Coles, Don
COLES, Don
Nationality: Canadian. Born: Woodstock Ontario, 12 April 1928. Education: University of Toronto, B.A. 1949, M.A. 1952; University of Cambridge, M.A. 1954. Family: Married Heidi Goelnitz in 1959; one daughter and one son. Career: Worked as a translator in Scandinavia, Italy, and Germany, 1954–65; instructor, 1965–66, lecturer, 1966–68, assistant professor, 1968–71, associate professor, 1971–81, since 1979 director of program in creative writing, and since 1981 professor of humanities and creative writing, York University, Toronto. Since 1985 poetry editor, Banff Centre for the Fine Arts, Alberta. Awards: Canada Council grants; CBC Literary award, 1980; National Magazine award, 1986; Governor General's prize, 1993, for Forests of the Medieval World; John Glassco prize, 1996, for translation of For the Living and the Dead by Tomas Tranströmer. Address: 122 Glenview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4R 1P8, Canada.
Publications
Poetry
Sometimes All Over. Toronto, Macmillan, 1975.
Anniversaries. Toronto, Macmillan, 1979.
The Prinzhorn Collection. Toronto, Macmillan, 1982.
Landslides: Selected Poems 1975–1985. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1986.
K. in Love. Montreal, Signal, 1987.
Little Bird. Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1991.
Forests of the Medieval World. Erin, Ontario, Porcupine's Quill, 1993.
Someone Has Stayed in Stockholm, New and Selected Poems. Todmorden, England, ARC-Publications, 1994.
Other
Editor, The Moment Is All: Selected Poems 1944–1983 by Ralph Gustafson. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1983.
*Critical Studies: "Attending the Masses" by Paul Stuewe, in Queen's Quarterly (Kingston, Ontario), winter 1983; "'All in War with Time': The Poetry of Don Coles" by Susan Glickman, in Essays on Canadian Writing (Toronto), 35, winter 1987.
* * *In a poem from Landslides called "What Will Happen to Us Both?" Don Coles voices the central concern of his poetry: "Time leans close." Throughout his career his poems have turned and returned to deal with this invisible element in which we live and which buffets and shapes our bodies and our hopes.
The theme is not a new one, and its presence in Coles's poetry is one of the ways his work reveals its comprehension and assimilation of the main traditions of classical and modern literature; his is a Canadian poetry informed by the heart and mind of Europe. Thus, his handling of time reminds us of Horace's efforts to build poetic structures that can afford monumental shelter against time's storms, of Shakespeare's lines of defense against the "bloody Tyrant," or of the "pretty rooms" that Donne builds deep inside his sonnets. Yet Coles's treatment of the theme is utterly new, and it contributes much to the distinct resonance of his voice among modern Canadian poets.
The poems often begin by plunging us into the currents of time. "My God how we all swiftly, swiftly/unwrap our lives" begins the first poem in his first collection, Sometimes All Over, and it proceeds to compare our rampage through time with the blitzkrieg of small children through the wrappings of their birthday presents. But "compare" is too tame a word to convey the poem's workings. Rather, it involves us in the unravelings of time: only three sentences unwind over nineteen lines; none but the last line is end-stopped; and all but three of the other lines hurtle forward without even a comma or a dash. The result is that the poem picks us up and carries us along, making us realize viscerally the point it insinuates rather than states: even as we think we are moving forward in control of our birthdays and our presents, it is time that rolls us along and controls our every turn. Yet we are not helpless. The sheer imaginative energy of the poem's unfurling metaphor and the momentum of its syntax testify—as surely as Horace's or Shakespeare's monuments—to a creative power that takes on the assaults of time and will not surrender easily, achieving a temporary victory in the controlling shape of the poem itself.
Such shapes have allowed Coles to move beyond the territory of personal history, in which many of the encounters with time took place in his first volume in such poems as "Photograph" or "My Grandfather, My Grandmother." His second collection, Anniversaries, unreels its comprehending skeins of language through the times of a "dim old dawdler,/Main Street gazer" ("Codger"), a widow and a "Gentleman, 50'ish" ("Lonelyhearts"), and the artists and heroes of medieval France ("Guide Book"). It unfolds the life dormant in "a yellowed and torn half-page of an unidentifiable newspaper" in "Mrs. Colliston," and it searches out the life behind a stone monument in another poem whose very title embodies its process of rescuing experience from time: "On a Bust of an Army Corporal Killed on His Twenty-first Birthday Driving a Munitions Wagon in the Boer War."
Both Anniversaries and The Prinzhorn Collection also show Coles traveling through the histories, real and imagined, of such writers as Tolstoy, Rilke, Mann, Ibsen, and James. Most successful is the long poem that gives The Prinzhorn Collection its title, a searing look into the drawings, letters, and journals of the inmates of a nineteenth-century madhouse. The poem's short but unstoppable lines trace a narrowing orbit, from the obscene drawings of the madwomen through the men's "complaints,/Threats, fawnings, explanations,/Prayers. Rational and irrational/Proposals." They move across "the borders of despair" to center on the anguished cries of a single inmate, Joseph Grebing. Coles's lines compress the twelve years of Grebing's unanswered petitions for his family's love into a core of agony at the heart of the poem, all the more effective because it avoids a direct and potentially bathetic approach in favor of a terrifying sweep around the margins of chaos: "A thin,/Leaf-coloured tendril winds from/One beflowered upper-case letter/To the next, and contains, like/An icon'd saint's girdle, messages— /To speak plainly, just one message,/Of unmistakable awfulness." Coles makes the inmate's grief speak so movingly across a hundred years that it comes as a shock, a last, wrenching turn of the screw, when he reminds us that "nothing of it/Was ever mailed, or we should not/Now have it." But this temporary triumph of oblivion is offset by the knowledge that we do have it, thanks to Coles's art; his poem has rescued Grebing's voice from the dead silence of time.
The poems of K. in Love mark a radical departure from Coles's earlier work in both design and implications. Short (most no more than eight or ten lines), untitled, confessional, they are love notes ostensibly written by Franz Kafka. The poems offer a seizing of instants, and they embody a new awareness of the power of individual words to leap off the page, alive, and to influence reality rather than merely record it. Thus, in "It's so lonely here," "Every word on the page/Bursts into tears," or "When you refer in today's letter/To 'our love', completely new/Images of home/Drift near." Coles has discovered in these poems perhaps the most effective weapon against time: the creative potential of the word to escape the frozen, photographic contours of history and to make a fresh time of its own. The discovery anticipates the last line of Forests of the Medieval World ("an hour's immortal even if a life isn't"), and it carves out the primary line followed in that volume and in its immediate predecessor, Little Bird. The latter book takes the sharp moments of K. in Love and joins them—without blunting them—into the sequence "Last Letter to My Father." Through heavily enjambed quatrains that are irregular in rhythm and rhyme, Coles pursues a dialogue between his own imaginative language and his father's polite middle-class silence, and in the process he manages both to demonstrate the grounds of his love for his father and to justify a life devoted to poetry. The quatrains achieve a superb tonal balance, keeping us distant from sentimentality through their wit ("heart I" rhymes with "Sparta," and "Word" with "blurred") as they effect "a kind of/binding of/silence/& language" that enmeshes love.
Such a balance also carries us through the more diverse loves (friendly, paternal, passionate, filial) of Coles's most chronologically and geographically inclusive volume, Forests of the Medieval World. Winner of the Governor General's award, this collection staves off time by comprehending much of its offerings, the sights and sounds of a lifetime given the ringing solidity of bronze through the pressure of Coles's art. His language can rise without apparent effort from the commonplace ("Way to look, Gary, way to look") to the metaphorical ("your tongue/harried my mouth's bays and inlets"), or it can hover magically to include both at once, as when the baseball coach of "Night Game" sits "staring into the evening diamond." As we move from Edvard Munch's Norway to G.A. Henty's India, from the Wren Library at Cambridge to the Triple Star Cleaners of small-town Ontario, time rolls more powerfully than ever through the aged or aging figures of Forests of the Medieval World, but in this most accomplished and resonant of Coles's works "their brief voices/Are vibrant and near."
—John Reibetanz