Florence McNeil | Biography

No Canadian poet, not even P. K. Page, has focused as steadily as Florence McNeil on the intersection of the visual and verbal. In the anthology New West Coast (1977) she wrote: "I've always been interested in the differences: representation of the thing and the thing itself and the various shades of truth in what is perceived. So I use movies, photographs, television, paintings as source material." This interest in thing and representation of thing is realized in poetry which consistently combines graphic precision and fine verbal shading.

The storytelling tradition which McNeil's father shared with his Outer Hebridean ancestors provided a childhood which McNeil remembers as rich with vivid verbal pictures. Born to John and Jean Gillies McNeil, and raised in North Burnaby, close to ocean, forest, and mountain, McNeil studied at the University of British Columbia, receiving a B.A. in 1960. She spent the next year at the University of Alberta, where she met Eli Mandel and Rudy Wiebe, whom she recalls reading from an early novel in one of her creative-writing classes. After intermittent high-school teaching, she returned to U.B.C. where she studied with Earle Birney and received an M.A. in English and creative writing in 1965. That year she won the Macmillan of Canada Prize for Poetry and began to teach English at Western Washington State College in Bellingham.

McNeil's first book is the published version of the poems which she submitted as her M.A. thesis. Elegantly and sensitively designed by Takao Tanabe, A Silent Green Sky (1967) is a delight to the eye. McNeil describes objects and places--a parking lot in fog, a hospital corridor, a ferry, "four green shoots climbing out / of the edges of the trash can"--with, as her publisher enthuses in a foreword, "depth of observation and acute microscopic perception." McNeil anticipates her later work by frequent use of metaphors from the visual arts: in "Interior August," for example, "beach people ... [are] stranger than / parchment figures glazed on a Chinese screen," the sky is "like a bar-room nude," and the branches overhead are a "sweeping fresco." Implicit in these examples, however, is the most persistent criticism reviewers have made: as Peter Stevens wrote in Canadian Forum (November 1968), this poem is "a catalogue of images quite precise in themselves, but giving a generally exaggerated tone because of an over-use of similes."

In 1968 McNeil left Bellingham for the University of Calgary, where she taught until 1973. The poetry written during this period is strongly influenced by nostalgia for the West Coast. Walhachin (1972), prompted by driving past the small community on many trips between Calgary and Vancouver, shows two significant developments in the poet's work: the attempt at an integrated suite of poems and at using the voice of a historical figure. McNeil describes the poem as "the imagined monologue of an Englishwoman in Walhachin," a town settled by English colonists in 1907. In twenty-two parts the poem describes a seven-year attempt to irrigate the desert and establish a town; McNeil fixes on the trees, and their analogy with the speaker's poems, which define the community's dream. The Overlanders (1982) is a later attempt at a similar serial poem, in which a pregnant woman, solitary among a group of male fortune-hunters en route to the Cariboo gold fields, dreams (concealing her pregnancy, she is "secretly fertile") of a "magic carpet" and a clear image of her self.

The Rim of the Park , which appeared the same year as Walhachin, is a more random collection of poems, loosely organized along biographical lines. A "didactic / prairie winter" is recalled in "Afterthought," followed by a series of poems on the scenes and personalities of Halfmoon Bay, where McNeil has a vacation home on the ocean. Her fine evocations of landscape are here extended by an increasing interest in the way humans represent their world. In the title poem a companion is a camera: "I'm on fire in your eight millimeter / eyes," the poet complains. The metaphors of the earlier volume lead to poems about photographs and movies, and about remembering: in "Silents" "tom mix / and ws hart" are "pure / pantomimes / of an age / chased out of / existence."

In Emily (1975) McNeil secures her great talent for the poetic interpretation of painting with an ideal subject--the West Coast painter Emily Carr--who is a lyrical, energetic writer: "I who wrestle with words / as with paint / wanting to catch the cobalt sky / and let it trickle / through black and white type / force veridian (forests) through the / swirl of a sentence." The economical focus on Carr's eccentricity and "wild canvasses," the shadow of Carr's biography, make this McNeil's most satisfying book. As Jean Wilson wrote simply in a review for Canadian Literature (Winter 1977), "The spirit of Emily Carr is in this book, not any easy thing to capture."

Ghost Towns, also published in 1975, is a more general collection combining the interest in history and art found in Walhachin and Emily. Here the focus on the visual artifact--not only photograph and movie, painting and television show, but magazine advertisement or illustration from a Dickens novel--becomes so pervasive that the "typical" McNeil poem is identifiable. "It is close to being a formula," wrote Dorothy Livesay when reviewing this volume for Canadian Literature (Winter 1976). McNeil begins with an image by which a culture expresses its perception, finds the right verbal and metaphorical means for presenting it with great clarity, and then pushes the limits of both word and visual representation to extend her own seeing of the world.

Having discovered her forte--the anecdotal poems often flounder by comparison--McNeil began A Balancing Act (1979) with a suite of poems on specific paintings and on painterly schools and movements. At their best these can serve as a genuinely novel guide to seeing what is usually unnoticed: "A Paul Klee Cat" could be a brilliant program note to a gallery showing. Barkerville (1984) gives similar prominence to the visual: it is designed as an album of archival photographs elaborated by verbal portraits of the characters who peopled the Cariboo mining boomtown in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. McNeil's extensive use of a range of prose and dramatic forms is a formal recognition of the problematics of relating verbal grammars to camera-eye framing.

Perhaps the descriptive lucidity and immediacy of McNeil's poetry has created a sense that her poetry is excessively simple. Her suggestions of the many dimensions inherent in the two-dimensional have elicited surprisingly little critical interest. But new work in different genres may change that: in 1980 she wrote a radio play about Barkerville. Most interestingly, she has turned to writing juvenile novels: Miss P. and Me (1982) is a puberty-blues novel about a thirteen-year-old dreaming of becoming a writer, and All Kinds of Magic (1984) is a mystery thriller set in the interior of British Columbia, which has been the literary landscape she prefers. In one sense these novels for young people seem an appropriate direction: as in Alice in Wonderland, one of her favorite books, McNeil has always combined a childlike directness and a magical intelligence.