The Essential Don Coles (Essential Poets) - Softcover

Coles, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889843120 ISBN 13: 9780889843127

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2009

Synopsis

Don Coles' Forests of the Medieval World (PQL 1993) won the Governor General's Award for poetry. Kurgan (PQL 2000) won the Trillum Prize in Ontario. The Essential Don Coles presents an affordable collection of the poet's very best work.

About this title

About the Author:

Don Coles was born April 12, 1927, in the town of Woodstock, Ontario.

Coles entered Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1945. He did a four-year history degree, then a two-year M.A. in English, spending two undergraduate summers in Trois-Pistoles, Quebec, learning French, and one summer travelling in Europe. He had several courses with Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, whom he recalls as the best teachers of his life. In between the two M.A. years, he spent a year in London working in a bookstore, then enrolled at Cambridge from 1952 to 1954, and upon graduating was awarded a British Council grant to live in Florence for a year. It was in Stockholm that he met Heidi Golnitz of Lubeck, Germany, whom he eventually married; they lived in Copenhagen and Switzerland before coming to Canada with their daughter in 1965 -- supposedly for a visit, but they stayed.

It was only around 1967, in tandem with teaching, that Coles began writing poems. His first collection appeared in 1975 when he was forty-seven. It was followed quietly by several others, but he resisted becoming any kind of public poet-persona. He was sixty-five when Forests of the Medieval World won Canada's premier literary award. As a poet, Coles has always marched to his own drummer. He was never enamoured of the modernist poets, looking instead to what he has termed the `Hardy-Larkin line', those who were able to move their art back towards accessibility and the general reader. Besides his ten poetry collections, Coles has, since retirement, published a novel and a collection of essays and reviews, and translated a late collection by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

Coles resides in Toronto, but has lived close to twenty years in western Europe, with sojourns in Munich, Hamburg, and Zurich besides cities already mentioned. A deeply private man, he lists family first among his pleasures.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The young Don Coles was a sojourner, extending a period of graduate study at Cambridge into a dozen-odd `wander-years' in central Europe and Scandinavia. He returned to Canada in 1965, in his mid-thirties, and only then began writing poems; his first book did not appear until 1975, and it was not until the appearance of his seventh, Forests of the Medieval World, in 1993, that his poetry began to receive the notice it deserved. Coles' European interests and infuences served initially to ostracize him as a Canadian poet: his early books appeared at a time when Canada was determined to forge a literary culture it could call its own. Declining to follow fashion, he continued to write poems inspired as often by cultural artefacts and the pleasures of reading as by the personal: a painting, a line from a literary biography, a scene from a novel could provide the spark. He eschewed flashiness of any sort, rejected innovation for its own sake, and applied a highly concentrated craft to the serious contemplation of what it is to be human. This won him the deep regard of discerning readers, but not the acclaim lavished on some of his contemporaries.

In selecting for this volume, I thought it best to excerpt as little as possible and only where the excerpts are effective as self-contained poems. Not represented here are Coles' two book-length sequences, K in Love (a series of verse love-letters inspired by the letters of Kafka) and Little Bird (an extended letter-in-verse to his late father). I have tried nevertheless to show something of Coles' range -- the different kinds of things he does in his poems, and the different modalities in which he addresses his overarching subject: time's passage.

Any artist must love what fuels his art, but Coles' love for his subject is also his war with it: in one poem, he refers to time as a `catastrophe'; in another, as `Time, the enemy'. In his poetry one feels the tug of the past on the present, the ever-present tug of the future; pathos of hindsight, pathos of aging, but also the consolation of memory. And one feels the vertigo of time -- notably, in the haunting `Somewhere Far from This Comfort'.

Of particular interest to Coles are the arrested moments that survive in photographs, letters, journals: what they tell us, what they withhold, the signals they relay across years. Many of his poems begin in contemplation of a photograph -- usually from his own family album, but the example I have chosen (`Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910') describes a family of strangers, nameless and likely long dead, about whom nothing can be known `except that once they were there'. Enigmatic, these people are `safe now from even their own complexities' and they seem to the poet `miraculous'. Surviving in this one slightly blurred formal portrait, they present the illusion of having escaped life's rough and tumble -- what Coles elsewhere calls `this old, hard business of meddling with time'.

Against such complexities, Coles holds an ideal of untouchedness, innocence. We see it in the pre-conscious waking state described in `Untitled' (`I had not sustained any damage at all yet. Whatever was special in me had not been dulled by use or exposure ...') -- and in the tabula rasa of the hockey rink after the Zamboni has finished its rounds, in `Kingdom'. Given that life must always decline from such perfect states, the tension in his poetry is that of opposites to which he is differently attracted: wandering and restlessness with their associated risks, vs. stasis and patience with their promise of safety, reliability, serenity. Coles can change sides within a single poem: in `Botanical Gardens', musing on the rooted constancy of trees, he experiences `sudden remorse' at `not having lived patiently enough', but soon decides this line of thought is pointless, admitting, `I never wanted/ to stay long anywhere, really.' Still, he is haunted by shades of what might have been. Roads not travelled, words not spoken, lives cut short or otherwise unlived are invoked in `Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm', `Marie Kemp', `William, etc', `Not Just Words but World'.

A secondary theme for Coles is the plight of the overlooked, the helpless, those who cannot speak for themselves. `Landslides' is a series of compassionate, mostly one-way conversations with his mother in a geriatric care centre. `Mishenka' considers the case of Leo Tolstoy's illegitimate half-brother, who grew up illiterate and died a pauper. In `The Prinzhorn Collection' -- a poem that has been compared to Browning's `My Last Duchess' -- a fictional curator writes a letter describing his museum's current exhibition: drawings and writings by inmates of a 19th century German insane asylum, reportedly salvaged by a certain Doctor Prinzhorn from the files of a predecessor. (The Prinzhorn Collection is real, though Coles has simplified its provenance here.) Through the voice of this conflicted but not unfeeling curator, Coles describes actual drawings from the collection, and quotes passages from heartrending letters that were never mailed -- `derelict 100-year-old signals (airless cries, unlit gestures)' that, in coming to light and being presented now as art, stand as both chilling indictment and exigent human truth.

Much has been written of Coles' signature poetic voice -- civilized yet informal, poised between colloquial and literary. His poems seem thought-aloud, unfolding spontaneously, with hesitations, backtrackings, and parenthetical digressions that affect a conversational intimacy while guarding a personal privacy. Their casualness is artful: the poems are much more worked than they appear. (One American poet-critic wrote me, `Reading Coles has been interesting, in that lines that I thought were insufficiently charged the first time through, seem tighter and more satisfying each time I go back to them.') Rhyme, present in some of the earlier poems, is so unobtrusive that an inattentive reader could miss it altogether: see `Mishenka (I)', `William, etc', and `Sampling from a Dialogue' (the latter actually a disguised Petrarchan sonnet in which, ingeniously, formal moves of the poem slyly echo emotional moves of the couple depicted.) Coles is also capable of seamless and inspired vocal shifts: in `Codger', note how we start out looking at the old man from the outside, but gradually are drawn into his world, until we find ourselves overhearing his very thoughts.

For all that, there's a curious elasticity to Coles' exactness. His fondness for reworking poems is well known: some exist in as many as five or six published versions. While successive revisions show inarguable improvements, each version has its own virtues and its own integrity of logic and effect. The poem remains recognizably itself, but a line-by-line comparison with the previous version will reveal subtle but significant variation throughout (including, often, all new line-breaks). One cannot easily splice versions in the interest of saving preferred bits from each; they resist combination. What will future anthologists and editors make of this? For Coles, the latest version of a poem is the definitive one; but the existence of multiple versions will, I suspect, ultimately be recognized as part of the richness of his art.

(Robyn Sarah)

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0889843120
• ISBN 13: 9780889843127
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64