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Signed copy. THERE ARE NO TARIFFS OR CUSTOMS DUTIES ON BOOKS. An extremely scarce signed copy from the Canadian poet. The following is the first part of a contemporary review (in the magazine Canadian Literature No.25, from 1965):"The themes that underlie most of the poems in Michael Parr's The Green Fig Tree are unusual in contemporary Canadian poetry in two ways; they are at one and the same time both religious and joyously optimistic. Although a few poems (notably "I n the Beginning") deal successfully and memorably with a religious theme in the formal and historical sense, the poet's key symbol â?? that of the green fig tree â?? indicates the source of his worship. It is nothing less than the green earth, the fruitful mother of all organic life, and the worship is blended with the love and the miraculous awe that are inspired by Earth's children in their multiplicity of form and flesh: clouds, flowers, insects, trees, snakes, foxes, crows, owls, crocuses, men, and women. All these become to the delighted poet occasions for the celebration of the keen enjoyment of living. The devil's side of the drum of life â??winter, storm, old age, death, imperfection, crime, squalor, and idiocy â?? is sounded here softly and seldom. And perhaps that is the main defect in the book. The cumulative effect of eighty three pages of hosannas â?? however well conceived and executed â?? resolves itself ultimately to a stunned monotony in which inevitably the later poems suffer. One can say of the Earth, as the poet says, with his Mary in mind: each day's rising sun do I love you: but lastingly and more terrible than these. but even such terrible love for this planet, or for a woman, cannot stand the battering of constant repetition without modulation. It is in this relative sameness of attitude that Michael Parr differs most greatly from the late Dylan Thomas, whose work is most closely allied to his own in theme and technique. Although Thomas was essentially a poet of fertility, harvest, and the sun among the leaves, he could rage against the end of autumn or the dying of the light. Circumstances have not yet called forth that rage in Parr. He will be, one feels, a much greater poet when they do. In fact, there are indications in this volume, in two poems ("Birth" and "Genesis") where creation is fused with pain, of a more muted rhetoric and a more precise imaginative intensity. Two other poems ("F or Those Who are Younger than Poets" and "Th e Boy in the Rowan Tree") point to the potential Michael Parr whose poems will no longer need a technical "bag of tricks" to attract attention to them but will stand on simple but inevitable expression behind whose clarity one can see a true and imaginative response to experience, the naked body of poetry. . . Signed by the author (see image 2). For the inside flap blurb, see image 3.
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