Rambling with Birney, poet and ironic wit

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EARLE BIRNEY. McClelland and Stewart. 2 vols. 188 and 191 pages. $20 boxed.

Earle Birney is not only one of Canada's most distinguished poets but one of its most irrepressible. As a comic novelist, playwright, critic, teacher of creative writing, and above all poet, Birney's ironic wit and sensitive social conscience has informed everything he has touched and made throughout a long and varied career.

Birney was born and brought up in the Rockies, which form the setting for "David," his long narrative poem about the duality of man. As a people, we have not been concerned until very recently with teaching Canadian literature to Canadian students, but if our children have encountered any Canadian poetry, the chances are good that that poetry was Birney's award-winning "David."

The Canadian identity and students of "Can.Lit" are often the butt of Birney's humor:

too busy bridging loneliness

to be alone

we hacked in railway ties

what Emily etched in bone

we French and English never lost

our civil war

endure it still

a bloody civil bore

So much for technological expertise, and B and B. "Can.Lit" concludes, "It's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted." A 1945 poem, "Canada: Case History," presents us as a "high school land, dead-set in adolescence," while the updated 1973 version suggests that we have moved into "permanent senescence."

No more the high school land

deadset in loutishness

This cat's turned cool

the gangling's gone

guffaws are for the peasants

Like that other wanderer, Al Purdy, Birney has traveled to such exotic climes as Australia, Japan, Africa, and Latin America, giving poetry readings and transmitting his travel experiences into new verse. As Birney puts it in his short foreword to the Collected Poems, "I've moved around a bit since I jotted down the substance of 'Kootenay Still Life' at 15 on my father's fruit ranch." The two volumes are grouped by period and locale. Travel poems are especially prominent in the second, sample headings being "1955-1962: Mexico," "1958-1972: Asia," and "1962: South America and the Caribbean."

Wherever Birney goes, he takes his Canadian consciousness with him. In "Cartegena de Indias, 1962," he walks through a tropical market and sees himself through South American eyes, incredibly rich, a tourist from outer space. Yet the inhabitants of "this rancid disarray" love and honor their local poet Luis Lopez. The Canadian poet, "I who am seldom read by my townsmen," envies Luis and loves the people whom he celebrated:

I love the whole starving cheating

poetry-reading lot of you      most of all

for  throwing  me  the  shoes  of  deadman

     Luis

to walk me back into your brotherhood

Birney believes that poetry cannot be taught, in the literal sense, only enjoyed, shared, extolled or hated. His work, like good poetry everywhere, is both universal and local, objective and personal. It reveals that personal and regional experience can also be something that belongs to mankind, and to all time.

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©Copyright 1996

LSK - DATE Friday March15, 1996