Shaman art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Montreal and Vancouver, the two best cities in Canada

Here are final photographs of honey bees in Vancouver, this time on the UBC campus overlooking Chancellor Road near the Chan Centre parkade.

What we love about cities in the east, history, access to culture, a feeling of man's presence for decades and in some instances for centuries, is not found in Vancouver. Of course, there is "culture" here, but the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, or the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, are all superior to the Vancouver Art Gallery and comparing them isn't fair. You don't go to Vancouver for "culture." Vancouver is a very young city compared to most eastern cities.

Only a "young" place, Vancouver and British Columbia, would have on their license plates "The Best Place on Earth." On the other hand, on Quebec's license plate you'll find "Je Me Souviens" which means "I remember myself," and refers to remembering the past, looking backwards, the ethnocentric side of French Quebec which would sacrifice the future in order to hang on to the old, the past, what has been, what never was, including all the perceived injustices, the desire to separate from the Rest of Canada, and so on. BC's license plate is young, naive, and annoying; Quebec's license plate is representative more of people off the Island of Montreal; Montreal has always been a city of tolerance of other people. 

There is a connection between Vancouver and Montreal, maybe it's a spiritual connection. You'll find evidence of spirituality just about anywhere you go in Montreal--it is, after all, "Ville Marie," the City of Mary--and spirituality seems to emanate from the very heart and being of Montreal, past, present, and future. Visiting Montreal you'll see Mount Royal with an illuminated cross at the eastern side of the mountain, the Oratory, St. Patrick's Basilica, the many churches that are found in every neighbourhood, and so on. Vancouver's spirituality is in nature, whether the mountains that can be seen from just about any part of Vancouver, the mild climate, the ocean, Pacific Spirit Park, Stanley Park, honey bees in lavender beds on Cornwall Street or at UBC, there is a quality of spirituality here that comes directly from the close proximity of nature. 

Underpass on Cote St. Luc Road

These photographs of an underpass on Cote St. Luc Road in Montreal, near where we live, seem at first like they could be any urban scene. It is a rather unpleasant place with a peculiar ordour that I have never been able to identify, but almost like the smell of corn. Equally unpleasant is the pigeon poop on the sidewalk, and the pigeons overhead nesting in the underpass. Nevertheless, there is also an architectural quality to the place, the eleven columns, the four lanes divided by the supporting columns, and the descent and ascent of the road. There was also, that day, a quality that I am always aware of when it happens, or when it makes its presence known to me, and that is a quality of silence or quiet that can sometimes be found in places like this, or anywhere it makes itself known. That quiet is what I am trying to evoke in my photographs. There is the moment between traffic, the quiet, the presence of quiet for the pedestrian if he or she is open to this experience. I am conscious of an experience of quiet and silence in the urban environment that changes the quality of life in cities and is part of an aesthetic or spiritual experience that I try to express in photographs.

Douglas Lochhead's new book, review

Painting by John Hammond, 1905; Hammond was based in Sackville, New Brunswick

Looking into Trees, by Douglas Lochhead 

(Sybertooth Inc., Sackville, New Brunswick, 2009) 

Review by Stephen Morrissey 

Go wind, go green, go move it into great shiftings “looking into trees” Douglas Lochhead’s extensive body of work shows a lifelong dedication, passion, and commitment to poetry. The poems in Lochhead’s new book, Looking into Trees, as one finds in his other books, are pared down and concise. As the title suggests, we may look into trees, but what do “trees” suggest, what do they mean to the poet and to the reader, what is our meditation on trees? As an archetype “trees” have always interested me, beginning with my own first book of poems, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1978). First, one thinks of the roots of trees, of being rooted in the ground of our existence, the physical, the earth from which life generates. There is also another aspect to trees, there are the trees’ branches that reach into the sky, into the heavens above us. Trees, then, suggest both the physical world and the spiritual realm. Trees also suggest a meeting of the two worlds, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. 

Indeed, Looking into Trees is a wonderful and evocative title. It is not looking at trees, which is a passive act, but looking into trees which suggests an investigation— “I will look into the situation”—this also suggests taking care of a situation that requires some open-ended study. Four poems in Lochhead’s book stand out, they are those entitled “Exhibits for the Lord,” numbered one to four. These poems give the reader a portal through which to enter into both the poetic and spiritual experience. This perception is an awareness of the presence of God in Lochhead`s daily life. When is God present to us? In the poems, God is present all the time. In the first poem, the “exhibits” are in the form of a morning and evening walk and seeing flowers growing in people’s gardens, these are all “exhibits for the Lord.” There is an ambiguity in this: are they exhibits or evidence for the presence of God, or are they what we present to God as an exhibit, or evidence, of our belief in Him? The second poem’s exhibit is that of the presence of children. In this poem we move from the world of experience to the uncorrupted world of a child’s innocence, and this is a cause for prayer. Prayer in this poem is not the ostentatious exhibition of ego that Jesus warned against, but spontaneous prayer that is a conversation with God. I am told that Einstein did not believe in God, but he nevertheless engaged in an on-going conversation with God. Prayer, then, is a conversation with the Divine. 

An experience of God, it seems to me, comes uninvited, unannounced, in God’s own time. We wander, as I have done, in the exile of a self-made desert until we return to God, as I have also done. Exhibit three presents this to us. It is sometimes enjoyable to read a detective novel, to be distracted when we can`t sleep. This, however, might also be the time when God makes His presence felt; Lochhead writes, “... words took me up saying REJOICE/ and it was God’s day again…” The fourth exhibit reminds us that in our daily living—the “Holy Living,” and “the slide rule possibility of Holy dying”—there is the constant presence of rejoicing, for one who is living in the presence of God is also rejoicing that God is in his life. The reproductions of paintings in Looking into Trees, by Kenneth Lochhead (Douglas Lochhead’s brother), who is an eminent visual artist in his own right, enhance the poems in the book. The paintings present a similar vision of life as one finds in the poems, and they show that, as I have always believed, poetry and visual art have more in common than poetry and other genres of written expression, for instance the novel. 

Notes: 1. My review of Douglas Lochhead’s Upper Cape Poems (Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, 1989) appeared in the Antigonish Review, nos. 81-82, spring-summer 1990. 2. I also recommend these other books by Douglas Lochhead: Collected Poems: The Full Furnace (1975) A & E (1980) The Panic Field (1984) The Tiger in the Skull, New and Selected Poems 1959 – 1985 (1986) Upper Cape Poems (1989)

A walk in N.D.G., Summer 2008

A walk in our neighbourhood, Notre Dame de Grace, is always interesting and fun. Here, beside the apartment where Artie Gold used to live, is a painted billboard from the 1920s-1930s, pristine and clear after being protected and hidden for many decades by another building that was destroyed by fire a few years ago. The debris has now been removed from where the old building used to stand. I see others have posted photographs online of this same painted billboard. 

Montreal isn't Ville Marie--the City of Mary--for nothing. Here, a few blocks east of the Turret cigarette advertisement, is a statue of Mary (to the left of the huge statue of Jesus), in someone's back yard. 

A few hundred feet east from the statues of Jesus and Mary, on Monkland Avenue, is the former home of poet Irving Layton; it has been renovated by the new owners. I remember visiting Layton here, with CZ and Noni Howard, in his living room. Sometimes, when I would walk or drive by Layton's place, I'd look at his home and see him sitting at his dining room table writing poems, smoking his pipe.

On the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, near where Irving Layton used to live, is this statue of Mary, with a water fall and water circulating around the statue.

Next, we walk down Elmhurst Avenue from Sherbrooke, cross the railway tracks, and then walk along St. Jacques by the old Griffith-McConnell nursing home; the building has fallen in disrepair and neglect since they moved to their new location in Cote St. Luc. The old place is still standing, but since these photographs were taken, in 2008, construction has begun behind the building and I suspect it will be demolished.

Poetry, spirituality, lilacs blooming in spring, lanes that are like the country, history and people, they all make N.D.G. one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Montreal.




On the way home we stop by Rosedale-Queen Mary Road United Church, at Terrebonne and Rosedale, where they have constructed a labyrinth outside of the adjoining community centre. I gave a reading here once, all very nice people. The labyrinth is open to the public and has an amazing affect when walking on it. You are almost immediately plunged into profound questioning on the meaning of mortality. I never expected this but it certainly had this affect on me. As you walk the labyrinth, you are removed from the everyday, you find yourself in the spiritual.

There is a lot more to see than this on our walk in N.D.G.; this is just a part of the less trendy western part of N.D.G. For instance, there is a miniature Chinese garden directly across the street from the labyrinth; this is a wonderful creation someone has lovingly made and maintained in their front garden, it is a city and landscape all in miniature, with Oriental statues, running water in a little river, and tiny houses.