Winter’s Reward of Words. A Review of Books by Gordon Phinn

Books Referenced:

Dirty Money, Financial Crime in Canada, Christian Leuprecht & Jamie Ferrill, (McGill/Queens 2023)
The Scent of Flowers at Night, Leila Slimani (Coronet, 2023)
Stray Dogs, Rawi Hage (Knopf Canada 2023)
The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, Christine Estima (Anansi 2023)
Imagining Imagining, Gary Barwin (Wolsak & Wynn 2023)
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, Raja Shehadeh (Other Press 2023)
Like Figs in Autumn, Ben Bastomski (Delphinium Books 2023)
Instead, Maria Coffey (Rocky Mountain Books 2023)
And The Andes Disappeared, Caroline Dawson (Bookhug Press 2023)
Two Purdys, A Double Portrait, Brian Purdy (Pottersfield Press 2023)

Some would say summer at the cottage or the beach, while others might argue for the cool departures of autumn, and yet others the front porch with the first tastes of spring sun, coffee, toast, fruit of one’s choice, but for me winter is the optimum season for postponing one’s life with all manner of narrative detours, the poetry of exhilaration, exhaustion and all points in between.  Those long hours of dark can become a contagion of cozy once the burden of indoor chores is shoved aside.  Skiers and skaters need not apply, while domestic pets are required to sleep by one’s slippers.

     Now that that is taken care of let’s plunge into the snake pit of Dirty Money, where moral compasses always point to cheating, a sobering compendium of financial skullduggery right here in our home and native land.    With chapters like “Washing Money In A Canadian Laundromat”, “Taken To The Cleaners: How Canada Can Start To Fix Its Money-Laundering Problem”, “Underground Banking In Canada”,  “Canadian Cryptocurrency Conundrums: A Socio-Technical Systems Analysis of Crypto Laundering In Canada” and “Task Specialization in Organized Crime Groups: Money Laundering and the Montreal Mafia”, you can see the breadth of the investigative scope involved.  If you found yourself satisfied with the one or two articles and scandal scooping you may have come across in the popular press, then go no further.  This worthy collection is aimed at those involved in the field as analysts, investigators and ambitious thesis architects.  It belongs on reference shelves where it can be consulted for the deep dive it provides.  Make no mistake though, our beloved country is up to its neck in financial irregularities and illegalities, despite the continued efforts of those involved in its discovery, exposure and eradication.  If I may go all Zen on you for a moment, both problems and their solutions arise simultaneously out of the void, ready to be activated.  Life invites you to cheer for whatever team strikes your fancy, and it has lately come to my attention that purveyors of lies and fraud seem to be doing awfully well in the heroes and villains’ stakes.

*

     Leila Slimani, a Moroccan-French writer now taking refuge from both cultures in Lisbon, hit pay dirt some years back with her second book The Perfect Nanny, winning the Prix Goncourt for a literary thriller, a retelling and repositioning of an actual New York murder/suicide.  Such an honour can be as much of a burden as a gift to a young writer.  She seems to have survived the adulation so far, publishing regularly and travelling widely, and this year issuing two titles, the novel Watch Us Dance and the essay/memoir The Scent of Flowers at Night, (both ably reshaped into English by her regular translator Sam Taylor) where, on invitation, she spent the night at the Punta Della Dogana museum in Venice.  That is alone, after closing, on a camp bed with acres of opportunity, all silent and tourist free, to interact with and reflect on the various artworks on display.

    She uses this spot of good fortune to examine both the legends of Venice and her own life.  From free thinking, fairly liberal and book-imbibing parents in a hypocritical conservative Islamic culture that kept young women safe from the twentieth century as long as they, like the society around them, conveniently lied about the details of their lives, and thence to the city of every artist’s dreams, where freedom of choice is a given for those who retain the means, unlike those at the bottom of the barrel who scrape and scuffle as their dress, religion and lack of education keep them penned in the service economy for the ever that is better than the wars and repression they left behind.

    Slimani is well aware of these contradictions, portraying them with insight and sensitivity in the her award winning novel then exploring them in depth in her collection of encounters and interviews “Sex and Lies”.  The memoir seems to step aside from those concerns to explore the esthetics of creation and what by now are the customary existentialist quandaries of those who have shucked the comforts of religion, the challenges of science and the dire warnings of the god fearing to flounder in the philosophical speculations of the god denying.

     In doing so she barges into some fine expositions: “I did not grow up in a harem and no one ever stopped me living my life.  But I am the product of that world, and my great-grandmothers were women who believed in the necessity of those boundaries.  I never suffered what my ancestors went through, but all the same the idea persisted, even in my childhood, that women were immobile, sedentary beings, that it was safer to keep them inside than let them out.  They had less value than men.  They inherited less.  A woman was always somebody’s wife or daughter.”     

     This leads her to quoting Paul Morand’s The Man in a Hurry: “‘Pierre you’ll put on weight, you’re taking root.  You’re becoming immobile.  Remember some snails are crushed to death by the weight of their own shells’.  Because I was a woman, I was always afraid of the shell that would crush me.  It seemed to me that existence was nothing other than an attempt to destroy the wildness within us, to rein us in, to control our instincts.   In all my novels the mothers felt the desire to abandon their children.  Each of them is nostalgic for the woman she used to be.  They suffer from the compulsion to build a safe and comfortable home for their children, a doll’s house in which they will be the smiling prisoners.”

    And on to the inevitable and eminently quotable Virginia Woolf: ‘The question of women is a question of space.  It is impossible to understand the domination women are subjected to without studying its geography, without evaluating the constraints imposed upon their bodies by clothing, by places, by other eyes.’

     On literary matters she is equally clear eyed: “I often see myself as my characters’ defense lawyer.  Like someone who is not there to judge them, to lock them up in boxes, but instead to tell their story.  To defend the idea that even monsters, even the guilty, have a story.  When I write, I am inhabited by the desire to work for the salvation of my characters, to protect their dignity.  Literature, in my eyes, is the presumption of ignorance.

     “I have always been more than curious about other people. Have always felt a ferocious hunger to know them.  A desire to enter inside them, to walk in their shoes for a minute, an hour, a lifetime. I have never been able to relax in the cold comfort of indifference.  The passer-by in the street, the baker who talk too loudly, the little man walking slowly, the nanny daydreaming on the beach, they all move me.  When we write, we feel an affection for the weaknesses and faults of others. We understand that we are all alone but that we are all the same.”

     While Slimani has played her cards smartly in her adopted culture, becoming a government approved cultural spokesperson, she has continued to spread her wings in matters of story and its elegant spinning.  This brief but incisive memoir will likely cement her reputation as a voice to be reckoned with in contemporary European literature.

*

     Speaking of paydirt Rawi Hage hit the jackpot with his first novel DeNiro’s Game, which took Ireland’s Impac Dublin award back in 2006, and established him as a novelist to watch as descriptors like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘gorgeous and grandiose’ were tossed about with the kind of gay abandon not employed in his gruesome account of life in Beirut during the apocalyptic madness of civil war.  Later titles like Beirut Hellfire Society rather cemented his reputation for damnation on wheels.  The short fictions of Stray Dogs display a calmer cast of characters domiciled in a variety of European capitals. They follow their life paths with modicoms of dignity achieved in middle age.  Yet most are trailing the memories of the merciless bloody rivalries of their youth, drawing them remorselessly back to the scenes of moral depravity in the half-repaired towns and mountainous villages of Lebanon, now bulging with refugees from their former oppressor Syria.  Rather than existential anguish of those caught in the crossfire and endless bombing we now see the brooding despair of minds and hearts permanently scarred.  Some of the narratives take their cues from legend, myth and folktale, where the inevitability of outcome is calmly accepted without the boiling over of rage and lust for vengeance.  These fictions find their home in the tradition of the tale, where the reader cannot escape the notion that they are being comforted in the genteel defeat of resignation. There there now, such is life.

*

     Christina Estima’s Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society follows the paths of an Arab family fleeing the Middle East for Montreal in the 19^th century and coping with the overpowering cultural shifts as tradition clashes with modernity in the 20^th Century.   The post-modern West is a playground of freedoms in which almost anything goes, as long as you can stand being surveyed and tut-tutted by the thought police, camouflaged as clowns. Migrants and refugees usually arrive breathless from territories where surveillance is the first step in violent repression, so their lack of adaptive abilities is appreciated.  Shifty citizens can be such a bother.

     This is her first book of short stories, but her extended journeys through the worlds of theatre and journalism deliver her safely beyond that threshold of newbiedom that all writers wish to hurry on by.  Drawing on her mixed ethnicity of Lebanese, Syrian and Portuguese cultures she fashions a narrator whose struggles and confusions are at once nuanced and predictable.  Young women from conservative societies shaped by centuries of tradition and customised repression look for any chance to rebel and redraw boundaries as far from the personal as possible, and Estima’s protagonist takes every opportunity to puncture any pretension or falsity with outrageous and scandalous behaviour.  I was alternately amused and appalled.  Throwing herself at white boys is one thing, but deliberately dripping menstrual effusions on the floors of fashionable shops seems a bridge too far to me, but I can easily see legions of young women raising their rebel yell fists in some righteous Instagram chorus.  Declaring that’s she “feels her ancestors in her blood”, despite its trendy insinuations, does not absolve her from the inanity of her transgressions.

     There are times in a reader’s life when one realises one is not in the projected demographic of the creator’s intentions.  One is expected, perhaps even required, to cheer on from the sidelines.  In this case I feel polite applause is the appropriate response.  Estima is a writer of prodigious gifts, of that there is no doubt, but she has yet to resist the temptation to show off her talents every other metaphor.

 Young virtuosos in any field of expression need to temper their enthusiasm for fireworks and see that the quietism of the candle can illuminate just as effectively.  That trip to terminal boredom when all juiced up with jangly bracelets and quilts of tattoos can seem more attractive as age assumes its directorship.

*

     There’s plenty of fireworks, intellectual, esthetic and humorous in Imagining Imagining, Gary Barwin’s latest assault on the bastions of the traditional and conventional.  Not a page goes by without several reminders that language is there to be played with, ideas to be turned inside out, assumptions to be revoked and reordered, and narratives to be nuanced and then knocked sideways before the reader can retain her balance.  Barwin is too far gone into the mayhem of many viewpoints and colliding perspectives to be lectured and tsk-tsked by the likes of me.  The virtuosity on display trumps any claim to a critical stance.  Other than, perhaps, the carnival ride where keeping one’s seat and hanging on to one’s hat for the sake of decorum becomes less and less desirable as the giddiness induced by the dance as it dissolves all boundaries between reader and read, author and audience, imagination and negation.

     Fortunately, the work is divided into twenty-three sections that only briefly shoulder the burdens conveyed by the definition chapters.  One can actually ease out of the frenetic flow, close the book and disabuse oneself of the notion that the reader engages with the text.  One actually engages only with one’s desire to engage, as the almost constant white water rafting over the enigmas of ideas and language propels you beyond.  Beyond the beyond.

    Perhaps you think I jest: “Before we talk about everything else, lets stay a while longer with uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, as John Keats says, Negative capability.  It’s what my gym teacher always said I had.”  That’s from Writing as Rhizome: Connecting Poetry and Fiction with Everything.  “Cell walls?  I’m against them.  Also divisions between things.  Between physical objects.  Between people.  The separations between things are, in some ways, working fictions.  Yes, there are different ‘zones’, but I have this notion of everything being part of this huge protoplasmic unity.  From galaxies to the inside of dogs and the underside of sweat socks.  Air our lungs, birds.  Ash. Fire. Turnips.  Do we really need cell walls?”

    Later, in the same essay, On Between: “The same is true of concepts and abstractions.  One person’s manbun is another’s mantra.  Is it true that someone’s pain is my pain and it is only the self and society which creates reasons to keep them at a distance?  I want my thinking and feeling to reflect the fundamental unipanrhizomatubiquity between/of things.”  Employing words to approach and embrace the unitary consciousness, the self as other and all as One:  hey I’m all for that.  Nice work if you can get it, and not always within reach as our pockets bulge with tissues, reminders, duties and appointments.

     For those who easily tire of such semantic semaphore signalling there is always Elegy for a Poodle, a heartrending recitation of the sad details surrounding the death and burial of family pets.  Or The Archive of Theseus, a rumination on personal libraries and their domestic scatterings, several pages that I easily inserted my book-loving self into, making a resting place in the Dylan Thomas quote:  To read “indiscriminately and all the time with my eyes hanging out”.  And for those who appreciate the solitary stroll, talking to the wind while the moon nods serenely, there is The Selected Walks.

     In all these daring escapades in essaydom the author allows, indeed encourages, the mind, his mind your mind our mind and for god’s sake do not mind the gap, to meander, exploring that alley, sniffing that flower, removing that rubbish indiscriminately thrown, seeking out the “poorer corners where the ragged people go” or finding that “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor”.  Such freeing of language’s detainees can be as liberating to the reader as it is to the creator.  All that’s required is grabbing hold of the string as the kite flies away.

*

     Of course, the game of language and ideas is not the only game in town.  In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, Raja Shehadeh plays the memoir game, a favored genre in this column.  He situates the fluctuations in the evolving relationship with his father within the larger context of Palestine’s passage through the turbulence of the twentieth century.  Sure it’s been a rough ride, no surprize there.  Saeed Teebi calls it “the defining tragedy of the twentieth century” and Rashid Khalidi insists on “the unrelenting resistance to the British perfidy, Hashemite tyranny and Israeli colonization that have tormented the Palestinians since 1917.”   While there is merit in such accusations, it is altogether too easy to focus on local real estate rivalries and ethnic squabbles while ignoring the rest of this tormented century with its relentless decimation of conscripted armies and hapless civilians to further the insanity of ideology and imperialism.  I imagine the Armenians, Irish, Kurds, Basques, and the ‘former Yugoslavians’ would have much to contribute on this.  Every nation has something to answer for and the many truth and reconciliation commissions only go part of the way, the easy part.

     Well, what about the book, you say.  It performs its narrative and geopolitical functions with a precise and unerring detailing of the aforementioned perfidy that others might consider constructive and unavoidable.  And yes, there’s always the other side of the equation, and in the Middle East there is often several other sides.  And yes, Europe is not immune from such: the crazy quilt of alliances that sucked everyone into the catastrophe of World War One might suffice as the glaring example.

     Raja Shehadeh, an activist himself, speaks warmly and sensitively of his father and uncle particularly, both of whom were judges during the formative post-war years of the Palestinian carve up, mainly between Israel and Jordan once the British fled the dead end of the Mandate, circa ‘46-8, and did their best as community leaders to hold the line against what now seems like an extended denial of statehood and forced assimilation.  Comparisons to the once trampled-on Kurds are not out of place and demonstrate the possibility of the seemingly impossible.

     If a background to the current hostilities in and around Gaza is required by any reader willing to be immersed in the ethnic rivalries and hatreds of what was once called the Levant and go beyond the propaganda of all sides, this is a good a place as any to start.

*

     Not to be too trendy or provocative, although it will likely seem like it, Like Figs in Autumn provides a challenging and intriguing balance to the familial and cultural concerns presented by Raja Shehadeh above.  A memoir by a Jewish American man who reacts to a personal tragedy by emigrating to Israel and signing up for the I.D.F., an acronym that resonates loudly these days.  But this was around 2010, this “one year in a forever war”.  Both books fell into my path around the same time and I couldn’t help but see the hand of fate stirring my simmering pot.

     So you are about to graduate from an Ivy League school with a degree in moral philosophy, a supportive family and wide circle of friends when a best buddy is killed by a drunken driver on a late night walk home.  Tumbling through the turmoil of grief and resentment, you come to the conclusion that jumping ship from Rhode Island and emigrating to Israel with the express purpose of joining the IDF to serve your adopted homeland despite never having held a firearm in your life, is an ideal escape hatch to your dilemma.  Maybe the Mahal, the “special set of volunteering non-Israeli Jews” will make a fit. Parents remind you that yes, it’s your choice and life son, but don’t let your grief do the talking.  Friends are taken aback but hold off from laughing in your face.  Older friends return at graduation to report on promising careers in business, banking and academia.  But no, you want to go to a war zone and fight for what is right and maybe right yourself in the process.  Sounds like a plan, huh?  Maybe he missed all that Vietnam and Iraq era ‘no blood for oil’ and ‘what if they gave a war and nobody came’ stuff.  The decades and their imperatives have a habit of disappearing in the relentless rush of headlines and outrages.  Ironically, he winds up with a decommissioned M-16, Vietnamese sand grains etched into the barrel, but that’s just for training.

     Signing up, boot camp, practicing your rusty Hebrew in the midst of all the bluster and bravado male bonding insists on.  “Idiots together, our Hebrew was a primitive code, a syntactically bankrupt set of short words and phrases”.  Finding that the myth of the friendly welcoming kibbutz is much more and actually a familial reality.  Guarding checkpoints with the approved suspicions, waiting for sudden eruptions, boredom punctuated by panic.  Travelling in a, well let’s be kind, compact troop carrier through narrow winding streets, seemingly as old as history itself, watching, always watching.

     Ben was five when Baruch Goldstein committed his now infamous massacre of Muslims at prayer, gathered for worship in the Hall of Issac, where, before being beaten to death by a fire extinguisher, managed to kill 29 and wound 125.  He thinks of it as his own on rifle jammed on shooting practice decades later.  When his much-admired colleague Shai, his squad’s ever so cool “squared jawed playboy” expresses the thought “I admire his devotion but not his act”, Ben imagines “a cool kid from home saying of a Klan lynching that he admired the devotion just not the act”.  Maybe he might also “admire the devotion of an Intafada suicide bomber, if not the act”.  Ben felt the distinction was impossible, that” admiring the devotion aloud meant admiring the act in quiet” and this was “serving only to conceal him from his own hatred” and “permit it to poison him from the hiding place he had constructed for it”.  But he had not the “Hebrew to say it with grace, and I did not merely want his friendship, I needed it”.  Of course, he was not “in uniform to play the peacemaker”, so he held his own peace, “even though Baruch would not soon give me his”. 

     In his own final year, before his own assassination, by extremist or patsy depending on who you read, Yigal Amir, then PM Yitzhak Rabin pronounced Baruch “an arrant weed” and “Sensible Judaism spits you out”.

     Nothing is the final word in such murderous rivalries, whipped up again and again by the lust for righteous vengeance, and Bastomski resists the temptation to shriek or spew slogans.  On his return, when his acceptance from Harvard Law School comes through and his future opens up, he realises he had decided to “Join the army after Avi died because it gave me something new to be about” and although he “could not go back through the yellow gate into Be’eri or back to Kisufim, even though he” still did in his dreams” and that now he “would take a step forward toward leaving things behind.”  That step forward played out as law school graduation and employment at a prestigious law firm, with, believe it or not, a little male modeling on the side.  This astutely observant and finely rendered memoir, quite the triumph for a first book, proudly contributes to the ranks of the coming-of-age tale.

*

     Travel memoirs can provide a welcome escape to exotic locales and the wild high-wire adventuring necessary to their attainment.  For us all-too-sober stay-at-homers they can certainly lend more than a dash of spicy threat to our comfortably predictable days.  Maria Coffey’s newest slice of daring exploits, Instead, Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life, is as rambunctiously enjoyable as any in the genre of reckless adventuring that I have come across in my cozy bookfest life.

     Springing herself free from a middle class suburban English existence into the company of hard drinking hiking and hill climbers, most of whom are revving up the money and guts necessary for mountain ascents in distant locales, she sets herself up for the trauma of a beloved boyfriend’s death on Everest, following on from her own near drowning in a rip tide, which, not surprisingly, sets her up for the long road to recovery and reassertion of inner strength.   A young woman of her times she watches with growing discomfort the marriage and baby announcements of friends, all of whom, in the first flush of nesting, want the same joy for her, despite her inner urge to run a mile in the opposite direction.  About 10,000 miles and a ‘nanny visa’ later she winds up in British Columbia, taking the Island ferry in five days a week for her mainland duties, caring for three children who hate all the previous nannies and the strict vegan diet their travelling father insists on.  The irony of this choice, squirting out from under her Catholic mother’s guilt-tripping as well as her coterie of bun-in-the-oven pals, does not escape her.

     Indeed, her excoriating self-examination, parsed from contemporary notebooks forty years on, is to be praised.  She makes no excuses for her determination to remain childless, which seems challenged at every turn; initially by her starter family friends and later by many native women in the third world cultures on that kayak-around-the-world vacation that is the meat of this many layered narratives.  Women from Malawi, the Solomon Islands, India and Vietnam, all express sadness at her childless state, some even offering one or two from their copious broods.  Husband Dag is regularly pitied for having married an older and barren wife.  Ah, the oppressions of cultural expectations!  One recalls that Dylan line, “Well I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them”.

     Coffey has made a life out of snubbing expectations, both familial and cultural, a daring exploratory life, sometimes following and sometimes leading husband Dag, a fearless explorer in his own right, that most would only fantasize about while camping fifty miles from home and taking advantage of the site’s washroom and shower facilities.  Let’s face it sharing hotdogs with strangers can be an adventure in itself.

        On this, perhaps her tenth book, Coffey has polished her evocations of nature, – landscape, seascape, the heavens at night, – to a fine sheen, a sheen the reader can glide on while sucking in the sensuous and enticing details of coral, rock, tropical fish, diving seabirds, sparkling clarity and enshrouding mists.  A memorable instance is the long-drawn-out paddle down the holy mother Ganges, passing the decomposing dead while witnessing the wild dogs swimming out from shore for a fleshy nibble before being drawn into village life and being feted by almost every family, including the poverty-stricken ones at the edge of the compound.

      Years later when their paddling and trekking runs into organising adventure tours and being invited to address conferences and attend film festivals their life becomes as hectic and harried as any big city power couple, kayaking becoming the picturesque replacement for rail and road commuting.  Well, the more you run from something distasteful the more it chases you down, as relentless as karma, something those Hindus by the Ganges believe in implicitly.  But as sophisticated Westerners we ‘re beyond all that folktale nonsense, aren’t we?  We stick by old reliables like ‘What goes around comes around’ while binge watching our oh-so-familiar dramas of fraud and murder.

     When late on in their passage of endless adventure, a dinner guest asks for the exit strategy from their organisation Hidden Places, they respond in shock.  What, a way out of not just paradise but many paradises?  “The truth was we didn’t have one.  We never had a business plan, or any long-term plans in any area of life.  Our modus operandi had always been first to decide what we didn’t want to do.  Uncertainty was our stimulus; we embraced it, following our instincts.  We had developed trips in areas we wanted to explore, that inspired us, rather than for purely commercial reasons.  Creating and running Hidden Places had been a big adventure, a haphazard exciting journey.  I didn’t want it to stop.”

      When she told her dinner guest that she figured their strategy was to ‘just die’ and be done with it, he was mortified and changed the subject.  Coffey had herself learned the art of quick subject change in the endless avoidance of baby talk, although her trekking in third world poverty had shown her without doubt the mother that lurked beneath the charitable support of starving beggars and oppressed daughters.  It is to her credit that she illustrates all those changes with the candour that refreshes as it shocks.

*

     It would be churlish to dismiss Caroline Dawson’s As The Andes Disappeared as just another immigrant memoir, although it does tick off a number of boxes in that ever growing genre.  Less ambitious than Christine Estima’s Syrian Ladies, it sticks to the hardships and adaptive challenges of one refugee family from Pinochet’s Chile to Montreal, about as cosmopolitan a city as one could hope to find.  Entering as asylum seekers they plug in at the lower end of the economic spectrum, along with the Haitians and Vietnamese, settling in the less than salubrious neighborhoods and eeking out an existence from whatever low-income employment makes itself available, often under the table cash work, that benefit free picnic for the bourgeoisie.  We see the author in grade school, high school and college, taking the various humiliations and bullying like a turning-the-other-cheek champ while developing the thick skin necessary for a successful survival mechanism.

    As she narrates her growing it becomes obvious, she has inherited the fears and resentments that have come down the matrilineal line, from a poverty-stricken grandmother forced into a hastily arranged marriage and on down through the decades, where poverty and poor education dictate the narrow gates through which the family must pass.  Her inchoate resentments and frustrations suddenly find their explanation in a college level sociology course that handily provides the categories necessary for those oh-so-familiar diatribes of the developing earnest lefty who disdains communism but insists that all life is dictated by the rigidity of class structures, like her mother seemingly chained to the fate of the cleaning woman at everyone’s beck and call, even when they move to the upscale suburbs.

     As she exults; “The language of sociology named things like social classes, exploitation, cultural, social and symbolic capital.  It especially talked about domination, but also in its better moments, exorability, a possibility of escaping one’s assumed lot in society.”  That her education leads as inexorably to a teaching position and a husband to die for as her previous self-indoctrination on the immutability of class structure seems to have slipped the nets of her extended self-examination.  Like psychology, religion, biology or the law, it supplies a lens that illuminates as it obscures.  Outside of their purviews each insists or ignores unreliable shadows.

     My own life path allowed me to encounter a number of refugees from various repressive regimes in South and Central America, all of whom appeared well on their way to finding their niche in the giant and racially diverse suburb of Mississauga.  Perhaps Dawson’s family was unlucky in their placement.  Poor downtown neighbourhoods, with their relentless and depressing parade of dropouts, drug addicts and sidewalk hookers can easily poison the hopes of a young girl already struggling to fit into a confusing melting pot of cultures, but despite Dawson’s insistence it is not the only game in town.

     When she relates that she “got the job of her dreams”, and is “no longer the invisible child tagging along with her parents in deserted bank offices”, and that it is “not a job that gets my hands dirty or makes me keep my head down, it doesn’t smell like dirty coffee machine filters, the plastic of water coolers, a mixture of Windex and bleach,” one wants so much to cheer but is held back by the suspicion that her asylum seeking whining has played upon one’s bourgeois guilt complex, despite a lifetime of blue collar employment.  But that’s psychology, isn’t it?  Ah, the tumble drier of disciplines, which one to extract, fold neatly and wear?

*

     Poet Brian Purdy’s memoir-in-verse of his father Al, Two Purdys a Double Portrait, is exactly that, a series of reminiscences ripened through the years of mysterious absence, the shock of sudden truth and the welcome reunion of father and son.  A little wary of that usual suspect, sentimentality, I approached the collection gingerly but soon found myself swinging through the lyrics with a pleasure unrestrained by apprehension.

     How many Canadian writers can be recognised by their first names?  Leonard, Margaret, Peggy, Alice, Irving, Milton, Malcom, Earle, Al?  Certainly, Al will always be identified with the A Frame, Ameliasburg, Roblin Lake.  The Purdy legend, that of the hard drinking, brawling, cigar chomping iconoclast, belligerently blue collar in a world of perceived privilege and refined academia, initially self-sustaining, eventually a protected mythology, with the parade of disciples, doffing their hats for some A frame worship that seems, with the concurrent Cohen devotions, to be never ending.  The young will always identify with the underdog struggling to emerge and then finally triumphant in the uncaring world.  It’s as true of sports stars as poets.  Or was, back in the decades of Purdy’s fame, that grant funded creation of a culture out of the embers of colonialism.

     I found much of his verse sloppy with giddy passions and enthusiasms, a trait I saw splashing down from Whitman through Ginsberg to flood the Beat fifties with its anything-goes ethic, and lacking the discipline that renders the work of, say, a John Newlove, a Ralph Gustafson, or that other Al, still vibrantly with us, Moritz.

     That said, Brian Purdy’s poems here transcend the distance and disappointment that his parental estrangement might have evinced and wholly succeed in their task. Father and son are reunited and the reader has a ringside seat.  Bravo!

And So, On

Now, Papa,

while I read your poem

about being that age

we are in our sixties together

and soon, if lucky

I will join you at seventy

still reading your words –

then eighty, which sadly

you didn’t reach – and so on.

If I am lucky, I say

and think that now

after so much of the other kind

(some of which you placed in my path)

you’d wish me good luck.

I hope like hell it’s true

I hope to heaven that’s true

-whichever applies – and

same to you, what ever road

you’re travelling.

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Gordon Phinn has been writing and publishing in a number of genres and formats since 1975, and through a great deal of change and growth in CanLit.  Canada’s literary field has gone from the nationalist birth pangs of ’65 – ’75 to its full blooming of the 80s and 90s, and it is currently coping as well as it can with the immediacy and proliferation of digital exposure and all the financial trials that come with it. Phinn’s own reactions was to open himself to the practices of blogging and videoblogging, and he now considers himself something of an old hand. His Youtube podcast, GordsPoetryShow, has just reached its 78th edition, and his my blog “anotherwordofgord” at WordPress continues to attract subscribers.

Phinn’s book output is split between literary titles, most recently, The Poet Stuart, Bowering and McFadden, and It’s All About Me. His metaphysical expression includes You Are History, The Word of Gord On The Meaning Of Life.

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