HISTORIANS ARE no exception to the rule that all of us have our specialties and are fish out of water when we attempt to pontificate on other. matters. Theirs, of course, is the past, where we cheerfully allow them to muck about with their documents and to surface periodically to throw mud and suchlike at each other`s books. But when a historian is allowed to review a book on a contemporary event -- for instance, Desmond Morton on Rick Salutin on the 1988 federal election (November) -- he is launched on an endeavour that makes as little sense as it would to have a journalist evaluate a manuscript on the fall of the Roman Empire or the causes of the Industrial Revolution. The wise historian would demur, but not Professor Morton. The result is predictable: we learn frightfully little from his review except that the intense debate about free trade and the coalescence of the popular sector groups against it do not fit Morton`s preconceived notions -- appropriated from some previous century for all I know -- about the nature of politics. As a mere economist, I can lay no claim to expertise in political matters past or present, But I was actively involved on the ground in the 1988 election. Salutin`s book told me things I knew and things I didn`t know, and had the ring of truth throughout. When enough time has passed for that election to be history and to have made it into the archives, say a generation or so, then and only then should Morton and his ilk be allowed to appear in print. Mel Watkins Toronto REVISIONISM ONE COULD debate many of the premises of Erin Moure`s interesting article "Watching the Watchwords," (November), not least that which supposes that writing not using explicit self-reference has not examined its premises, and vice versa. After all, Moure herself does not really examine her own critical premises, which, though only theories of meaning, she speaks of as facts. She is also, surely, the country`s most prescriptive critic. But I want to question particularly her assertion that some writers are (gasp!) using formalisms in poetry "not seen in 30 years or more." First of all, to suggest that formalism can be easily defined seems problematic. Second, to suggest that rhyme or metre or regular stanzas or the "unquestioned subject" (only Erin Moure can tell which subjects are questioned) have been absent for over three decades constitutes either ignorance or sheer arrogance. Lastly, since free verse has dominated serious poetry for half a century (more in Canada than elsewhere), Moure might ask herself just which style of writing poetry is emblematic of the status quo. I do not know the answer to the contemporary question of what, exactly, form connotes. Moure may not like the formal poetry written in the last 35 years by poets such as James Merrill, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Ralph Gustafson, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Derek Walcott, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, Douglas Dunn, Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Paul Eluard, Robyn Sarah, Raymond Queneau, Pierre Jean Jouve, Philip Larkin, P. K. Page, Yves Bonnefoy, John Montague, Robert Marteau, David Solway, Anne Hebert, Robert Lowell, Michael Harris, A.M. Klein, Richard Wilbur, George Johnston, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Sylvia Plath, Milton Acorn, Ted Hughes, Leonard Cohen, Thom Gunn, just to list those that spring to mind; but to pretend they do not exist seems an act of revisionism extreme even by the standards of the Canadian post- structuralists. David Manicom Montreal HE LIKES MIKE IN HER review of the first volume of Lester Pearson`s biography (November), Heather Robertson complains that John English "fails to explain Mike`s ideological about-face from a liberal peacemaker to a hardline cold warrior." This "failure" is easily explained: the alleged about-face never happened. Pearson was a cold warrior, i.e., an opponent of Soviet expansion, at least from early 1948 when the Communists strangled democracy in Czechoslovakia. The following year, as Canada`s external affairs minister, he helped organize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to resist further Soviet advance in Europe. The peacemaking for which he won the Nobel Prize, following the Suez War of 1956, was entirely consistent with that objective. The United States had opposed -- and thereby doomed - - the Anglo-French military expedition to recapture the canal from Egypt. Pearson wanted to extricate the British and French with minimum loss of face, and thereby limit the damage done to Western unity by the breach between the U.S. and two major European allies. I know of this motive because Pearson emphasized it to me in a private interview shortly after the crisis (I was then chief editorial writer of the Toronto Star). His creation, the United Nations emergency force, separated the combatants and enabled Britain and France to pull out with some shred of dignity. It was as a staunch alliance man, for the sake of North American defence, that he accepted nuclear warheads for Canada`s Bomarc missiles in 1963. But as a cold warrior he was discriminating. He advised Washington -- diplomatically in public, bluntly in private -- against getting heavily engaged in Vietnam. He did so not because he shared the prevailing liberal delusions about the virtues of Indo-Chinese communism, but because he thought the area was not strategically vital, and feared that the U.S. would lose and that its defeat would weaken resistance to Communism generally. Events bore him out. It is thanks to Pearson`s generation of Western statesmen (and to their conservative successors in the 1980s) that the free West has endured to witness the total self-discrediting of Communism and the accelerating crack-up of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Mike Pearson was and remains the only Canadian ever to win international recognition as a statesman of first rank (similar claims on behalf of Pierre Trudeau were mere partisan puffery). He did not deserve a reviewer who is plainly ignorant about his thinking and about the historical era that his policy and diplomacy served so well. THE RING OF TRUTH HISTORIANS ARE no exception to the rule that all of us have our specialties and are fish out of water when we attempt to pontificate on other. matters. Theirs, of course, is the past, where we cheerfully allow them to muck about with their documents and to surface periodically to throw mud and suchlike at each other`s books. But when a historian is allowed to review a book on a contemporary event -- for instance, Desmond Morton on Rick Salutin on the 1988 federal election (November) -- he is launched on an endeavour that makes as little sense as it would to have a journalist evaluate a manuscript on the fall of the Roman Empire or the causes of the Industrial Revolution. The wise historian would demur, but not Professor Morton. The result is predictable: we learn frightfully little from his review except that the intense debate about free trade and the coalescence of the popular sector groups against it do not fit Morton`s preconceived notions -- appropriated from some previous century for all I know -- about the nature of politics. As a mere economist, I can lay no claim to expertise in political matters past or present, But I was actively involved on the ground in the 1988 election. Salutin`s book told me things I knew and things I didn`t know, and had the ring of truth throughout. When enough time has passed for that election to be history and to have made it into the archives, say a generation or so, then and only then should Morton and his ilk be allowed to appear in print. Mel Watkins Toronto REVISIONISM ONE COULD debate many of the premises of Erin Moure`s interesting article "Watching the Watchwords," (November), not least that which supposes that writing not using explicit self-reference has not examined its premises, and vice versa. After all, Moure herself does not really examine her own critical premises, which, though only theories of meaning, she speaks of as facts. She is also, surely, the country`s most prescriptive critic. But I want to question particularly her assertion that some writers are (gasp!) using formalisms in poetry "not seen in 30 years or more." First of all, to suggest that formalism can be easily defined seems problematic. Second, to suggest that rhyme or metre or regular stanzas or the "unquestioned subject" (only Erin Moure can tell which subjects are questioned) have been absent for over three decades constitutes either ignorance or sheer arrogance. Lastly, since free verse has dominated serious poetry for half a century (more in Canada than elsewhere), Moure might ask herself just which style of writing poetry is emblematic of the status quo. I do not know the answer to the contemporary question of what, exactly, form connotes. Moure may not like the formal poetry written in the last 35 years by poets such as James Merrill, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, Ralph Gustafson, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Derek Walcott, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Bishop, Douglas Dunn, Fleur Adcock, Anne Stevenson, Paul Eluard, Robyn Sarah, Raymond Queneau, Pierre Jean Jouve, Philip Larkin, P. K. Page, Yves Bonnefoy, John Montague, Robert Marteau, David Solway, Anne Hebert, Robert Lowell, Michael Harris, A.M. Klein, Richard Wilbur, George Johnston, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Sylvia Plath, Milton Acorn, Ted Hughes, Leonard Cohen, Thom Gunn, just to list those that spring to mind; but to pretend they do not exist seems an act of revisionism extreme even by the standards of the Canadian post- structuralists. David Manicom Montreal HE LIKES MIKE IN HER review of the first volume of Lester Pearson`s biography (November), Heather Robertson complains that John English "fails to explain Mike`s ideological about-face from a liberal peacemaker to a hardline cold warrior." This "failure" is easily explained: the alleged about-face never happened. Pearson was a cold warrior, i.e., an opponent of Soviet expansion, at least from early 1948 when the Communists strangled democracy in Czechoslovakia. The following year, as Canada`s external affairs minister, he helped organize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to resist further Soviet advance in Europe. The peacemaking for which he won the Nobel Prize, following the Suez War of 1956, was entirely consistent with that objective. The United States had opposed -- and thereby doomed - - the Anglo-French military expedition to recapture the canal from Egypt. Pearson wanted to extricate the British and French with minimum loss of face, and thereby limit the damage done to Western unity by the breach between the U.S. and two major European allies. I know of this motive because Pearson emphasized it to me in a private interview shortly after the crisis (I was then chief editorial writer of the Toronto Star). His creation, the United Nations emergency force, separated the combatants and enabled Britain and France to pull out with some shred of dignity. It was as a staunch alliance man, for the sake of North American defence, that he accepted nuclear warheads for Canada`s Bomarc missiles in 1963. But as a cold warrior he was discriminating. He advised Washington -- diplomatically in public, bluntly in private -- against getting heavily engaged in Vietnam. He did so not because he shared the prevailing liberal delusions about the virtues of Indo-Chinese communism, but because he thought the area was not strategically vital, and feared that the U.S. would lose and that its defeat would weaken resistance to Communism generally. Events bore him out. It is thanks to Pearson`s generation of Western statesmen (and to their conservative successors in the 1980s) that the free West has endured to witness the total self-discrediting of Communism and the accelerating crack-up of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Mike Pearson was and remains the only Canadian ever to win international recognition as a statesman of first rank (similar claims on behalf of Pierre Trudeau were mere partisan puffery). He did not deserve a reviewer who is plainly ignorant about his thinking and about the historical era that his policy and diplomacy served so well. Robert Nielsen Perth-Andover, N.B. NOT JUST LOVE AND ANGST IT IS with some wonder and with great disappointment that I find myself impelled to respond to Bruce Serafin`s reductive and ill-informed review of Gerry Shikatani`s most recent book of poetry, 1988: Selected Poems and Texts. Shikatani is a writer of incredible range who has been published internationally and has performed at prestigious poetry festivals in France. The volume in question contains not only some of the most exquisite experimental/visual work being done in Canada, but also lyrical poems` prose poems, and the 17-page narrative exploration of northern Ontario, "Journal of a Trip down to Moosonee and Moose Factory." If I may be permitted a brief quote: I want coffee and french fries and gravy "Benjamin Moore Paints" sign and the panelling/ a hangout/ Cree family out for a Saturday stopping in/ nylon windbreakers, the two women who helped us a few days ago, packs out of the canoe at Moose Factory, they smile and we are inside this Moosonee to walk by rusty shacks, followed by every dog the time of our culture is splitting Mr. Serafin writes: "Here and there it contains little drawings ... and a lot of writing whose chief feature is ... unclear allusions to things that have meaning for the writer but are obscure ..." Funny, the above passage does not seem obscure at all; and the context is the rest of the book and the rest of the world. Shikatani`s work pushes at the edges of what is often considered "acceptable" in poetry: but isn`t that what art is destined to do, is required to do? Poetry is not simply tidy communications about love and angst; it is about politics and language, family and food, travel, death, and gardens. In other words, it is limitless, and if Mr. Serafin had read 1988 with care, he would have found all these things and more. This review was not just inadequate in approach (as the reviewer refused in any sense to be "read" by the text, but throughout imposes his own set of received ideas) but irresponsible. The reviewer misrepresents the book as almost entirely visual (which it is not) and quotes sections of poems without even attempting to imply the careful context in which they were positioned. Mr. Serafin compares Shikatani`s work to that of Fred Wah and bpNichol and, for once, he is correct. I would like to remind him that both Wah and Nichol won Governor General`s Awards for their work. Perhaps the limitation here is not the writing, but Mr. Serafin`s reading of it. Beverley Daurio Aya Press Stratford, Ont. THE BITER BIT YOUR REVIEW of my story collection, Snakebite, contains a lot of inaccuracies, not to mention some rather peculiar statistical observations. John Oughton dwells quite a bit on the "fact" that I`ve published only 10 stories in the last decade: in reality it`s more like 20, of which these are a selection. I`ve also published two books of poetry and a novel. There is no piece in the book entitled "Jupiter`s Transit," although Oughton mentions it as his favourite. He also says the stories "all feature women protagonists," when in fact four out of 10 are about men or written from a mate point of view. Oughton further suggests I try working with a "broader spectrum of humanity ... Except for the five-year-old in `Snakebite,` the women are uniformly white and in Young middle age." Uniformly white? Well, damned if we do and damned if we don`t. I thought art aimed at universality, not statistical averaging. Nevertheless, I tested my characters for multiculturalism, and came up with this list: an African witch doctor, several Jews, a failed American guru, a modern-day Egyptian prince, a couple of Australians, and two or three Quebecois. As for their age profile: I`ve got one who says she`s 3 1, while another claims to he 29. The lesbian is 42 if she`s a day, and the gun moll could be any age. The protagonist in "Limbo" is in her early 20s at the beginning of the story, and then soars into her 30s for the finale. Mary, the aspiring mermaid, is 25. I`m not Sure what all these "criteria" really have to do with reviewing fiction, although they certainly can he used in place of thought. What disturbs me is that Oughton seems to have barely glanced at Snakebite before he sat down to dismiss it. Ann Diamond Montreal John Oughton replies: ANN DIAMOND`s letter raises several points. First, I did not say she has published only 10 stories or only short stories: I wrote "her first collection includes 10 short stories written over the last decade," which is apparently still accurate. I did get the title of my favourite story wrong, for which I can only plead brain failure: it is titled "The Jupiter Effect." She is also right to say that a few of the stories have male protagonists; obviously they didn`t stick in my memory. I stand by my advice that trying a wider range of characters might stretch her writing muscles, although writers are always free to (and usually do) ignore reviewers` advice. What disturbs me most is that she read my review as dismissal; I do terms like "polished," "mastery," or "a gift for linking the banal and the extraordinary" to dismiss a writer. THIN SOCKS IS THERE any prominent writer who can use more words to less purpose than Leon Rooke? "Tales from the Caboose" (November), his review of Solomon Gursky Was Here, was missing an engine. Given that this is Mordecai Richler`s first novel in nine years; given that Richler is at worst the second-best fiction writer this country has ever produced (Mavis Gallant is the tops, isn`t she?), Solomon Gursky Was Here is an event. It ought to have been greeted with fireworks! It ought to have been reviewed by Richler`s best friend! It ought to have been reviewed by his worst enemy! Whatever! It certainly deserves a more explosive introduction to the world than Leon Rooke doing the old academic boxstep (step back, shuffle forward, lean left, shuffle right) over it. I knew something was amiss as soon as I saw Paul Orenstein`s equally dreary cover photograph: Mordecai Richler looks like an author who has just been told that his most ambitious work is going to be reviewed by Leon Rooke -- baleful. I hope Leon Rooke`s socks are so thin this winter that his feet turn blue and curt up at the ends: that might keep him from skating like a Toronto Maple Leaf the next time Richler turns his way. And by the way, Solomon Gursky Was Here is to writing what the LafleurDryden editions of the Montreal Canadiens were to hockey -- in a league pretty much by themselves. It moves beautifully, it shoots hard, it scores often and shuts out the competition. Don`t be Rooked -- buy it, read it, let yourself be knocked on your ass by it. T.F. Rigelhof Westmount, Quebec