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One Muddy Hand: Early Birney (Harbour $18.95)
Earle Birney's famous poem about the death of a hiking companion, "David,"; had been published twenty years before I first heard it. I can still recall the voice of Mr. Burt, my Grade 12 English teacher, reading it aloud and reading it well.
"That day we chanced on the skull and the splayed white ribs
Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff-face, caught
On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of hawks.
And that was the first time I knew that a goat could slip.";
It remains visceral, the shock of that poem; its powerful rhythm and wording as well as the unforgettable narrative about a mountain climbing fatality. It is one of the few poems in the Canadian canon that most readers of this column might recognize.
Naturally "David"; has been included in One Muddy Hand (Harbour $18.95), the only Birney collection currently in print, but this is a surprising book. Along with David, one might expect mostly worn-out or sentimental work from an academic born more than a hundred years ago but his modernity and energy astound. There are poems with ecological insight, others with a passion for indigenous cultures, as well as sensitive and delicate love poems. Editor Sam Solecki has collected an amazing variety of work. While starting out as a traditional formalist, heavy on Anglo-Saxon rhythms, Birney, an avid outdoorsman and hiker, continually experimented with form, shape and voice. The work of Birney's friend and fellow poet Al Purdy (also collected by Sam Solecki) is the nearest in comparison. Both were unmistakably Canadian though that's hard to define how and why. Both were also peripatetic travelers, restless even. Poems by Birney flowed from and about Mexico, Thailand, Istanbul, Japan and Peru. Then he's in Australia or London or writing in a tavern by the Hellespont.
Birney never wrote the same poem twice. In "The Speech of a Salish Chief,"; taken from The Damnation of Vancouver, Birney wrote of Indian baskets and the destruction of First Nations culture:
"Red roots and yellow weeds entwined themselves
Within our women's hands, coiled to those baskets darting
With the grey wave's pattern, or the wings
Of dragonflies, you keep in your great cities now
Within glass boxes. Now they are art, white man's taboo
But once they held sweet water...";
Birney's last great love was a much younger woman named Wailan Low who cared for him later when he was ill and disabled. The sequence of love poems written to and for her, many of them on her birthdays, are so intimate it feels like a blundering intrusion to read them. No doubt their spring/winter relationship caused a stir but to read these poems now is to sense them as a memorial of surprise and gratitude. How genuine his love for her was; one hesitates to use the word "sweet"; because it's been so over-used and ruined by cynics.
The love poems are unaffected and unpretentious; short and deceptively slight:
"the magic flows
in the wind that bends
the waterlily's face
to the lips of the wrinkling lake.";
With wry allusions to their difference in age, Birney repeatedly sets her free, to go on after his death:
"to warm another
with the same love
you shone steadfast on me
If sometime my shadow
flits over the embers
it's just to bless.";
The volume concludes with about fifteen pages of Birney's prose which demonstrate his humour and the contemporary nature of his poetics. He writes, "There's a curious peace that comes in the intensity of practicing one's metier, an absorption that annihilates time and place."; In 1966, when most Canadian readers had not yet noticed Marshall McLuhan, Birney wrote, "Literature is all the more alive today because it is changing so rapidly. In fact it's adjusting to the possibility that the printed page is no longer the chief disseminator of ideas."; The prose section includes a long piece on the composition of David, the poem which ends unforgettably like this:
"I said that he fell straight to the ice where they found him,
And none but the sun and incurious clouds have lingered
Around the marks of that day on the ledge of the Finger,
That day, the last of my youth and the last of our mountains.";
Despite more than five decades of literary activity, Earle Birney, who died eleven years ago while in his nineties, has been fading in notoriety.
Thousands of talented writers are coming out of Creative Writing programs these days, not to mention many more who are skilled poetry readers and book buyers, yet how many know it was Birney, along with UBC professor Roy Daniells, who started the first Writing Workshop in Canada, forty years ago, at UBC? As it matured into the country's first Creative Writing Department, Birney was its first head. Since then his influence on writers in this province, and in this country, cannot be over-stated.
1-555017-370-7
[BCBW 2006]
"That day we chanced on the skull and the splayed white ribs
Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff-face, caught
On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of hawks.
And that was the first time I knew that a goat could slip.";
It remains visceral, the shock of that poem; its powerful rhythm and wording as well as the unforgettable narrative about a mountain climbing fatality. It is one of the few poems in the Canadian canon that most readers of this column might recognize.
Naturally "David"; has been included in One Muddy Hand (Harbour $18.95), the only Birney collection currently in print, but this is a surprising book. Along with David, one might expect mostly worn-out or sentimental work from an academic born more than a hundred years ago but his modernity and energy astound. There are poems with ecological insight, others with a passion for indigenous cultures, as well as sensitive and delicate love poems. Editor Sam Solecki has collected an amazing variety of work. While starting out as a traditional formalist, heavy on Anglo-Saxon rhythms, Birney, an avid outdoorsman and hiker, continually experimented with form, shape and voice. The work of Birney's friend and fellow poet Al Purdy (also collected by Sam Solecki) is the nearest in comparison. Both were unmistakably Canadian though that's hard to define how and why. Both were also peripatetic travelers, restless even. Poems by Birney flowed from and about Mexico, Thailand, Istanbul, Japan and Peru. Then he's in Australia or London or writing in a tavern by the Hellespont.
Birney never wrote the same poem twice. In "The Speech of a Salish Chief,"; taken from The Damnation of Vancouver, Birney wrote of Indian baskets and the destruction of First Nations culture:
"Red roots and yellow weeds entwined themselves
Within our women's hands, coiled to those baskets darting
With the grey wave's pattern, or the wings
Of dragonflies, you keep in your great cities now
Within glass boxes. Now they are art, white man's taboo
But once they held sweet water...";
Birney's last great love was a much younger woman named Wailan Low who cared for him later when he was ill and disabled. The sequence of love poems written to and for her, many of them on her birthdays, are so intimate it feels like a blundering intrusion to read them. No doubt their spring/winter relationship caused a stir but to read these poems now is to sense them as a memorial of surprise and gratitude. How genuine his love for her was; one hesitates to use the word "sweet"; because it's been so over-used and ruined by cynics.
The love poems are unaffected and unpretentious; short and deceptively slight:
"the magic flows
in the wind that bends
the waterlily's face
to the lips of the wrinkling lake.";
With wry allusions to their difference in age, Birney repeatedly sets her free, to go on after his death:
"to warm another
with the same love
you shone steadfast on me
If sometime my shadow
flits over the embers
it's just to bless.";
The volume concludes with about fifteen pages of Birney's prose which demonstrate his humour and the contemporary nature of his poetics. He writes, "There's a curious peace that comes in the intensity of practicing one's metier, an absorption that annihilates time and place."; In 1966, when most Canadian readers had not yet noticed Marshall McLuhan, Birney wrote, "Literature is all the more alive today because it is changing so rapidly. In fact it's adjusting to the possibility that the printed page is no longer the chief disseminator of ideas."; The prose section includes a long piece on the composition of David, the poem which ends unforgettably like this:
"I said that he fell straight to the ice where they found him,
And none but the sun and incurious clouds have lingered
Around the marks of that day on the ledge of the Finger,
That day, the last of my youth and the last of our mountains.";
Despite more than five decades of literary activity, Earle Birney, who died eleven years ago while in his nineties, has been fading in notoriety.
Thousands of talented writers are coming out of Creative Writing programs these days, not to mention many more who are skilled poetry readers and book buyers, yet how many know it was Birney, along with UBC professor Roy Daniells, who started the first Writing Workshop in Canada, forty years ago, at UBC? As it matured into the country's first Creative Writing Department, Birney was its first head. Since then his influence on writers in this province, and in this country, cannot be over-stated.
1-555017-370-7
[BCBW 2006]
Submitted on November 10, 2006 in By David.
