News

Peter Dale Scott is a third-generation poet and public man. His poet grandfather was Frederick George Scott, a famed First World War padre, Quebec City Anglican canon, and British imperialist. His poet father was F. R. Scott, Montreal law-school dean and constitutional expert, and one of the founders of the CCF, predecessor of the New Democratic Party.

• Mosaic Orpheus, by Peter Dale Scott, McGill-Queens University Press, 182 pages, $16.95

Nor has Peter Dale Scott been idle. A former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, he's been a consistent and prolific critic of U.S. covert operations and foreign wars from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, and the author of books with titles like Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War . He's said that he prefers the term “deep politics” to “conspiracy theory.”

Scott is an unabashedly political poet, at least in part. His Seculum trilogy began with Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (1988), continued with Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and ended with Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (2000). In varied ways, the three books shuttle between history and autobiography, and between the political yang and the spiritual yin.

Mosaic Orpheus is more of the same. To his credit, Scott is as much an agnostic about humanism as he is about organized religion. Almost as a tribute to his Anglican forbears, Biblical quotations and Christian mystics inform the book, and Taoism and Buddhism inflect it, as does Scott's political and cultural overview of our jangled times in The Tao of 9/11 :

…the republic is suborned

by these forces we cannot see

for which the intellectual price

is a shrinkage of our culture

towards the trivialities

of narcotic distractions undecipherable poets

and expansion of empire

with help from al Qaeda

until now there are American troops

from Kyrgyzstan to Kosovo.

Russia, China, Latin America, the Middle East, all the disunited nations, are present if not altogether accounted for, because Scott is ever mindful of the thick fog of political circumstances in which we dwell. Thailand, with its past deforestation and present-day drug trafficking, looms especially large with its blend of the tragic internal displacements of its population and the upward trajectory of its economy. Referring to a wat, a Thai Buddhist temple, in Wat Pa Nanachat , he writes:

the darkness of the forest

opening the darkness within us

the wat once walled

inside the forest

as Thailand in Buddhism

and now the forest

or what is left of the forest

walled inside the wat

Scott's longer poems have marginal glosses that are sometimes helpful but often are linked to bibliographies that seem more designed to impress a thesis advisory committee than the common reader. Considering his wide scholarship and density of geopolitical reference, perhaps the apparatus was unavoidable.

As much as one welcomes substantive political poetry that is not mere attitudinizing, the personal, recollective, almost conversational poems make the most impact. The charming, wryly humorous The Power of Prayer concerns his Uncle Arthur, an Anglican cleric in the Eastern Townships distinctly different from Frederick George:

with his prayerful fingers

his influent smile

fixed on a sphere

I had not yet glimpsed

In several poignant, bittersweet, or rueful poems, he recalls the women in his past. He reviews the sexual opportunities he passed up, concluding in Something Precious :

for all this I am now grateful

I have arrived where I am

in a place where it is o.k.

to be (like Eliot and James)

a tad abnormal

In contrast was his revered and philandering father

With his nighttime absences at work

His two trunks full of love letters

(Not to be opened until

Fifty years after my death)

He fondly, sometimes movingly, recalls writer colleagues like Jessica Mitford, Denise Levertov, and Czeslaw Milosz. He honours Maylie, his first wife, and Ronna, his current one (“I have been so very happy traveling these past years / But only, my love, because of you”). In Good-bye to Thailand , near the end of the book, he says:

… and now I am an emeritus

like the old men I once thought irrelevant

not yet having known this freedom

to be the only one

watching the purple heron

drift slowly north across the sky

For someone who has been so involved in public forums, the heir of public men, this is one way to come to peace with his solitary self.

Fraser Sutherland is a writer and editor whose most recent poetry collection is Manual for Emigrants.