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Hamilton Arts & Letters
BOOK REVIEW
by J.S. Porter
On Mark Dickinson’s Canadian Primal: Poets, Places, and the
Music of Meaning
[Canadian Primal: Poets, Places, and the Music of Meaning by Mark Dickinson. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021, $34.95.]
“We live in a country we have barely begun to perceive.”
~ Don McKay
for Stan Dragland
Canadian Primal is a collective biography of five poets in shared conversation redefining and re-imagining home, a work of appreciative criticism that uncovers layers of deep philosophic and poetic thought, an expedition into an authentic spirituality for our time, and a large conversation on Canada’s heritage of wilderness and Indigenous wisdom. So, how can a writer fuse biography and literature and spirituality and heritage and do justice to each?
The task sounds daunting, but Dickinson’s conversation is so warm and welcoming, so full of love and affirmation, that you follow happily to wherever he leads.
Dickinson pays attention to five poet-thinkers – Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Robert Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn—who inhabit the country from Quadra Island in British Columbia to St. John’s Newfoundland, with stops in Saskatchewan and Ontario. For each poet, Dickinson finds a key word that suggests their inner life: Polyphonic Soul for Lee; Shapeshifter for McKay; Renaissance Man for Bringhurst; Lyric Philosopher for Zwicky and The Conversationalist for Lilburn. Dickinson also has an image for each, usually a wooded area or field, although in the case of Lee the accompanying image is of the Henry Moore sculpture The Archer in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, befitting the former Poet Laureate of the city and author of Civil Elegies.
The five poet-thinkers form a kind of symmathesy, a group that learns together through interaction. They correspond with each other, see each other when they can, and write about each other. Periodically, Tim Lilburn scoops up his friends and puts them in a book (Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing), binding the compañeros in their common pursuit of rethinking and renaming here. Dickinson outlines their core achievement in his Preface: “the recovery of a mode of musical thinking open to ancestors, non-human beings, natural processes, and the genius of specific places.”
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[Distillate © HA&L + J.S. Porter {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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