Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets,
ed. Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane
(Roberts Creek, B.C: Nightwood, 2004).

Like collections of stamps, shells, or stuffed animals, poetry anthologies come in many kinds. They can be built around eras, nations, genders, poetic forms, or no criteria other than quality – think of Heaney's and Hughes's classic The Rattle Bag. Most notoriously, they can be thematically focused, with inferior poems often included due to little more than subject matter. (Yet I admit a weakness for such anthologies sprung from an all-too-human form of classifying, so I'm not about to discard The Harrap Book of Sea Verse, Yowl: Selected Poems about Cats, First Light: Mother & Son Poems, or The Faber Book of Movie Verse.) One of the toughest sorts of anthologies to edit is that of young poets in the early stages of being published. Editors of such books can find themselves cast in the role of uncomfortable prophets, or of adjudicators at a music festival, choosing the singers or pianists most likely to go on to become surpassing artists.

It is easy to have mixed feelings about the title Breathing Fire 2, as it was for the first Breathing Fire a decade ago and for Storm Warning, Al Purdy's title for two similar anthologies of young poets published in 1971 and 1976. Such titles are shaded with melodrama, but just try to come up with a better one that has some colour yet no trace of overstatement. The phrase "breathing fire" gains when read in the context of its origin in a Gwendolyn MacEwen poem quoted at the start of both BF anthologies. MacEwen's lines give a far more complex view of poetry than any title can, with her poet as navigator, Adamic namer, dreamer, stone-igniter, and paradox-illuminator. Belabouring comments on the trickiness of titling would be unwise, but any qualms about the title underline just one of the difficulties of putting together an anthology of this sort.

One picture that kept coming to mind while I read Breathing Fire 2 was of its editors, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, poring over poems long into the night, past the point of exhaustion. How could they not have had energy-sapped hours, with over 300 poets (born between 1970 and 1980) having submitted poems? "We could have included fifty instead of thirty-three writers," write Crozier and Lane. "The last cut we made was painful." While standard, those prefatory comments don't make the undoubted frustrations of the labours any less real. But Crozier and Lane write their Intro mostly in celebration, excitement, and gratitude for the good poems they found. For that, and for all their time and attention, they deserve praise. Two or three decades from now, may one of the poets selected for this anthology – or absent from it – act with similar generosity.

Your experience of the book will depend partly upon your prior familiarity with the poets. Since I had already read and admired collections by Tammy Armstrong, Adam Dickinson, George Murray, matt robinson, and Sue Sinclair – and these poets are among the ones I find most exciting of those chosen by Crozier and Lane – my reading of their brief selections had a dimension lacking in my reading of the other poets. One group of the anthologized poets for many readers, then, is (to adapt a book-classification scheme from Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) Poets Whose Books I Already Knew And Am Glad To Find Here. That category might be subdivided further, into ...And Whose Selections Here Represent Them Well, and ...But Whose Selections Here Don't Represent Them Well. Lavishly talented George Murray is the clearest member of the second subdivision, and it's regrettable that the Tammy Armstrong selections conclude with one of her more simply anecdotal, linguistically less interesting poems, one that may have swayed the editors with its humorous why-I-don't-like-hockey confession. A better conclusion for her section would have been another poem with the verbal and sonic life of her "A Proper Burial for Songbirds" ("Pincette-mouthed, their songs push out / past early morning, hole-punch the mist").

Another category is Poets Whom I Hadn't Read In Any Depth Or At All And Whose Poems Here Spurred Me Into Reading Their Books (Joe Denham, Triny Finlay, Adam Getty, Alison Pick). I am thankful to Crozier and Lane for introducing me to those four poets, as well as to Jason Heroux and his idiosyncratic wit, though now that I've read his whole collection, Memoirs of an Alias, I wish different poems represented him in the anthology. At their best Heroux's poems, reminiscent of the surreally humourous prose poems of Russell Edson or the brisk, wonderstruck reports of Jacques Prevert, are more unpredictable and haunting than you would know from his BF2 selection (yet you can't fairly use such a response to criticize the editors without knowing what poems they had available to consider). BF2 unfortunately includes Denham's "Bus Stop" (like Armstrong's easier poem, maybe chosen for its anecdotal accessibility?), a more prosaic choice than most distinctive poems in his first book, Flux. The Crozier/Lane selection of Adam Getty also fails to capture the force of his poetry at his best, though it was enough to prompt me to track down and read his justly Gerald Lampert Award-winning book, Reconciliation.

The desire to move on from an anthology to a whole collection by a poet is not always a case of having especially positive responses to the first-encountered poems. Despite the seamless switches between mind and landscape in her "Quidi Vidi," the weaknesses more than the strengths in Alison Pick's BF2 poems – especially a sentimental ending celebrating "How [rain] doesn't judge. How // it is not afraid to cry" – compelled me to buy her collection Questions & Answers to explore her poems more fully. There other poems are as subtle and supple as "Quidi Vidi"; paradoxically, then, in this case an inaccurate representation of a poet's finest work led me to go out and find the true values of her poetry. Strange how anthologies work, isn't it?

Other categories are Poets Whose First Books I Still Must Get Hold Of (Ray Hsu and Shane Rhodes, whose "Day and Night the Sea Whispers Thalassa" creates the strongest elegiac notes in the anthology), Poets Without Book Publications Whose Strong Poems Here Make Me Await Their First Collections With Curiosity (Shane Book, Anita Lahey, Amanda Lamarche, Steven Price, David Seymour), Poets With At Least One Poem That Gives Reason For Hope (Steve McOrmond with his "Finch Station," Matt Rader with his "River View," Sheryda Warrener with her "Balance"), Poets Who Fail To Ignite My Interest, Poets I May Encounter Again Some Day With More Enthusiasm, and Absent Poets Whose Words And Lines Pack More Punch Than Several Poets Here. The last category is a reminder of the hard-to-avoid incompleteness of books like BF2. For some of us, it remains a mystery why poets as accomplished as Ken Babstock, Geoffrey Cook, and David O'Meara were missing from the first Breathing Fire (though the simple answer may be that the editors did not have their poems to consider).

Crozier and Lane mention that the poets in their new anthology differ from those in their earlier one in being more widely published and awarded at the time of their anthology inclusions, but this does not mean that the second Breathing Fire includes more memorable poems than the first. Greater than any difference between the two Crozier/Lane compilations is the difference between them and the two Storm Warnings, which were published before some of the poets in BF2 were born. Comparing the two pairs of books speaks well for poetry in Canada today. While the Storm Warnings included early work of several subsequently significant poets, it's almost shocking to see how many of the poets chosen by Purdy faded into silence. The sharpest difference between the Purdy and the Lane/Crozier anthologies is how much more of the poetic keyboard today's young poets use than did yesterday's. Imagistic precision (Getty, Murray), metaphorical fertility (Dickinson, Sinclair), and intellectual presence (Book, Hsu) were rarer in the two Storm Warnings. The first lines of a Joe Denham poem, "I etch ephemeral sketches in flat, black water, / swirl the pike pole like a sparkler wand, / the steel spear igniting fairy-dust krill," with its play of repeated and varying sounds, can give readers sensuous pleasure, best felt if the lines are read aloud; that sort of pleasure was less common in the Purdy anthologies. More young poets today are also keen on exploiting and playing with traditional forms, though that change is not very evident in the choices made by Crozier and Lane.

Today there is also more stretching the boundaries of what poetry might be, such as in matt robinson's use of restlessly discursive syntax and diction, and a dash-favouring, anti-lyrical reflectiveness; and more willingness to think in spacious structures beyond the one-at-a-time poem, such as in Triny Finlay's group of "Self-Portraits" (the book includes "Self-Portrait as My Own Brain Tumour") and Steven Price's inventive, probing sequence of poems about Harry Houdini. A cynical view might see the growing commonness of interrelated poems as only a product of the contest industry or of workshop-and-thesis convenience, but while acknowledging that factor I also believe there is more to it than that, something that involves confidence and ambition, in the favourable senses of the words.

While there is much good news to report about Breathing Fire 2, the book can remind us that technical skills and passages of arresting, even soaring, poetry do not necessarily mean fully achieved poems. On many pages of BF2, moments or even extended passages of genuine excellence are followed by various failures. To return to the music-festival metaphor (complete with stern, nasty, dreaded adjudicators), it's then like hearing festival participants who have played the piano spiritedly and flawlessly for several minutes suddenly losing their rhythm or lapsing into histrionics or nodding-off dullness. Lapses in the book, even in poets impressive in other ways, include faux-profundity ("A span of time is not equatable with years passed," "anger is a galaxy, black milk and flint stars. Your silence wounds me as light wounds the black earth"), poems that fail to go far enough beyond their titles ("the way my jeans got shorter," "the young woman's thoughts while squatting in the night grass to pee"), and forced or schmaltzy repetitions ("Somewhere... Somewhere... Somewhere," "This is... This is... This is"). Too many of the poets also appear to value the stagily obvious over the powerfully understated. With few exceptions, there is scant historical consciousness and little humour in the book, few signs of the poets being inspired by the wryness and winks of, say, George Johnston, Colleen Thibaudeau, or Bruce Taylor.

But this review needs to circle back to thank Crozier and Lane again for the book they have produced. While the poetry included is – hardly surprising – greatly varied in quality, the book can give you hours of intense reading engagement and coax you to search for books you might have taken much longer to discover, or never discovered. A decade or two from now, the primary value of Breathing Fire 2 is likely to be as a historical time-capsule. That is the inevitable fate of anthologies like it, which can include poetry worth returning to but are bound to be superceded by individual collections from the finest poets in them. But this shouldn't downplay their importance as summaries, markers, and pointers, however incomplete, at the time they're published. The editors should feel deep satisfaction when their anthology is overshadowed by later, more complete representations of the poets they have chosen and encouraged.

The Malahat Review

University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia

Editor: John Barton
Assistant Editor: Rhonda Batchelor

© The Malahat Review, 2005
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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