by D.A. Lockhart
Blurred Sunlight Shimmering on Wet Rocks
A Review of Laurence Hutchman’s Swimming Toward the Sun. Collected Poems: 1968-2020.
Guernica Editions (2020)
I first heard Laurence Hutchman’s work read, by him, on a stage in Hazel Park, Michigan. We were in a small theatre in the sprawl of suburban commercial buildings that sets the standard sense of urbanity for Metro Detroit. Together in a country that knew little of us, yet welcomed us whole heartedly in small kitschy theatre, I felt myself drawn into distant and comfortable worlds. I understood then what I still see now in his Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems: 1968-2020 (Guernica Editions, 2020). Here is a man whose lifetime has been filled with work that carries on the great poetic tradition and one that furthers that tradition by adding a beautiful and important Canadian voice to it.
There is great depth and passion in Hutchman’s work. Among one of the most accomplished poets in Canada, his works have come to reflect much of the life of letters to be had in this country. With his work these reflections are driven not solely by the culturally dense streets of Montreal and Toronto. Although they are there as well, it is not the focus. It’s rather the man at the centre, the one that has come through it all. Here is Canada, here is our lives from the roots. With Hutchman’s works we witness the reflection of our lives. Deep multi-lingual country roots, small towns, the view is Al Purdy-esque in its vision of land and experience being at its centre. Sure, these are poems of the self to an extent. But they are more, they are sharing and connecting in ways that many oft praised contemporary poets are unable to accomplish. As such these are poems of the people, recognizable outside the halls of academia, but imbued with a depth of knowledge and experience that makes these poems at home in the classrooms of the nation.
One of the most endearing parts of his work is the manner that he utilizes language and most specifically places them alongside each other. Hutchman is concerned with languages and with mixings of memory and our experiences through them. In his poem about his family history, “Lost Languages,” he beautiful creates space for both the sound and literacy in mixing languages. “Sounds ripen in the mouth:/beschuit, pindakaas, boterham//sinaasappel … lekker … ah … a language of violets/orchids, solariums, and that tobacco …/” Here, like many other instances of French and other languages, Hutchman allows us to hear the words, see them on the page, and then open up to concrete experience through his use of imagery. We find footings in familiar and wonder in the connection to the sound and the personal.
Hutchman is also clearly a poet of places and people. They play critical roles in his work and act, most often, as grounding points. And these aren’t simply limited to his Turtle Island-based life. He is an immigrant, from Northern Ireland, and as such the manner in which one can find them both unstuck from place and firmly attached to it run throughout his work. His collections of the now gone small town Ontario town of Emory are well-known enough. They place both history and place as nebulous and impossible to completely revisit in our collective experience. The physical aspect of memory and recollection is central to both our existence and to the work of the poet as Hutchman sees it.
With such a diversity of lyric and narrative pieces, some full of honest experiential level detail, some filled with the earnest poetic sense of fiction and possibility, it could be difficult to find an over-arching theme. This is because Hutchman’s work does not simply follow a single principle of poetics or writing, but rather grows and changes over time. We witness phases, shifts, and returns. I liken the reading of this book as a study of living, breathing, and very vibrant living being, like a meandering river, the migration of birds across a continent, the seasonal wandering of antelope on the Great Plains. In this one book of collected works you can follow the growth of not just a poet but a soul through its pages. We witness a departure and return and then final departure from Hutchman’s hometown of Emory. We sense similar things with his talk of Atlantic Canada, and again with familiar and now departed writers. Yet there is more here than these expectant poetic turns. There is a cohesive ars poetica when the totality of the pieces is looked at as a whole. I find an apt summary of Hutchman’s work in the closing stanza of his “Poems at Hoagie”
“It is out of this exile we write our songs,/when the poem suddenly centres us/ and flows out past the large windows,/opening onto the river where the blurred sunlight/shimmers on the wet rocks,/ and purple flowers cluster./ We watch the men on Fish River/cleanly casting their lines.” (pg.153)
We as readers are thus left with the concrete visions of real tangible world, one that we share rather generously with Hutchman. From French-language cloaked travels down Atlantic Canadian roadways, to quiet moments between the speaker and poetic royalty such as Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, and Fred Cogswell.
This is a collected works, not a complete works, which leaves us with a less than exhaustive view of Hutchman’s work. This is not a problem, despite the fact that some of my personal favourites of his work might be absent. Here I am thinking of his earliest work in Storm Warning 2 and some of his most recent works. That said, we are still left a fairly expansive view of a long and still unfolding career. And for poets, for those interested in the arc of Canadian Literature, here is an insightful look into the community of writers and the context they emerged from over the last part of the previous century and well into our current one. Here is one finely produced and edited volume of one Canada’s most important poets and writers of the last five or six decades. An importance that shines through in its lyricism, its connection to the grand western poetic traditions, and to the finer points of how language and poems can record the nuances of our time upon this turtle shell. And the words on the page come through in honesty and fine melodic narrative lyricism that sparkles like an Irish storyteller in the shadows of a small-town maritime pub. This collected works is an absolute must for collectors and scholars of Canadian poetry. But it is also a true to delight to read, one that acts as both a history of Canadian verse, and memoir to one of the most important voices working and living in the field.