can get without touching. “You end up having to do everything yourself. Basically, I left it because I wanted to get back to my own work.”
Having heard him liken his last years at DC to being “a captain on the deck of a burning ship,” I can’t help asking Luxton how he sees the future unfolding for books in general. “There always will be books,” he says. “But my intuition is that most people, if they want a book, will get it in virtual form. The book as object will become almost — and I hate to use the term — a boutique item. Something for bibliophiles and collectors.”
The imminent Death of The Book notwithstanding, Luxton has another one in the works, slated for 2014, drawn from journals of his trip with an NGO into remote villages in the Amazon rainforest of southern Guyana. Retirement would seem to agree with him: He recently married for the first time, and he and his wife have bought a 200-year-old house in North Hatley.
Maybe it’s partly the age of that house, maybe it’s his encyclopedic knowledge of literary history and the vicissitudes of reputation, or maybe it’s being attuned to the slow clock of nature, but Luxton has a healthy acceptance of time’s likely victory over poetic immortality: “It’s both depressing and liberating. It means you might as well do what you want to do, and do it while you can.”