A Response to James Pollock’s Choosing the Best Canadian Poetry

I heartily concur with many points that James Pollock makes. Canadian poetry desperately needs more reviews and reviewers. As an “attempt to formulate a canon of English-Canadian poetry for the common reader,” Margaret Atwood’s New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English appeared in 1982, to which one might add Ralph Gustafson’s Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, which came out in 1984 and is now equally mildewed. The absence of recast, revised or updated survey anthologies not only defeats critical re-evaluation and cheats successive generations of poets; it also consigns poetry to the spurious present. We can’t know who we are until we know where we came from.

Pollock observes that “a very few clear-eyed poet-critics are out there,” including Carmine Starnino. At times I find Starnino wrongheaded, but wrongheadedness is a reviewer’s privilege. What is important is that reviewers should be wrongheaded in varied ways. As Pollock suggests, critical...