A.M. Klein: Selected poems. (Book Reviews/Recensions).
Kertzer, Jon
A.M. Klein: Selected Poems. Zailig Pollock, Seymour Mayne, and
Usher Caplan, Eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 197 pp.
$40.00 hc, $19.95 pb.
The three editors of this volume are among the foremost authorities
on the Jewish-Canadian poet, A.M. Klein (1909-1972), having piloted the
A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee through several hefty
volumes of letters, notebooks, essays, stories and poems, as well as
writing critical, biographical and bibliographical books of their own.
Over the past twenty years Zailig Pollock, in particular, has devoted
himself to Klein's writing with the scrupulous reverence that Klein
attributed to Talmudic scholars, for whom every holy word is a gateway
to glory. While not guilty of idolatry, these editors regard Klein as a
poet whose extraordinary talents illuminate the glories and horrors of
modernity and express the special complexities of living in
multicultural Canada. Ironically, all the qualities that once made him
seem exotic--his Jewishness, his love of ethnic Montreal, his joyful
erudition and linguistic exhilaration, his blending of modernist and
romantic sensibilities, of anguish and decorum--now ma ke him seem
dated. Yet the impression is misleading. His reputation rose, fell, rose
again and now has subsided as new poetic voices speak to new
constituencies about many of the same problems that bothered Klein. In
an early poem entitled "Arithmetic," which is not included
here, he contrasts the leper, emperor, hunchback and beggar, who
enumerate the obsessions of their lives, with the wise man, who counts
innumerable stars only to discover at sunrise that "Totality is
one." The search for unity amid multiplicity characterizes much of
Klein's writing; indeed, the quest for "the One in the
Many" is the dominant theme of Pollock's critical study, A.M.
Klein: The Story of the Poet. His passion to unify a chaotic world might
seem to put him at odds with current theorists (feminist, postcolonial,
cultural, queer), who refuse to "totalize" in any way, who
cultivate divisiveness, excess or unruliness, and who regard efforts to
discipline this vital jumble as tyrannical. In their view, Klein might
look like another patriarch who subjects all their eccentricities to his
iron law. But his passion for unity is just that--a passion--and like
all passions it is driven by conflicting needs and urges that make his
poetry richly ambiguous. For Klein, the law is not iron but a blessing
desperately sought in a faithless age. Only the agents of
lawlessness--racism, fascism, totalitarianism-- use iron weapons against
which the poet can summon nothing but words.
Selected Poems should keep Klein's writing fresh by making it
available it to an audience in schools and to the wider reading public.
It is a slender version--Eline Keline Nachtmusik, as Klein might say--of
Pollock's scholarly, two-volume edition which appeared in 1990 as a
response to Miriam Waddington's Collected Poems (1974, but now out
of print), a collection which Pollock dissected for inaccuracies and
faulty editing in a devastating article that appeared in Canadian Poetry
(Spring/Summer 1982). In view of this pedigree, one would expect a
cleanly-edited, accurately-annotated, deftly-selected volume. I have no
complaints. There are eighty-four poems arranged chronologically from
1929 to 1955, accompanied by thirty pages of notes and a brief
introduction. I can find no significant omissions. Here are the longer
poems and sequences, arguably Klein's best compositions, as well as
a sampling of shorter lyrics and psalms, and about two-thirds of the
poems from The Rocking Chair, his nostalgic yet critical po rtraits of
traditional Quebec life. There are also three translations by Klein of
the modern Hebrew poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik.
The notes and annotations drawn from Pollock's edition of the
Complete Poems are succinct, well-informed and especially useful. Yet
the fact that they are necessary at all indicates a problem that Klein
never resolved and that may partly explain why he abruptly stopped
writing and retreated from his busy public life. The introduction
explains that he assessed poetry in terms of its public office and so
set himself a goal that he could never satisfactorily achieve. He
regarded the poet as a public figure, an eloquent voice speaking to and
for a community which, unfortunately, found little use for poetry in a
world violently tossed among political atrocities, mindless diversions
and commerce. It is ironic, then, that Klein's exuberant writing
has to be annotated for the very community that it is supposed to serve.
His verse is full of multilingual word play, literary echoes,
historical, Biblical and Jewish allusions with which many readers will
not be familiar. To read his poetry is to embark on a cultural edu
cation and celebration, but it is also to encounter a deep suspicion of
culture itself, a suspicion that contemporary cultural theorists might
well study. Lurking within his poems following the Holocaust is a fear
that culture may be no safeguard against destructive forces not only
arrayed against it, but released within it.
