Ruin & Beauty: New and Selected Poems.
Nominated for the 2000 Governor General’s Award for poetry.
Review by John Moore in the Vancouver Sun
“Patricia Young’s work has steadily gone from strength to strength since her first book, Travelling the floodwarers, in 1983. Unlike some “new and selected” editions in which a few new poems are scattered like fresh dumplings on a left over stew, Ruin and Beauty is a powerhouse sampling of six of her eight previous books, fronted by a generous collection of new poems showing why she deserves to be ranked with Crozier and Margaret Atwood as one of the country’s great poetic voices.”
Julie Reibetanz, University of Toronto Quarterly
“Young’s Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems brings together work from six previous collections along with recent work, all demonstrating the sustained singularity of Young’s vision: repeatedly one encounters intensely focused situations of personal narrative, finely etched in spare metaphors and notable for their deftly controlled line endings.”
by R. W. Stedingh: Being in the World, Language and Time
Patricia Young’s Ruin & Beauty: New & Selected Poems is the most formidable book of poems I have read in a long time. And both time and being are key words to understanding and appreciating this volume with its retrospective look at the past. Both the new and selected poems contain Young’s most mature work and consist of epiphanies she has found in the everyday being of things like human artefacts, grocery lists, tabloids, talismans, maps, fishbowls, men’s magazines and art. Her poems are vibrant documents of human lives, families and events which have shaped her life.
The selected poems sections of the volume consist of the best poems from six previous collections and dwell on the recurrent themes of isolation between men and women; origins of the race as well as her own Scottish beginnings; success and failures of communication; love for one’s husband and children; the shifting and dissolving boundaries between animals, landscapes and humans; the order of the disorder and vice versa. The work from her earlier books provides us with great insight into the development of an artist at ease with both abstraction and concrete image and whose sensitivity to language is characteristic of the truly great in poetry.
But is in the new poems that Young’s talents truly shine. This section of the collection is entitled How Mysterious the World Was, and from the title we can discern Young’s preoccupation with being and time, how the relationship between the two was but is no longer mysterious. Yet in ‘Ruin and Beauty,’ a lovely futuristic projection that begins the volume, the speaker does have some questions. After a long series of refreshing images of civiliztion being overtaken by the wilderness, she says:
Tonight you sit on the edge of the bed loosening your shoes.
The act is soundless, without future
weight. Should we name this failure?
Should we wake to the regret at the end of time
doing what people have always done
and say it was not enough?
This tone of quiet despair permeates all of the new poems. It arises again in ‘Elephants’ where, conversely, civilization threatens to destroy the wilderness. This poem is a meditation on a large painting which in Young represents still another successful attempt to call forth prehistoric and posthistoric time and focus on the destructive element in the being of human beings.
In ‘How Mysterious the World Was,’ this recapturing of prehistoric time is accomplished by recounting a trip to the caves at Lascaux wherein an archaeologist guide attempts to seduce the speaker’s sister into posing nude before the Palaeolithic paintings. The mystery of the world to those who painted the animals and hunting scenes is contrasted and at once compared to the timeless act of sex. Of her sister, the speaker says:
As if, she groans later in bed,
wondering what it would be like
to lie naked in that prehistoric dark –
a wounded bison frozen above her, a hunter,
kneeling to drink of her body.
It is clear that for Young the being of being human is a prehistoric dark that permeates our lives in the present, and will do so as long as there are men and women. It is, after all, what we are, and it comprises some of our most memorable moments. This is the case in ‘The Clyde’ where Young remembers a childhood sweetheart who tried to seduce her. Of him, she says, ‘Dead thirty years/and his voice/can still strip my bones clean.’ This almost Darwinian view of human sexuality arises again in ‘Staccato Punch’ in the lines: ‘They say one person’s helpless/calls out to another’s cruelty like the call of a lover./What does a victim know of its tormentor?’ This view of being human culminates in ‘Sex is Like Geologic Time’ where the speaker concludes:
I didn’t understand sex
is like geologic time, and change
so gradually you can only see it
if you look back
over your shoulder.
Taken together, the new and selected poems in Ruin & Beauty are aesthetic statements on the nature of being human in time. They are specific recaptured moments of universal clarity seen through a temporal lens. And they are graphically rendered in a free verse that is so carefully controlled, so sensitively rendered, so visually real that this book should be nominated for the Governor General’s Award.
