The Blue Pools of Paradise

by Mick Burrs, Coteau Books, c.1983
Thunder Creek Publishing co-Operative Limited

The author, a transplanted American draft-evader now living in Regina, is a poet and a teacher of creative writing. Mr. Burrs, beside being the founder of a reading series, is also a vocal advocate of books written by Saskatchewan writers.

In this collection Mr. Burrs has turned to exploration as a way of mining his inner feelings, as a way to attempt to understand his beginnings and perhaps by so doing, understand also the endings of all things. For the human experience is a universal one; understand what brought us to the shore of sentience and the universe is unravelled before us. This search is a long and weary one, the road a well-traversed one, well-worn by many who have gone before - and the exploration is doubtless destined to be repeated by those many who will surely come after. The answers are elusive, the way is shrouded in mystery, a mystery as arcane and little-fathomed as the human mind and the emotions which experience evoke. The search for sources, the search to unravel mysteries beckons many, and some who search discover truth. But truth is a troublesome word and what is truth or 'answer' to some is merely baffling and veiled mystique to others.

Perhaps real truth lies in the satisfaction of having attempted the journey; to finally understand is not given to many, and many realize that behind one truth or one answer is simply another question beckoning, another exploration to be undertaken and its mystery unravelled.

Mick Burrs begins his exploration through his family's unrecorded history, back to the tracery of Czarist Russia, pogroms, the differences of Yiddishkeit, the ostracism of the 'different folk'. Aptly enough, the photograph fore and aft of this collection does speak a thousand words, silently and eloquently, as it is a photograph of Russian military officers sitting around a table hosting a Samovar and the lead poem, titled 'Samovar', sets the exclusionary stage at which the story told through the collected poems, unfolds.

Mr. Burrs dangles exploratory fingers into the pudding of his birth, to his early development, when in a poem with that title he "...would laugh and swing/ eight years old/ a pilot taking wing/ in our garden/ shout BOMBS OVER TOKYO!' on a swinging crescent/ a boy/ too young to know/ bombs/ are appalling things/ tokyo a human place/ i only now remember/ our japanese gardener/ hoeing, turn away his face/".

The poet lingers over 'names and numbers', tracing his connection to father, grandfather and name change from "B ... is for Burrs, from Berzinsky/ (son of one who lives near Birches),/ his family name/ ...the family name changed/ by the father, in the New World,/ to fit in with the Smiths,/ to be more acceptable to the Browns/" ... with the poet's avowal of the value of the Berzinsky, yet his devotion to the Burr, now long-familiar and self-owned.

From the purges and the pogroms, from the Czarist officers and their samovars - escape - to the Goldene Medina. Transition to the golden world of Encino, California, where the neighbourhood has changed, and the samovar transformed to swimming pools; the fabled blue pools of paradise. Surrounded by movie stars, palatial homes and the obligatory pool, the neighbours are felt, but never seen; forever diving into their pools, celebrating, bringing in New Years' fetes. The separatedness, the apartness of the Burrs family is as complete in this new world as it was in the old.

Finally, an act of separation, the decision of the misunderstood, unappreciated and sensitive son to leave the country of his family's succour, that country which has oppressed another, alien people. His refusal to fight, his flight to another, war-uninvolved country which brings him to the following poem, after an evening in a Vancouver hotel room with his father and mother, where their two disparate sensibilities and worlds still fail to touch one another; neither father nor son saying the things that matter, to bridge the gap of misunderstanding, and soon afterward, on his return to Encino, the father dies:

"And none of us realized that last night
in the motel room in Vancouver
how one year later
these two Als
my father the sign painter and real estate broker
Jolson the movie star and popular singer
would share
the same consecrated hillside
of the City of Angels
each with his place under the grass
(though they had never met
on the palm tree boulevards of Encino)
or how their gray hair
would slowly intertwine
with the holy roots in the dark
soil of Hollywood
(Near the oil derricks and bright roar
of the city's snarling freeways)
or how the audience of their bones
would only hear the stillness
of talk / the silence of song
from a million flickering stars
light years removed from all those fabled blue pools
of paradise."

Mr. Burrs returns, briefly, to Russia/California to bid farewell to his dying grandfather... "I had not seen you for fourteen years./ Now at the gray border separating our lives/ the bus driver turned the motor off -/ and I watched an officer step aboard." He is taken off the bus, interrogated, and is relieved to be permitted his journey. He tries to explain ...

"You could not understand why your grandson
had fled the country that was your refuge,
had left the land of freedom; to be free,
not to struggle in someone else's war,
not to kill or be killed, but to find

the gift of poetry
along paths in northern woods,
songs waiting to drop like red berries
from the arms of snow-clad trees."

Finally, he recalls himself as a nature-struck child, collecting fireflies, wondering at the effervescent, evanescent firefly in a jar ... and it is this wonderment that we shall all, perhaps, return to finally... "Discovered among songless shadows/ plucking my notes of fire/ on invisible strings/ I became/ your small captured moon/ composed of throbbing light/ the one bright song/ in your dark universe/ now I resonate with echoing faintly against glass."

In the final analysis, we are all but transient flashes, fireflies burning brightly, then extinguished. But while we burn, beating our wings against adversity, striving to live out our ephemeral spans with dignity and honour we search for direction and meaning. Sometimes we discover these in our personal histories.

This collection does justice to the never-ending search.

c. 1985 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jew