The Porcupine's Quill

Chris Wiseman stayed at the Marine Hotel in North Berwick, Scotland, in 2000, about eighteen months after the American novelist John Updike. Wiseman believes he stayed in the same room as that in which Updike is reported to have watched High Society (1956). Here Wiseman collects his best work, alongside a section of new and previously unpublished poetry. Described by Lee Shedden of The Calgary Herald as ‘a testament to a lifetime of dedication to the poet’s craft,’ In John Updike’s Room won the City of Calgary’s W.O. Mitchell Award in 2006.

In In John Updike’s Room, one of Canada’s major poets has gathered the best from his first eight books, and added a generous and richly varied selection of new and previously unpublished work. Christopher Wiseman demonstrates here, with great authority, a strong and impressive humanity, deep feeling, a total command of both free and formal verse, an ability to celebrate the seemingly ordinary and turn it into something unforgettable, even luminous, and a startlingly wide range of subject, tone and approach. The poems collected here from some forty years of writing move around Europe, Britain, Canada and the United States, and range from the comic to the satirical to the reflective to the elegiac, but never lose what the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Donald Justice has called Wiseman’s ‘strong, clear, truth-telling voice’. Don Coles admires the poems for being ‘subtle and tender’, and throughout these warm, human and accessible works, the over-riding quality is one of honest, recognizable, but distinctive emotion, as the poems, brilliantly crafted and shaped, delight and deepen our sense of personal possibility, of the joy, laughter, sorrow and grief which will send the reader back over and over again to its warm and wise pages.

Table of contents

New Poems

Margaret Gill’s Quiet Life
Monty
In John Updike’s Room
When My Parents Danced the Tango
That Night at the Palais
Little Sketch, with shoe
The Place Left Behind
Postcards on My Window-ledge
Granddaughter, First Meeting
Mac Duncan, Trombonist
Givings and Takings As We Age
At The Hospice
To A Lost Grandchild
Four Silk scarves I Bought
Monument Valley
North Berwick Law
Old Couple Sitting
Hot and Fast, with Echoes

from Waiting for the Barbarians (1971)

In The Basement
Philistine at the Ballet
The Academic
Dracula
The Garden
Winter Song
Past Loves

from The Barbarian File (1974)

Prediction
Love Poem
The Cougar Poem
He Remembers

from The Upper Hand (1981)

Disused Airfield 2
The Field
To A German Pilot
At Rievaulx Abbey
In Highweek Churchyard
Filey Brig 1975
At the Pool
On A Painting by L. S. Lowry
The Shrine
Remembering Dorset

from An Ocean of Whispers (1982)

Elegy for Bing and the Duke
Elvis Dead
The Fighter lotters
Calgary 2 a.m.
Expatriate
Needlework Sampler
Ash Tray

from Postcards Home: Poems New and Selected (1988)

Mrs. Rowley
The Bell
Postcards Home
Dead Angels
My Son, a Ball, the Years
In The Banff Springs Hotel
Kensington Gardens, May 1982
Bedside Manners

from Missing Persons (1989)

Old Songs Back Again
Taking the Words with You
I’ll Have You to Remember
Movements
Saturdays and Mr. Sidi
The Curious Death of Billy Smart’s Circus
Words for Mrs. Kibble
The Fall and After
Sketch, by Son and Nephew
Reunion, Age 79
Beneath the Visiting Moon
Leutnant Strobel Is Just One of Them
Interior with Woman
These Images Are Mine
Stinsford, the Hardy Graves
Glasgow, 1964
School Photograph
Against the Dying of the Light

from Remembering Mr. Fox (1994)

Out of Season
Remembering Mr. Fox
The White Door
Suite for My Uncle
Prayer Tree, Haworth Church
Old Fingers, Shining Rings
A Letter, Long Delayed, to Doris Day
Revelations 3
Limitations of the Missionary Position
Cards from Scarborough
Tea Dances, My Father’s Motorbike
Scarborough Bay
Contract Not Renewed
Cemetery Near Beiseker, Alberta
Phone Calls Home

from Crossing the Salt Flats (1999)

All Those Years Next Door
Elegy for an Alto Sax
Two Loves Had I
Finish Line
On Julia’s Clothes
Standing by Stones
By the Mississippi
Village Cemetery, Scotland
For Charlotte Dunn
Unconsecrated Ground
Departure Gate
Hearing Sirens
At the Bomber Command Memorial
Grandfather, The Somme, An Invoice
The Gravediggers
Bird Sanctuary -- A Memory of My Father
April Elegy
By The River
Soccer Coach
Not My Department

Notes

Acknowledgements

Review quote

‘By turns funny, elegiac, wry and tender, In John Updike’s Room stands as a testament to a lifetime of dedication to the poet’s craft, a book anyone could be proud to submit to posterity.’

—Lee Shedden, The Calgary Herald

Review quote

‘His subject-matter is, for the most part, sad in character. A high percentage of the poems are either elegies, or set in churchyards, or commemorate the date. The dead may be relatives, personal friends, film celebrities, revered sports players, or simply victims of the accidents and tragedies of our age. But if the mood is often sobering, the poems themselves are accessible, accomplished, and therefore exhilarating. Wiseman is a master of lacrimae rerum, of the poetry of loss. All his poems bear testimony to a life lived to the full, telling of its joys (sometimes), its sorrows, and its timeless memories. Almost all of them (‘‘Granddaughter, First Meeting’’ is a charming, eloquent exception) look back to the past, yet Wiseman displays the ability to write with deep feeling and to convey pathos without falling into a cloying sentimentality.’

—W J Keith, Canadian Book Review Annual

Review quote

‘This is timeless writing with no hint of pretentiousness. Intensely human, about ‘‘ordinary life,’’ it can be appreciated and cherished even by those who feel nervous when confronted with ‘‘the poetic’’.’

—W J Keith, Canadian Book Review Annual

Review quote

‘It’s this alternating tone, this multifaceted ability, that does a rare thing: the poems actually play off of one another. Too often I read poem after poem in collection after collection wherein no thought is paid to juxtaposition. Wiseman has this trick down cold. His poems can be menacing, they can be tender, they can be comic, they can be serious. Theme ricochets off of theme; and I suppose this effect must have been amplified in the individual collections themselves for it to be preserved in a Selected. Each of the poems, though, are similar in one respect: they take a premise -- be it the washer and dryer being lovers, be it the Dracula legend -- and expound upon it. They use their premises as a launching ground for insight. Often small insight -- Wiseman isn’t a master of leaping logic, of transcendence -- that’s perfectly suited to the little moments he creates in his poems, little vignettes.’

—Shane Neilson, PoetryReviews.ca

Back cover copy

‘Time’s circle draws us in’, Christopher Wiseman writes in one of his finest poems, and it’s the continuous, poem after poem, vivid and tender evocation of Time that gives this collection its cachet, its utterly distinctive and, as the pages turn, increasingly obvious stand-alone quality. This is a voice which cares not how nakedly and vulnerably it speaks its truths: the brittle safety-first impersonality of post-modernism is kept far hence, like Eliot’s dog; if we will only enter into these finely-crafted poems with half the longing that they so richly have for remembered bliss, for the ‘faint persistent music’ (from the same Wiseman poem) of our own lives and the lives of those we have known or admired or even, and not seldom here, adored -- sporting heroes, dance-hall tunes, film beauties, early and also late loves -- then, ah then, we’ll know we’ve been allowed into an emotion-laden space that’s wider and deeper and, for sure, less predictable than what the fashions of the age have trained us to expect, to endure, to put up with.’

—Don Coles

Unpublished endorsement

‘More than any other Canadian poet I’ve read in recent years, Christopher Wiseman has written poetry that, as Philip Larkin believed, should ‘‘try to move towards the reader.’’ The poems in In John Updike’s Room reach the reader using an exciting plain-style -- clear, stylish, colloquial, and capable of the most exquisite, unhurried, delicately-expressed insights. By keeping alive the English language as a force both accessible and bold, approachable and freshly-imagined, Wiseman makes good on a promise only the finest poets are able to satisfy: he has created an individual music that can be genuinely shared.’

—Carmine Starnino