This lusty, shambling, terse, and magniloquent book contains "the whole Hogg", the poems as well as the drawings, but it is no mere re-issue of the 1978 collection of virtually the same title. The present compilation also includes a number of poems from Barry Callaghan's 1988 book of poems, Stone Blind Love. Moreover, several of the poems have been rewritten, re-titled, or placed in new positions within the whole, in effect creating a new collection. The central section of the book containing "Hogg's Drawings" has also been radically revised; many of the original drawings have been omitted and other, new ones added-not always to the book's benefit. This revamped collection now carries a fulsome introduction by the American poet Hayden Carruth, who notes that Hogg is in fact James Hogg, a nineteenth-century settler in early Toronto (the eponym of a valley called Hogg's Hollow), and so a personification of the city as well as a mouthpiece for the poet. It is probably safe to assume that the present Hogg represents the poems that Callaghan wishes to preserve, in his preferred order.
How has Hogg held up after almost twenty years? According to Carruth, the original publication of the book "was an event of signal importance, registered as such in the consciousness of readers throughout North America", and he calls the book "this momentous lyrical and epical triumph". Be this as it may, certain of the poems have great force, especially in the first section, set in Jerusalem. These are almost all the poems concerned with Hogg's love affair in that ancient city. Indeed, it is a curious aspect of Hogg that Jerusalem comes far more alive for the reader (and, one assumes, for the poet) than Toronto does. Hogg: the Poems & Drawings is divided, like the 1978 edition, into three "books", with the second book devoted to the drawings, bracketed between two slight lyrics. The first book is the most powerful and the most readable, though there are several poems of equal merit in the third (set in Toronto).
The chief problem with the book-and I think that this is true of both the earlier and the present version-is that Hogg himself too often appears to be a mere pretext, a structural device, rather than either a true character or the embodiment of a city. One could imagine the best poems in the book succeeding without his presence. Hence, though outwardly Callaghan's creation bears a superficial resemblance to such figures as Ted Hughes's Crow or John Berryman's Henry, there is something ghostly and half-hearted about Callaghan's porcine persona. Occasionally, it is true, we are given some physical characteristic, such as the "little clawtrack of incredulity" in Hogg's lower lip or "his reddish hair", but these are few and far between. Even in his death, which parodies an "assumption" (in the Roman Catholic sense), Hogg manages to remain bodiless, as in these lines from "Hopscotch":

No one knows
what became of him.
He must have fled this world in the flesh
because he left no bones,
none nobody exhumed
. Oddly enough in a way, it is part of Callaghan's achievement here to have suggested Hogg's presence with a near absence of physical description. This occurs, in my view, because of the intensity of certain of the more explicitly sexual lyrics, which carry the book. The closing lines of "Hogg Meets a Woman" provide one example:

Alone
the upper room
he bathed her feet with wine
and she took his body,
and bit his mouth for the blood.

This looks simple but is rather cunningly crafted. The power of the lines arises from the conjunction of Biblical allusions with sexual suggestion: the "upper room", for example, where Jesus celebrated the Last Supper; bathing the feet with wine, reminiscent of Mary Magdalene drying Jesus's feet with her own hair or of Jesus washing the disciples' feet; the emphasis on "body" and then "blood", a conscious echo of the consecration of the Eucharist in a Catholic Mass; and, finally but not trivially, the deft repetition of "and" with its inevitable evocation of the classical Biblical style of narrative, culminating in a last line of strong blunt monosyllables and the two final alliterations on "b". When Callaghan succeeds in such effects, the resulting poems are strong indeed.
In "The Gift of Tongue", with its mischievous allusion to the pentecostal tongues of flame, Callaghan again melds the sacred and the sexual:

But he and his
woman were naked and
ignored the language

of moss along the bone,
and all grief, calumny,

rage, fell from his eyes
when she knelt and gave him

the gift of tongue. So too,
the moon swallowed

the sun. His cry named
her and in reply

they heard the muezzin
in his minaret,

that stone shaft into
the mouth of god.

This deliberate courting of blasphemy, especially in the first book of Hogg, gives many of the poems (even when they are not always good poems) a palpable force; and yet the blasphemy coexists with a stubborn reverence. Hogg's blasphemy is the nightmare side of awe. As a result Hogg's Jerusalem rises up in the reader's imagination with a gritty but almost spectral intensity. In Jerusalem, too, Hogg's mythic nature becomes manifest. It is a curiously Christ-like nature which yet exists in a sort of reversal of the Gadarene swine of the Gospel: here it is not the swine that are inhabited by devils but the Incarnate Lord. Hogg's torment, his inner Golgotha, if you will, is to be nailed spread-eagled upon his own unquenchable sexuality. This innermost crucifixion is suggested and not stated, but it propels some of the stronger poems in Hogg. Consider the sardonic and yet reverent evocation of Jerusalem in "Skull Hill":

Burning, the women smell
of must and sour milk. Burning, the bones

of dead birds in the roofgutter.
Burning, the cairns, the crypts, the towers

of silence, and the Lord himself locked
within stone, and the water locked within
stone,

and here the handprint of the Sheik of the
Jews,
Ibrahim, and here the slaughter-stone for his
Son
under the Dome of Saladin, blood, stone,
rubble and burning stone...

These opening lines lead into a chant-like anaphora of mounting power:
gone down the Imperial Beak,
gone down Bishop Arculf and Saewulf,
gone down the Perfumers of the Rock and the
Kadi of the Mount,
gone down Tancred and Baldwin and Blake's
vision of Skull Hill,
gone down Montefiore and Rabbi
Yosef Warsawe and Rabbi el Bagdadee...

After a savage reference to "loan-sharks with whips of hippopotamus hide" in the "chapel of Veronica" (a juxtaposition anyone who has ever visited the old city of Jerusalem will recognize), the poem concludes on a wry and satirical note which does not undercut, but instead reinforces, the lamentation of the opening lines:

"See the blind stair, that's where
Christ leapt upon his cross;
and close by, Mr. Hogg, the best
coffee in Jerusalem.",p> By contrast, the drawings that make up Book Two, enigmatically entitled "Stone: Hogg's Drawings", impress me as not only extraordinarily ugly, but ugly without purpose. Both the 1978 version and the present book would have been far better without them (though the earlier ones strike me as slightly better). It is in fact difficult to contemplate these images as anything more than rather pretentious Rorschach blots, despite the evident graphic skill in certain of the line drawings. I have looked, and looked again, and while I freely confess my incompetence as an art critic, I can see nothing in these drawings but a kind of ghastly loathing of the human form, and particularly of human genitalia. The collocation of the sacred and profane that lends depth and vigour to the poems becomes in the drawings at once shrill and precious, raw but weirdly artsy.
Book Three, entitled "The Mayor Says It's a Whale of a City", is located in Toronto, and particularly in the Toronto subway system (that is, if I, a Montrealer, am interpreting the signs aright). Book Three is quite a mixed assemblage. Without Jerusalem, Callaghan has lost much of what gave his earlier poems their momentum. Toronto, our "Hog-town", the profane, indeed unkosher, pole to the Holy City, simply lacks the historical and emotional counterpoise to stand up to Jerusalem as an image or evoked presence. Callaghan tries his best to make of Toronto a grimy, funky, seamy town with a credible underworld-a cool Sheol to Jerusalem's hot stone-but even at its most "Hoggish", his Toronto remains pale and bland as pork.
Book Three contains Callaghan's ludicrous attempts to mimic some sort of superannuated jive-talk. I do not know if there is any verbal equivalent for Al Jolson's "blackface", but if there were, Callaghan's poems, such as "Medusa among the Moochers" or "Hell's Belle" or "John the Conqueroo" or the interminable "Judas Priest" would furnish prime examples. I cannot bear to cite more than a few lines (this from "Hell's Belle"):

"Upside the magazine
rack this fool
for whips and studs

says, Dahling, don't
come to me 'bout
women, she-it,

see, the doom's
down funky..."

But in the same Book Three, cheek by jowl, as it were, lie some of Callaghan's best poems, and it is these which remain with the reader. These include several spare, lean ballad-like lyrics, such as "Wedding Bells", which I quote in full:

In Museum Station
he saw
an old railroad hand car

and a man see-sawing
the T-bar, calling
You can be best man.

He wore straightlast shoes,
a Bachelor's Button
in his button-hole

and handed Hogg
a fist full of transfers.
Those'll take you for a ride.

He sang a spindlesong
about a gelded life,
then knelt down
and bared his neck.
I do, he said,
and chinned himself
on the third rail.

A spider wove
the wedding garment.

The apparently artless accumulation of homely details-the hand car, the "straightlast shoes", the button-hole-becomes transmuted with an unexpected poignancy in "a spindlesong/ about a gelded life". The ending with its nursery rhyme simplicity (and sinister as only certain nursery rhymes can be) casts a chilling backglow over the earlier stanzas. Other such successes include "The Dry Font" and "Water Music", both too long to quote here. "Water Music", in particular, is graced with an unusual musicality of phrasing.
Callaghan tries to unite all three books in the rather flat and unconvincing "Desert Woman", in which the Jerusalem affair of Book One is recalled. "Transmute our dust to music," his vanished lover admonishes him; and yet, this has already, repeatedly, occurred in Hogg, particularly in such memorable poems as "The Hatching of Hogg", "On the Abu Gosh Road", "Hogg Meets a Woman", "Sleepwalker", "The Worry-Bead", "And So to Bed", "The Khamsin", "The Emperor's Imperial Beak", "How We Are", "At the Lazarus Stone", and "Skull Hill"-all from Book One. To those poems from Book Three which I have already praised, let me add "Out of the Tomb Sheets", for this third-from-last piece (in my view, the true conclusion of the whole book), in addition to being a good poem, clinches the whole shifting image of Hogg himself, so maddeningly nebulous at many points and yet so weirdly corporeal at others:

Call Hogg precursor obsolete,
but nonetheless alive to hope as more than
survival
to prayer as more than madness, to death
as more than a sigh.

In the end it is perhaps this stubborn longing, this wholly pigheaded greed, for hope, for prayer, for life, which gives Hogg its vitality after almost twenty years.

 Eric Ormsby's most recent book of poems is For a Modest God (Grove Press).