Read Online I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons - Free Book Online

critic H. N. Frye and the poet Douglas Lochhead, the first commenting that “his outstanding poetic quality, so far, is a gift for macabre ballad reminding one of Auden, but thoroughly original, in which the chronicles of tabloids are celebrated in the limpid rhythms of folksong,” and the second describing Leonard’s poetry as “strong, intense and masculine,” with “a brawling spirit and energy.” There was also a paragraph about Leonard that appeared to have been written by Leonard himself in the third person. It painted a romantic picture of the author, mentioning his trip to Cuba and the year he spent writing on a Greek island. He quoted himself saying, in his familiar partly humorous, partly truthful fashion, “I shouldn’t be in Canada at all. I belong beside the Mediterranean. My ancestors made a terrible mistake. But I have to keep coming back to Montreal to renew my neurotic affiliations.” 9 Clearly though, his roots were more important to him than that. He ended with an unexpected attack on the modern buildings that were taking over his favorite streets in Montreal. This might well have been ironic; Leonard knew his old neighborhood had more serious things to worry about, now that its grand residences had become the target of militant French separatists and mailbox bombs. But Leonard was genuinely fond of the old Victorian houses, and if, for now at least, he seemed to have soured on change, it was understandable so soon after his experience in Havana, where he saw for himself that life post-revolution was no less desperate than it had been before.
    The position Leonard occupied on the conservative-modernist scale was an ambiguous one. A CBC TV presenter, curious to know where he thought he stood as a writer, asked Leonard if he considered himself a “modern poet.” His answer was deflective. “I always describe myself as a writer rather than a poet, and the fact that the lines I write don’t come to the end of the page doesn’t qualify me as a poet. I think the term ‘poet’ is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When you look back over the body of his work and he has written poetry,” Leonard said, “then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.”
    The Spice-Box of Earth is the work of a major poet, profound, confident and beautifully written. The title makes reference to the ornate wooden box of fragrant spices used in the Jewish ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the secular week, but this spice box is of earth. The poems dance back and forth across the border between the holy and the worldly, the elevated and the carnal. The opening poem, “A Kite Is a Victim,” presents the poet as a man with some control over the heightened world but whose creative work is also subject to strictures and restraints, just as the kite, though it appears to fly freely, is tethered like a fish on a line. The poet makes a contract in the poem with both God and nature and keeps it throughout the book, which abounds in orchards, parks, rivers, flowers, fish, birds, insects. The killing of a man (“If It Were Spring”) is romanticized through images from nature; “Beneath My Hands” likens Marianne’s small breasts to upturned, fallen sparrows. In “Credo,” the grasshoppers that rise from the spot where a man and his lover have just had sex leads to thoughts on biblical plagues. Sex and spirituality share a bed in several poems. In “Celebration,” the orgasm from oral sex is likened to the gods falling when Samson pulled down their temples.
    There are poems about lovers (Georgianna Sherman was the muse for “I Long to Hold Some Lady” and “For Anne,” the latter singled out for praise by critics) and about angels, Solomon’s adulterous wives and a sex doll made for an ancient king (“The Girl Toy”). Irving Layton,