Dennis Lee in 2003Darryl James/The Globe and Mail
Once upon a time, about five decades ago, the canonical poet Dennis Lee wrote the text for an oratorio. In it, he made use of the cries shouted by Toronto newsboys (there were newsboys on downtown street corners back then) as they hawked the latest editions of The Globe and Mail, The Star and The Telegram.
I've always remembered this because it seemed to foreshadow the mixture of sober adult diction and informal pop-talk that became characteristic of his work. The juxtaposition was one of the tools he used as he wrote himself painfully through the issues that tortured him so: WASP angst (I never understood that one), small-c conservative nationalism, and a certain kind of Protestant Christianity about which he was at once both disbelieving and clingy.
The results were much like those in his latest collection, Testament: Poems 2000−2011, even though his whole approach to language has changed fundamentally, and in sometimes fascinating ways, over the past decade.
I suspect that for Lee (born 1939) the change may have begun when, after years spent nursing the talents of so many younger poets, he found one (Christian Bök, born 1966) who influenced him instead. Bök's best known book, Eunonia (2001), which won the Griffin Prize, employed only one vowel in each of its five sections, turning accepted poetic language upside down and inside out. In Ezra Pound's old phrase, he made it new.
Lee then followed with experimental collections of his own titled Un and Yesno. He has rewritten some of their contents for inclusion in Testament, which consists of strange lyric poems in highly fragmented language. A typical line chosen at random: "Surd journeys to scrambled states of once." One reads this book inductively, letting some invisible current send the words shooting through one's ears. There's no need to read it the other way – deductively – for its ideas are blatantly apparent and anything but unfamiliar.
The greater part of Testament struggles with a dystopian future (or maybe no future at all) due to ecological and environmental ruination that originated with European colonialism and is now unremitting and unstoppable. Hardly an uncommon concern. It's Lee's language that enlivens matters. To jumble quotations from a number of different poems, he hears the "last call for littoral cities, slipaway Sydney/ London. Manhattan. Mumbai" and indeed for the entire "trashable planet,/ bring it on home." Dammit, the extinction of the entire "iffy human smear" is nigh, and language itself is naturally going down with it: "Syllabic unhitchings among the galactic nevermind" as we "stammer the uterine painscape/ in pidgin apocalypse …"
There always has been something highly biblical in Lee's work. He once wrote how in his youth he "gorged on the rumours of God." In an earlier poem, he kept beseeching Jesus, whom he called "Master." He once told me of his interest in quantum physics in such a way as to let me infer he was seeking the secrets of God as well as those of the scientific Universe. Here he writes that "some-/ thing matters, no/ matter how nano the known." But now he's obsessed with endings rather than beginnings; he's gone all eschatological on us, speaking of "Earth in the end days."
Privately, I've always thought of him as some type of self-ordained United Church mystic, a bit preachy at times but compassionate and sincere, if perhaps not so worldly as he might wish us to believe he is. Once a student of Northrop Frye, always a student of Northrop Frye. In any case, we find his millennialistic doom-saying tempered a little by some slight notes of optimism about our survival, as though the planet, despite everything, might be "poised for a last-real comeback."
He writes: "Yes a rescue appeared, in the/ story of a saviour arose …" The hope is a faint one, but a hope all the same: "Homeheart, great loanheart,/ hang in;/ blue planet, hold on." He reminds himself and us "how/ dumfound how/ dazzled, how/ mortally lucky [it is] to be." There's even a barely discernible hint that Eros may somehow survive "the teleo-/ skookum surge to hominid domination: what geocidal/ grandeur? what germinal terminus schuss?"
If I've relied heavily on quotations from the text, it's only because that seems the surest way to convey the tone, intent and wonder of this vital, highly original and of course profoundly depressing book.
George Fetherling's latest poetry collection is Plans Deranged by Time.