Backup to Babylon

Maxine Gadd is one of the best poets in Canada, and yet strangely enough one of the severely underpublished. BACKUP TO BABYLON collects three books by her from the period of 1972 through 1987; I hope there's a followup to give us her more recent poetry, but anyhow this is cause for celebration because this is her first book in 24 years! Born in England during World War II, Maxine Gadd was the child of Canadian parents both fighting in the Second World War. They brought her back to their country when she was a girl of 6, and she grew up at Vancouver's Dunsmuir Hotel. By the age of 15 or 16 she had discovered poetry, and the Beats, and she made herself at home at Vancouver's very first beat cafe, the Black Spot. Girls wore black stockings, boys wore beards, it was very bohemian. She hitchhiked to North Beach, the beat capital of San Francisco, and lived in Monterey, meanwhile beginning to write some of the most beautiful, energetic, politically savvy, and formally linguistic poetry of the 20th century. I was about to say she is like a Canadian version of Kenneth Rexroth, Joanne Kyger, or Philip Whalen, but the truth is that we don't have aa Maxine Gadd equivalent in the United States. If only we had! We might be a more progressive nation, and our children might be writing much better poetry. As you can see, her writing makes me a little weak in the knees. "Greenstone," the first book, evokes a stage in late capitalism in which all structures begin to collapse, like the cry of "timber" of all the skyscrapers in the world. From the crevices, a new wilderness begins to creep like kudzu, or the space creatures in Neil Young's AFTER THE GOLD RUSH. The book ends with a theophany, "Maxine Meets Proteus in Gastown," that is one of the essential poems of our day. Gastown = a waterfront district in Vancouver, once dangerous, now a tourist trap. Proteus = the god of change, shapeshifting, the trickster. "Cabin on the Shore," book 2, is more idyllic, breezy, and yet it's a book of hesitations, stops and starts, retreats and go forwards. There's a poem "In Praise of Bad Things' that entreats, "praise the hawk that steals the heron's fish; praise the heron raising her true harsh cry of protest" etc. "April for Z" cuts a Z across the page like that Mauricio Castellan version of Zorro, and "For the times there are no ones," a long poem that sees the birds picking at Prometheus' liver as an augur of human suffering and solidarity in Nicaragua. So it's pastoral, but with a provocative twist. Finally the eponymous "Backup to Babylon" returns to the city for good and all, a city like Dhalgren filled with spontaneous kills and celebrations, a city under eiege, a squatters' Vancouver. In this last part Gadd seems so at home in the rhetoric of her line you drink in every word like oxygen, something necessary, nearly without thought. Maybe it's a little transparent? I don't know. Poems like "What" or "Round" seem eerily to have always existed, l