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‘Spanning both new and old traditions’

Poems Selected and New
by D.C. Reid


Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2023
$25.95 /8781771714129

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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Decades ago, D.C. Reid stopped writing historical novels to write lyrical poetry. Even in the poetry he stayed true to the novels and kept one foot in the lyrical, magical realist style of Rudy Wiebe.

The result is fifty years of exploration in genre fusion. In a century when many English-language poets became fascinated with haiku, tanka, Sapphics, rubaiyat, sestinas and ghazals, just to name a few, Reid’s lines grew flat and long, as if he were throwing out a fly to a steelhead on the Nitinat River.

He did that a lot, too. It’s easy to denigrate baby boomers these days for the overconsumption of the post World War II years. Reid, though, was moving past the wounds of his father’s war by fishing. Fly-casting became an evocation of individuality and a purification of traditional craft. The poetry followed.

It was the century for such attempts at healing. Ford Maddox Ford threw out rhyme at the end of World War I and wrote prose lines like barbed wire raked by machine gun fire. Robert Graves and Anne Sexton spliced individualism into traditional craft. Sylvia Plath and Lorna Crozier dove into imagistic lyrics with verve.

Many Canadian poets cut their lines into short lengths and stacked them up under the eaves for winter heat. Rhymes were out. The carriage return was in. The result was plain speech lifted into song. All these traditions continue to evolve vibrantly today. As a new century of war breaks over us, these contributions will become central again throughout the coming decades.

Reid’s contribution to healing a gulf of horror is a wealth of techniques for telling stories through long lyric lines controlled by a variety of in-sentence tricks. These include punctuation games, dropped verbs, morphed parts of speech (verbs into adjectives, nouns into verbs and adverbs, etc), outward addresses and challenges to readers. 

For all this postmodern verbal play, he is working the deep pool of an old conservative tradition. Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book works within it. At the end of the Great War, Ezra Pound discovered an elastic narrative mode in Browning’s Ring. Reid picks the thread up again and unrolls it in long, fragmented yet unified lines. But then he is a master fly-fisher; he knows how to cast a line and play it out and how to bring a fish home, set it free, and play it again. 

That’s the long view of Reid’s book. Up close, it is packed with emotional resonance. There are love poems, poems laconically exploring the male gaze, poems for losing custody of his daughters, and battles against chronic fatigue syndrome and cancer. Throughout all these stories, confessions, and pleadings for understanding, Reid works to hold pre-feminist and post-feminist worlds together in a way that allows male voices to flourish in a twenty-first-century century world of individualized identities. The context of this expression, the conception that maleness (and femaleness) are two of many identities on a kaleidoscopic spectrum, is both challenging and beautiful. 

Author DC (Dennis) Reid

Much of Reid’s interest in maleness comes as ripples from stones dropped by Pat Lane’s practice of placing male violence within poems as a force of conjoined creation and destruction.

A lot of it echoes back to the 1920s, when Pound’s insistence on seminal male thought battled it out with a resurgent feminism finding a voice free of late nineteenth-century artifice. Pound and Ford invented modernist poetry to set the excesses of such artifices aside. In turn, female writers were successful at setting aside Pound’s and Ford’s. A lot of Reid’s interest also comes from one of the oldest male stories: fathers and sons and the struggle to make an identity when that relationship is broken. Here, in “Elegy from a Slumber I Can’t Retrieve,” is Reid within that struggle, practicing for the Victoria Marathon:

Breath rises beyond control, my running shoes at the end of my feet,
double-knotted to prevent the Linus Pauling tendency of things to
fall apart.

I watch myself disappear, aware that this is not at all possible.

Fog, this fog, is a kind of sleep that moves gently inland until it, too,
cannot withstand the sun. Rising with great patience, leonine, the
foghorn says to no one in particular,

“I am here, where are you?”

Reid’s conservatism is dynamic. In his introduction, he speaks of creating four different styles of poetry. They might be one. At times, they are prose adapted to a lyrical narrative mode. At other times, they are prose expressing its own lyrical possibilities. Reid’s first stories are about women, in prose stanzas marked by narrative steadiness and simple formatting—traditionally Canadian, in other words. Later stories honouring Canadian military sacrifice are in tighter, rhythmic stanzas, like formations storming a line. All are variations on how a long prose line might be laid out on the page for various lyrical effects.

The most effective and integrated are the ones from his books Love and Other Things that Hurt (1999), The Hunger (2004), and What It Means To Be Human (2009). Together, they form a masterful incorporation of chaos and randomness into flexible verse spanning both new and old traditions. 

“Haikai Pass Revisited” is an example that shows Reid characteristically putting the Earth in place of his self: 

Think of a day as a piece of paper upon which is written the will of 
another.

Think of rain so heavy the rest of nature stoops to listen and so the 
rain is largened.

Think of the tension of rain, holding to itself, so in its coming, glass
beads harmless across the Pacific which is its other self.

I am free as long as the rain holds.

The approach is flatter in the military elegies, where the ambiguity of Reid’s long lines and the narrative of unfolding sentences has been set aside for official history passionately and personally expressed. In them, Reid rejects chaos for integration into group identities. These are strong military virtues, from the son of a fabled WWII veteran. If anyone has an ancestral right to describe a Canadian presence at Gallipoli as “we,” it might just be Reid. 

Tellingly, however, those soldiers were citizens of Newfoundland. Although their inclusion is honourably and movingly integrative, they were not Canadians yet. Elsewhere, Reid’s inclusion of contemporary Canadians as presences in the terrible Canadian battles of the Great War in France fails to fully convince. “All is well on the northern front,” he writes in “Canada’s Hundred Day War,” “except the enemy / heard Canada was coming and massed his armies / to make a silence of us.” It’s an exaggeration. By that point in that terrible war, German soldiers were fighting for more local goals—an important distinction between humanity and military rhetoric we have as much need of today.

Still, Reid addresses this conservative sense of nationalism with welcome clarity. The process of becoming Canadian began for Reid while he was a boy swimming and fishing on the Bow River in Calgary. That remained his Canada until he crossed the mountains and his sense of nation expanded to Vancouver Island. Fifteen years ago, when he led the League of Canadian Poets, he developed a sense of Canada as a nation-state. Reid’s Alberta and British Columbia are Canadian provinces for him now, more than cultural entities contributing independently to the Canadian confederation. The man comfortable with vanishing into the rain is gone. It’s quite the trajectory.

Every volume of selected poems speaks of a journey. Reid’s might not quite be the journey of innovation he claims, but it is a journey towards a remarkable fusion, as well as a journey from it to an integrated social identity. Throughout, Reid’s lines are turned this way and that in the light to see what else their long breaths will show. That is a full justification for the publication of a fifty year retrospective, especially since due to the peculiarities of Canadian literary publishing and distribution Reid’s books have rarely had the national exposure they deserve. What It Means To Be Human was well-deserving of a GG, for instance, yet it failed to be nominated.

Reid’s publisher, Ekstasis Editions, has a history much like Reid’s. It has published Beat and experimental work, as well as many translations of Canadian books originally written in French. It has also supported many folk poets working on the edges of literary culture. Reid has one foot in this group. A whole tradition of poetry met postmodernism in him, as he has achieved what he set out to do—carry it forward, weave it in, pass it on to us, and then let us swim on upstream, as his hands lift away.

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Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-four books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the GrassMotherstoneCariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. His The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle will appear this fall. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold Rhenisch has reviewed books by Kim Trainor, Dallas HuntTim BowlingHamish Ballantyne, Zoë LandaleKerry GilbertRobert HillesSho YamagushikuBradley PetersAaron TuckerDale TracyDominique Bernier-CormierSelina Boan, Joseph DandurandDélani ValinRobert BringhurstRayya LiebichSarah de LeeuwRoger Farr, Stephan TorreDon Gayton, and Calvin White for BCR. His book Landings was reviewed by Luanne ArmstrongThe Tree Whisperer was reviewed by Adrienne Fitzpatrick.]

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The British Columbia Review


Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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