The Poems Of Earle Birney

by Earle Birney

Genres: Poetry, Canada

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Earle Alfred Birney was a distinguished Canadian poet and novelist, who twice won the Governor General's Award, Canada's top literary honor, for his poetry.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple of months ago, the craftsman putting in new tile in our bathroom asked me if I knew Earle Birney's long poem "David." I was pleased. It was the first time any American had ever brought up Earle Birney to me, and I am pretty sure the name would draw a blank among my colleagues at the University of Michigan.

So I pulled down this book. A little book I've been carrying around with me for fifty years! David is in there, of course -- it is the poem by which most people in Canada remember him. It's a long narrative with wonderful descriptions of the Canadian Rockies. The story is of two young men climbing mountains, until one of them dies as the direct result of the narrator's actions.

There are other formal poems -- some of them feel successful, some (like the Anglo-Saxon alliterative poems, and the Sestina) feel forced and artificial. In a couple of poems he tries to write dialect of American speech, and that falls pretty flat. But he has a bunch of travel narratives and they are wonderful! He was a man of the Left, and he had genuine sympathies with the people he saw around the world. He has a poem dedicated to Jamaican novelist George Lamming which is startling in its willingness to engage questions of race, decades before that became part of the cultural dialogue.

There is joy in these poems. Brains. Compassion. Music. Birney deserves to live. And if my tile guy knew him -- well, maybe he will not be forgotten.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

His name was familiar to me, so when I saw this collection in a book exchange, I decided to snap it up. Poems aren't meant to be read all in one go, so I set myself the task of reading one every morning. I don't claim to understand them all, but the ones I did follow I enjoyed. Part of the fun of a good poem is simply savouring the inventive language used to describe what most people would consider an ordinary event.

Birney appears to have been well-travelled. Many of these poems were written in exotic places, ranging from Spain to Chile to Hawaii (it was odd to think of a poet at a resort in Hawaii).