Writing the Terrain : Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets

Echoing Mandel, historian Douglas Francis maintains in Images of the West (1980), that in the post-World War ii era, “the prairies have been transformed into a state of mind.” Ceasing to be associated directly with a physical locale, the “image of the West is of a landscape of the mind, moulded by the myths and realities of a western Canadian tradition.” For Francis, there continues to be a “healt [...] Th is is not only due to “few cities and consequently, a far greater stretch of sky,” but also because the skies “hold the promise of help or threat of disaster to the Prairie dweller,” who lives “on a knife-edge of hope between the despairs of frost and the terrors of drought.” Older Alberta literary anthologies support this orientation. [...] His Alberta was characterized by “the vastness of its territory … the variety of its scenery from prairie to foothill to mountain and lake and muskeg and forest.” Even when Hardy looked to Alberta’s future, with “a polyglot of peoples” fl ourishing in a “Land of Opportunity,” his rural landscape continued to dominate, “from the rolling prairies of the south to the permafrost of the Precambrian Shi [...] In Th e Prairie Experience (1975), Terry Angus grudgingly admits that a “characteristic motif of prairie writing is the rural-to-urban shift , the leaving of the land for the city” with that literature oft en contrasting the “mores and the moral implications of rural and urban life.” Yet Angus stands fi rmly for the rural: “Th e farmer, however, remains the symbol of the prairies. [...] Without him the west would be the east.” In Glass Canyons: A Collection of Calgary Fiction and Poetry (1985), Ian Adam suggests that the failure of Alberta’s cityscapes to penetrate these early anthologies may be in part due to the transiency of the city versus the permanency of the rural landscape.