A LOOK AT THE WORKS OF THREE B.C. POETS
George Stanley, David Zieroth and Phyllis Webb’s latest works are worth taking time to discover
Here are three books by B.C. poets that stand out in a crowded field.
In the past few years George Stanley (born 1934) has published Vancouver: A Poem, an imaginative book-length exploration of his adopted city, and After Desire, a meditation on aging and sexuality. His new collection, North of California St. — the title refers to his birthplace, San Francisco — is a rich selection of his much earlier work, some of it dating back 40 years, with an incisive introduction by the poet Sharon Thesen of Kelowna.
Stanley taught for years in Terrace and has associations with Prince Rupert and Prince George (“through whose doors we push / into city streets / light up / the supernatural.”) His main poetic focus, however, is his transition from San Francisco to Vancouver and the distance — that is, the psychic distance — that both separates the two places but sometimes also unites them.
Of the former place, he writes: “Bev: You belong / to the City / not the reverse.” And when he revisits San Francisco, whether physically or in memory, he recalls “tall dark rooms we had stayed in / too long” and a place that is “cool, timeless, / like it was / before nostalgia.” He was young then. Now as a Vancouver senior, he sees our own city as “No country for old men / hiding in their T-shirts — all summer — summer on Robson St. / — yet cold & without passion.” He exits a Chinese restaurant “through whose doors we push / onto city streets / Hastings & Main & the full moon ...”
Some of his recurring concerns are bohemianism, trade unionism, jazz, and the Cecil Hotel of blessed memory. His poems are often like slide shows, kaleidoscopic and discontinuous, and he is partial to lists of things, in the Walt Whitman manner. At times he rises to great beauty, as with this: “Now this raft goes faster & faster / & I hold in my mind a map / that is the map of the world / & at my back my other / watches the islands come swooping / past, & feels my back / warm against his, his precious one.”
While Stanley does a great deal of mental travelling, David Zieroth of North Vancouver (born 1946) does a great deal of the actual kind. His new collection Albrecht Durer and Me calls to mind how George Woodcock of the University of British Columbia once argued that English-Canadian poets have made almost a separate genre of travel poetry. Zieroth, however, immediately sets himself apart from other roving poets by the sophistication of his poetic technique, the quietly absorbent thoughtfulness of his voice and an interest in classical European culture that is rare in B.C. writers.
He glides through the Vienna from which Sigmund Freud fled the Nazis in 1938 and where, in the Zentralfriedhof, one of the world’s largest cemeteries, Beethoven is buried.
In Italy he engages with cities as different as Florence and Duino (and Trieste where the exiled Dutch writer Halo Suevo is interred). He reacts not as a casual vacationer would but as a sophisticated cosmopolite does, reflecting on the work of certain painters (hence the book’s title), artists and composers.
His poems aren’t mere travel impressions. They probe deeply the persons and places he re-memorializes, the ones that direct how he reacts to his surroundings. And they hang together beautifully with a tone of what you might call practical melancholy. Galileo, he writes, “lived on this street, so says / a tall handsome woman / whose apartment I’m renting / one thousand years old / with modern plumbing / and beams so huge I think of / Pacific coast giants …”
The third writer, (born 1927) is Phyllis Webb of Salt Spring Island, one of Canada’s most senior and most revered poets. John F. Hulcoop, who edited her Selected Poems 1954-1965, now gives us Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems, revisiting all of Webb’s previous collections and adding 50 previously unpublished poems.
Reading her work this way is like watching the seasons change, for people who have been writing as many years as she has don’t ordinarily stand still for long.
She was born in Victoria and graduated from the University of British Columbia and later taught there (and several other places). Her earlier works zigzagged attractively as they sought a new cadence. The breakthrough came in a 1965 collection called simply Naked Poems, an early feminist work couched in her own brand of minimalism. They were small poems and a small example called “Moving” will give you the idea: “to establish distance / between our houses. / It seems I welcome you in. / Your mouth blesses me / all over. / There is room.”
Phyllis Webb was for years the intellectual guardian of CBC Radio as the co-founder and producer of Ideas. An early CCFer, she has remained active politically, gradually settling on a mixture of anarchism, feminism and environmentalism that is to be found only on the West Coast.
Peacock Blue is a most important book. It’s both a testament and a trophy.