At a drum store in Toronto

Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems

Here is the review of Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems that I wrote in 1990. The original article also included reviews of five other poets; they are Cathy Ford, R.A.D. Ford, Lee, Singleton, and Wayman.
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Review by Stephen Morrissey
The Antigonish Review, no. 81-82
spring-summer 1990


While our society has become increasingly transient, some poets remind us of how important geography is to the individual's spiritual well-being. Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems celebrate the Tantramar marsh region between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; they show how familiarity with a geographical region need not lead to boredom with that area, but possibly to a greater awareness of life's diversity and the individual's inner life. Lochhead's poems are simple, direct, and extremely concise; his language has a definite rhythm that is never dull. There is no inflated ego in this work; indeed, there is an attractive understatement of both theme and emotion. In one poem he writes:

For months
leading to years
I counted you
my love
not saying much
because quite frankly
I am not much
good at it.

Once I did
say something
the white wine
was part of it,
you said it was mutual.

Now your silence
from this distance
deafens my days
I find the only way
to forget is to douse
myself in the shower
and curse.

Oh yes,
I blast myself
more often than you.

Unlike many poets, Lochhead is capable of changing the rhythm of his language. He is not a one-dimensional poet with only one song in her repertoire. "Tantramar, again, again" ends with these lines that give a feeling of actually being at the marsh:

gone great wind gone down
now to stillness and full July grasses
where they stood scything
stifling the wood never left them
gone though gone and great it was.

These poems bear repeated readings; this is only one indication that his work demands our attention. In "The woods" Lochhead writes:

I walked into the woods
all nearby to be seen
from the kitchen window
wild raspberry canes
brought blood to my arms
the brook was deceptive
leaving my feet mud brown

where there were birds
they vanished in alarm
the birds I had named
given my time

and the woods filled
with a new silence
the maples shading red
as the blood on my arm

it was the going in
to the woods
the neat place
I had thought tamed

but it brought blood
and a new kind of life

Lochhead's poems demand an aesthetic response, not only an intellectual analysis of his themes and ideas. A few of the poems in this book are transparent, their absence would not have detracted from the overall effectiveness of Upper Cape Poems. Lochhead's poems are a psychic map of one man's journey through life, always paying strict attention to the detail of his place and time. In Lochhead's faithfulness to detail we discover the human poet behind his words, but we also make a second, equally important discovery: it is our own self grown more human as we see life and experience compassionately revealed in these poems.

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)

At the Getty Museum in Los Angeles

It's thirteen years since we visited the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (back at Christmas, 1997) but I still consider it one of the most impressive museums I have visited. Everything about the Getty seems perfect, at least to the visitor who is made to feel most welcome. What a wonderful experience, to visit a Roman villa, fully restored and containing a wonderful collection of Roman and other art.

Christmas Morning in Harlem, NYC, 2008

Christmas Morning on Morningside Drive, 2008

Stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, summer 2009 (2)

Stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, summer 2009 (1)

St. James Anglican Church, Quebec

St. James Anglican Church, built in the early 1800s, is located in St. Jean sur Richelieu, Quebec (near Lacolle, which is a border crossing from Quebec's Eastern Townships to New York State). When the church was constructed there was a large English-speaking population in the Eastern Townships (including members of my paternal grandmother's family who attended the church over 125 years ago), but for various reasons the English-speaking population has dwindled over the last fifty or sixty years. For more information, visit: http://www.morrisseyfamilyhistory.com/.

St. Cunegonde Church in fall, rue Notre Dame, Montreal

Notre Dame de Bonsecours in Old Montreal

My maternal grandmother

Here is a photograph of my maternal grandmother, taken (I believe) at Westmount Park, around 1922. Her maiden name was Chew, and she was married to my grandfather, John R. Parker. My mother is on our right and my Uncle John, her only living sibling, on the left. An older child, Willie, died before my mother was born; a doctor was called when he was ill but by the time the doctor arrived, intoxicated, the child had died.

St Anthony of Padua Church

Located on St. Antoine Street in Montreal, near where our family used to live, the old St. Anthony Church was demolished for the building of the Ville Marie Expressway. The new St. Anthony's is a much more humble building.

From the old St. Anthony's Church, seen through the window on the far right of the church doors.

This is the Ville Marie Expressway directly across the street from St. Anthony's Church, where the old church was located.

Photo from 1963 before the Ville Marie Expressway was built

Turret Cigarettes

Here is the same Turret Cigarette advertisement as in the previous post, except that now debris has been cleared away from in front of it. This advertisement was protected, in pristine condition, because it was between two adjacent walls for many years. Since this photograph was taken someone has painted graffiti over it.

Smoke Turret Cigarettes!

A painted billboard, recently exposed when the neighbouring building was demolished after a fire, for Turret cigarettes. Located next door to Artie Gold's old apartment building, The Westmore.

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.