Book Title:  Phyllis Webb and the Common Good:  Poetry/Anarchy/Abstraction

Author:  Stephen Collis

Publishing Company:  Talonbooks (www.talonbooks.com)

Year:  2007

# of Pages: 228

ISBN #:  978-0-88922-559-6

$24.95 Canada

$24.95 USA 

3 Stars 

Reviewer:  Deborah Ground Buckner 

Poet and critic Stephen Collis (Anarchive, 2005; Mine,2001), explores the work and life of Phyllis Webb in his new book Phyllis Webb and the Common Good.  Webb was born in 1927 in Victoria, British Columbia.  She worked at the CBC in Toronto and produced the radio show "Ideas." Between 1956 and 1990, Webb published nine volumes of poetry.  Her work, The Vision Tree:  Selected Poems by Phyllis Webb, won the Governor General's award in 1982.

Collis traces Webb's work in the context of her life.  He draws a comparison to the life and work of Emily Dickinson, mainly because of the temptation of critics, particularly with women poets, to engage in “psychobiography,” attempting to analyze the writer through her work.  He notes Webb herself objected to this in a 1993 essay, proclaiming the poet “become[s] a sociological phenomenon whose secret life has become an almost more dramatic gift than the poems.”   

Collis focuses on three areas of discussion.  The first is “The Poetics of Response.  Webb readily acknowledges the influences of other poets in her work.  Webb wrote of her reason for writing, “there are the poems,” both her own works and the works of others, poems, as Collis states, “to which Webb can respond in kind and enter into dialogue with.”  Poetry is, in fact, a “response-ability,” Collis writes.

The second area is “Poetry and Anarchy.”  Again, examining Webb's works in the context of her times and the other poets she had read, Collis concludes her work “embodies the tension between . . . two anarchist poles,” these being “the individualist and communist strains.”

The third area of focus is “On Abstraction.”  Considering Webb's decision to stop writing and begin painting, Collis seeks to find “a bridge backwards, eventually reading her painterly abstraction back into her poetry.”  Collis argues “the tendency towards abstraction is the key trajectory of Webb's literary career . . . but a more fully abstract poetry was, for whatever reasons, unavailable, or simply unappealing.”  (author's emphasis).  Ultimately, it is through her painting that she can more fully explore abstraction, and the book includes some illustrations of her artistic work. 

Phyllis Webb and the Common Good is a very scholarly work, steeped with academic writing that makes it a difficult read.  It is worth the effort, though.  So often, poets are thought of in isolation, so it is particularly interesting to see the analysis of a poet in the context of the world that shaped her.