Book of the Month

June 2003

From time to time books arrive that are both a total surprise, and a very pleasant surprise. This is one such. It's time to own up here: I had never heard of George Stanley until this book was handed over by the postman.

As with Qua Books' first volume, John Ashbery's As Umbrellas Follow Rain, the production values are very very high. It's hardcover only (apart from the expensive limited signed edition, signed by both poet and artist), beautifully printed on good-quality paper, and bound to high standards. $25 does not seem too high in the circumstances. So, who is George Stanley? Well, he was a San Francisco poet in the 1960s, part of Jack Spicer's circle, but emigrated to Canada in 1971 and, such is the absence of cross-border communication in North America that he instantly fell from view south of the border. Publications north of the border have very limited distribution in the US, and there is also sometimes a contrary attitude in Canada, which ensures that US sales will be avoided, for a number of very confused reasons. After moving across the border, he lived first in Vancouver, then in the far-flung northern settlement of Terrace, B.C., then again in Vancouver, where he taught at Capilano College. Along the way he acquired Irish nationality, but I doubt we'll be seeing long studies of his work by Edna Longley. The editors of this volume report him to be at work on a long Paterson-type poem about his adopted city, which sounds intriguing.

Much of Stanley's poetry is unfashionably direct, but gains its impact by a very precise diction, with never a word out of place. A lot of his best works are spread across a number of sections, and are almost impossible to excerpt in quotation without leaving the poem a mess of tattered edges. The poems are records of a life, glimpses of another present, another world, and affecting at that:

Each knows his fate on the hangover
not unique, but to be suffered uniquely
It seems unbelievable, fatuous, that we might return
from within the word, from within the flower
The head is concrete, the air waste,
the whole is figured, mockingly
in the knowledge we seek to escape

& escape

(from The Hangover)

It's a simple kind of verse, and it's tempting just to say that these are the works of another ageing hippie, or a Californian beat who missed his time, but that would be unfair. And it would miss out that strain of his work which can produce the final poem in this volume, the quite astonishing Veracruz:

In Veracruz, city of breezes & sailors & loud birds,
an old man, I walked the Malecón by the sea,

and I thought of my father, who when a young man
had walked the Malecón in Havana, dreaming of Brazil,

and I wished he had gone to Brazil
& learned magic,

and I wished my father had come back to San Francisco
armed with Brazilian magic, & that he had married
not my mother, but her brother, whom he truly loved.

I wish my father had, like Tiresias, changed himself into a woman,
& that he had been impregnated by my uncle, & given birth to me as a girl.

I wish that I had grown up in San Francisco as a girl,
a tall, serious girl,

& that eventually I had come to Veracruz,
& walking on the Malecón, I had met a sailor,
a Mexican sailor or a sailor from some other country –
   maybe a Brazilian sailor,
& that he had married me, & I had become pregnant
   by him,
so that I could give birth at last to my son – the boy
   I love

This raw directness in the later work is in contrast to his apparently more ambitious style back in the 1950s. This is from Flowers:

In a world of flowers
the enclosing is pregnant with silent clockwork
and the shade with death,
nothing expires with more exhaling of life,
nothing clogs so quickly as sweetness,
nothing turns and burns the unshod foot
so readily, ruinously as
the corruption of petals becoming
conception in the earth. What word
can stifle as well as jasmine in the throat
or unsex in the thrust as sudden as gardenias?

which seems redolent of Robert Duncan's earlier work, and no bad influence, that.

There are light, tight journal poems here, where the minutiae of the poet's life drive the text forward, small inconsequentialities that somehow become fascinating in the way they are unfolded, the writing of a poem itself becoming the subject of the journal, the journal becoming a poem, or even the lack of one:

Poetry means (a) I'm going to die – and (b) this notebook will be read by someone who will se how lacking I am – unless I destroy it – & I can't do that – that would be worse than keeping it – that would mean thinking of it. Better this shit than nothing, better be sitting on Andy's front porch with Teddy, imagining this shit being (miraculously) turned into a poem –

(from At Andy's)

The editors correctly note the shift in style and mood that occurs with the poet's move to the remoteness of Terrace, B.C. The shock of the wide open spaces, the small town rather than the metropolises that had been his home until then, the sheer immensity of untamed nature lends a new lyric ecstasy to some of his work:

Hamlet says, this is a place
a point of air & grace
connected with the points
I cannot see to reach,
love unquestioned.

More throbbing, that flower of air
bending to hold us
in the white petals
of the mountains

(from Tell the Truth, out of the Mountains & Air sequence)

 

A Tall, Serious Girl is a very welcome book that fills in a gap in the history of recent American poetry, and shows how borders can prevent us from seeing the truth of what's going on. How much more is there in Canada that we don't know about, and should?

N.B. A Canadian correspondent familiar with George Stanley's work has suggested that the problem with the invisibility of Canadian work south of the border has more to do with xenophobia in the US. I recognise the validity of the complaint, and understand its origins, but the situation seems to me (from my admittedly distant remove) to be rather akin to the Irish / British (literary) problem, whereby British commentators are utterly unaware of publications from the Republic of Ireland, and no such work is ever anthologised by editors based in Britain. Things are somewhat better elsewhere: Germany/Austria/Switzerland for instance, Portugal/Brazil (maybe). There ought to be anthologies of poetry in English, regardless of origin, but they would probably cause more heartburn than even the current nationally-oriented versions, and I guess we'd end up with political compromises rather than good books.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman website at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003. Click on the months below for other Book of the Month selections in 2003.