POETRY

In a rhythm familiar
to the Canadian ear

THE UNQUIET BED, by Dorothy Live-
say. The Ryerson Press, $5.

HE brilliantly black-gold jacketed
' book, The Unquiet Bed, is a re-
markable testimony to the growth
of Canada’s most prominent woman
lyric poet, Dorothy Livesay. Her 42
poems are attractively laid-out in four
separate sections, each introduced by
an appropriate reproduction of Roy
Kiyooka’s symbolist paintings. Ryer-
son Press has done justice to this col-
lection of Miss Livesay’s last 10 years
of writing. :
What is remarkable, however, is the
poetry itself. No doubt most young
listeners of poetry think of Miss Live-
say aS someone from the ancient past,
while her contemporaries assume she
has withered and died as most of the
poets from her generation have done.
For, aside from the rather passé blasts
from Layton’s Nietzschean horn of self-
professed virility, most of the .promin-
ent writers of the 30’s-40’s group either
edit anthologies or lecture law, or like
Birney, play the poet’s role, and utter
obscurities to the chosen elite.
Perhaps because she does not have
the male ego to inflate and she hasn’t
fallen into the academic bag of erudite
metaphysicians (the two death traps
for many good Canadian poets), Doro-
thy Livesay has still, approaching her

60’s, something very fresh and alive to

say.

' The source of her revitalized sensi-
bility is two-fold. First, her experience
in the late fifties as a UNESCO teacher
in Zambia, and secondly, following her
return to Vancouver from Africa, her
experience with the Black Mountain
group, a new wave of young B.C. writ-
ers and a detailed study of linguistics.
The impact of this second phase is to
be seen, in form and content, in her
poem ‘Without Benefit of Tape,” a ro-
manticized statement about the fron-
tier poetry of daily speech:

The real poems are being written in
outports
on backwoods farms

in passageways where pantries still

exist

or where geraniums

nail light to the window

while out of the window boy in the
flying field

is pulled to heaven on the keel of
a kite.”

The living speech is shouted out

by men and women leaving railway
lines

to trundle home, pack-sacked

just company for deer or bear—

The new speech rhythm, free from
a sing-song stylized form, is heard
clearly in her poem, “Soccer Game,”
which captures the rigorous dance of
the sport: .

And bounce it once
hard to the ground
sharp, vicious kick
and beat

beat back again
into a sea of knees
the pounding field.

Nor does she forget to capture the
child’s point of view, a skill well es-
tablished in her earlier poetry. In “Iso-
late” she describes the “only child”
who “creates a web of action pulling
them in” only to be deserted when:

across the street

the firebell clangs

and the great grey horses stamp

in a burst of doors

deafen the asphalt with their
hooves.

The long narrative poem “Roots” in
which the poet describes her journey
from Vancouver back to the place of
her birth, Winnipeg, is interesting au-
tobiography and many of the images
of Canada’s geography are effective:

Second-hand city
strangers call it
Vancouver Vancouver

second-growth forest
sirens and sea-gulls

second-hand stores

hand-me-down houses

but city where
under the thumb-print of rain
love rages

Golden lies beyond
sun-fevered hills

greenland of lakes and rivers
mountain country

(handsbreadth of green-

gold fields

in a split-second of sunlight).
In Saskatchewan

they seem to hate trees

We drove and drove
dust evils swirled

black puffs of oil wells
choked.

But I agree with Seymour Mayne,
the young Montreal-Vancouver poet
who claims this poem is too clogged
with detail to sustain the pulse and
beat of its form.

The only one completely good poem
in Part II of the book is “The Rat.” If
read with any dramatic sense, it is a
nice, lyrical understatement of human

: cruelty.

However, the full beauty and open
humanism of Miss Livesay’s sensibility
are not really revealed until Parts III
and IV of her book. The title poem,
“The Unquiet Bed,” is a simple, lovely
song, an affirmation of womanhood,
with all the struggle that entails left
as an after thought:

The woman I am
is not what you see
I’m not just bones
and crockery

The woman I am
knew love and hate
hating the chains
that parents make

longing that love
might set men free
yet hold them fast
in loyalty

The woman I am
is not what you see
move-over love
make room for me

It sets the tone for a whole number
‘of fresh honest love lyrics, startling in
their frankness and warmth. As the
poet herself said at a reading recently,

a middle-aged woman in love cannot
regain her youth but she can regain
her innocence. And in this age of cy-
nicism and the mass cultural degrega-
tion of sex, these songs of innocence
are a pleasure to hear.

Little wonder Miss Livesay has such
an easy raport with the young writers
and listeners of poetry in Canada. The
humanist ethics implicit in her micro-
cosmic poems are a welcome alterna-
tive to the hate and violence of our
age.

The last section, “Zambia,” is the
most overt social statement in the
book. It recounts the poet’s stay in
Northern Rhodesia during the:period of
struggle, led by Kenneth Kauenda, for
national independence. The dramatic
progression from the poet’s initiation

to Africa—

From the twentieth of November
at the turn of the moon’s tide

I entered the dark continent—

it was blazing with sunlight

It develops into a miniature epic of
a whole people. The description of the
village, nameless, choked with dust
and heat, leads to the inclusion of life
and death cycles (“Wedding” and
“Funeral”) the rising empathy with the
liberation struggle (“The Leader”) and
finally culminates with the evocation
of a new mythology, that of the Afri-
can woman, “The Prophetess.” The
poem must be heard, read aloud (Miss

Livesay herself is @ super
order to catch the tens
chant:

Ai Ai How the peopl ,
as the fire flickers :
as the Le falls sudden ©
definite ae
darkening the faces. God
Not by a white mans
need we be saved —
but by the resurrection
an African mother —
Ai Ai

Lumpa (in the nighed
lumpa the drums bea
lumpa 3
lumpa lumpa ets:
lumpa lumpa lumpa

Certainly no on
Livesay of joining an &X@
literati. Her poems are ©

familiar
adian ear. Although ©
cit rhetoric condemning
war or denouncing th@ i
nation, there is implicit
humanism, warmth @
stands on its ow
our’ contemporary ! pron
something of an Emily ain?

woman’s psyche reveale

pot

say from the

Night will be int

has progressed.

tion who didnt oF a
those days fin

warmth in her lyrics wi
usually expect from © =
tion.

It is a pity that ee
have published “The isa
paper-back. Five dollats
But I still recommen as 10
it. After all someone ent!
writers alive. And 208 jy
nial committees are bee pe!
trees and selling out ngs of
sources to hear the 591?

temporary women poets:

THE CONDUCTOR

By GERARD HOFNUNG