We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947-1987. Ed. Nicholas Bradley. Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 2014. 480 pp. $39.95.

Like Al Purdy, I also go far back in time with Earle Birney. In 1955 he signed his newly published novel Down the Long Table for my godmother to give me for Christmas; in 1957 I began seeing him, tall and slightly stooped, on the UBC campus; in my third year in 1959 I enrolled in his Chaucer class and sat in the back row where I wondered whether he ever saw me. Always theatrically self-creating, he played each day to an appreciative audience of graduate students who had preempted the front row. He savoured speculatively the Wife of Bath's portrayal, “Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve, / Withouten oother compaignye in youthe,” and spent much of another class pondering new research into a rape charge that Chaucer had faced, and whether “raptus” could mean that he had only kidnapped the young woman, and perhaps not for himself, possibly for John of Gaunt. Stimulating stuff for a country boy like me or Al Purdy – wouldn’t have missed a word of it. In a 1969 letter to Purdy, however, Birney remembers: “I think he got firstclass marks from me; but he scarcely ever attended my lectures” (213).

Purdy writes three letters to Birney in 1947, while trying to get poems accepted by him for the Canadian Poetry Magazine, which Birney was editing, and begins a more personal correspondence in 1955, with letters that editor Nicholas Bradley here terms both “pugnacious” and “sycophantic” (15). Much to his credit, Birney replies, with patience and good humour. The two poets’ correspondence continues until Birney’s devastating heart attack of 1987.

Bradley describes his aims in this collection as “primarily curatorial” (30). He has seemingly reproduced all currently available letters exchanged by the two, deleting only brief passages “that seem to me gratuitously offensive, tactless, or cruel about people who are not public figures” and a “few” that disclose “sensitive medical information about” Purdy’s wife, Eurithe (32). He notes that there are frequent gaps in the correspondence where letters appear to be missing – possibly lost, or not yet catalogued, or contained within the numerous cartons of Birney papers still under embargo. Birney was notoriously protective of his public reputation, and within his lifetime prevented researchers from accessing any materials associated with his first wife, the teenage Trotskyist Sylvia Johnstone, or lovers such as

Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, by Peter Quartermain. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2013. 322 pp. $39.95.


Peter Quartermain retired from teaching at the University of BC in 1999. During the preceding 36 years he had edited three editions of an American poetry anthology, published the chapbook Basil Bunting: Poet of the North, co-edited an anthology of British and Irish poetry and a collection of essays on Objectivist poetry, and in 1992 published the study Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Since then he has co-managed the small Vancouver press Nomados, edited the Collected Early Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan (2012), and presented numerous international conference papers on contemporary poetry. His edition of the Collected Later Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan is scheduled to be released later this year by the University of California Press. Many of his recent conference papers are collected here in Stubborn Poetries.

Quartermain has been interested throughout much of his career in poets whom he views as having deliberately located their work outside the canon of academically recognized poetry. He opens this collection with the essay “Canonical Strategies and the Question of Authority” in which he contrasts how T.S. Eliot, through the “cajolery and bullying” of his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” presumptuously redefined the English canon to include himself with how William Carlos Williams, in his prologue to Kora in Hell, defined poetic value as “unmediated by either a set of social values or the views of the critic” (17).  Quartermain thus sets up a view that pervades the collection that canonical poets tend to be the astutely self-interested while those committed more to language and poetry than to their careers tend to be non-canonical.

Quartermain has also been interested during most of his career in poetries that are not only contemptuous of canonicity but that also ‘stubbornly’ resist both paraphrase and the attribution of meaning. Several times in the