A Fierce and Tumultuous Joy by David Adams Richards

If a Canadian school child is asked to name five favourite superheroes, most will not hesitate— names will spill quickly off their small tongues. Ask them to name five superheroes of Canadian literature, however, and the response is likely to be a wrinkled brow. We do have those superheroes among us, however. David Adams Richards is certainly one.

In 2011, when he was awarded the Matt Cohen prize for a lifetime of achievement in Canadian Literature, the Writer’s Trust said: “Whether we call him our Tolstoy, Camus, Melville, or Blake, we are delighted to call this year’s winner of the Matt Cohen Award simply our David Adams Richards.” He has won Governor General’s Awards in both the fiction and nonfiction categories, is a member of the Order of Canada and has been a nominee or recipient of so many other awards he has most likely lost count. In 2017, he was appointed to the Canadian Senate. In addition to the books of fiction and non-fiction, the essays and screenplays for which he is best known, Richards also writes poetry.

A Fierce and Tumultuous Joy is a slim volume collecting poems written over the course of a dedicated writing career that has spanned more than half a century. The poems bear a recognizable signature. From a frequently wintry Miramichi landscape, they illuminate the lives of unlikely, otherwise unsung heroes: veterans soothing their PTSD with cheap wine in a park; a woman struggling to raise her children on her own who is murdered over a $200 bingo win; a teenaged runaway, homeless and alone.

“The night was as cold as a shiv in blind weather…
She looked at me in hope for a little kindness
All the joy that I wanted for her and so remembered—
Gone, forgotten, or in such a world, squandered.”  (A Night Years Ago)

Richard’s skill and capacity as a writer and a poet is evident here. He is able to weave compelling and seemingly complete stories through the constraints of brevity and white space on the page that poetry demands. As in his novels, the circumstances of his characters’ lives evoke in me, a sense of empathy and commonality with people whose stories are very different from my own. I too have had times when I was fallen far enough that it was necessary to

…”believe in angels”. Although I am not a man, I can identify with the poet whose judging neighbour “Never understood that good men can be a disaster….”  (Teaching Children)

Throughout the volume, there are scattered poems of memoir and autobiography, some dedicated to Richards’ wife Peggy, and some to his two sons:

“….I remember my love when she was young
Before winter made us wise” . (Peg at Seventeen)

“My son John has the sand of the world
In his dark brown hair….”  (Love)

Equally intimate and beloved, the Miramichi landscapes that are in certain ways the soul of his work also appear in various ways in the poems:

“The light of this winter shines
like poverty on the river”  (Linda’s Place, 1965)

“And when I land it, I lay it down
In my old fish basket on the mud-red ground
I have a long quiet smoke and a cup of tea
And feel the evening sprawling over me
Then with the last pink twilight I walk back….”  (Fishing the Bartibog)

The richness and historical breadth of Richard’s literary life comes through in poems about other poets and writers—

“And in the blinding, blinded snow, see
Lowry, Nowlan, Buckler, Lane and Layton.
You’d think, Milton, like you,
They’d all have been treated
Somewhat 
Better.” (Old Poets Are Dogs
                      For Milton Acorn).

What comes through in the poems, as in the rest of D.A. Richard’s work, is the depth of his passionate love for humanity— despite and perhaps because of our species’ tragic propensity for violence and harm. What also comes clearly through his courage and determination, is his commitment to telling his own stories in his own way. My Wish for You, written about his wife Peggy, offers something to us all:

“I wish for you after I am gone
An immaculate ending
A fierce,
A fierce and tumultuous joy.”

Why this man is not an instantly identified superhero for children and adults everywhere in Canada is an excellent question. The half-century recorded in this book offers a complex and fascinating picture of one writer’s life, his commitment to the life of a writer, his personal struggles with alcohol and the challenges, both personally and professionally, of choosing to stand a little apart and to speak of difficult matters in a plain and frank way. A Fierce and Tumultuous Joy is an excellent companion to David Adams Richards’ autobiography, Notes on a Writer’s Life.

David Adams Richards is a novelist, short fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, poet, playwright, and screenwriter, known for his fictionalized accounts of life in his native region of Miramichi, New Brunswick. He is one of only three writers to have won the Governor General’s Award in both the fiction and nonfiction categories. In his acclaimed career, he has also won the Giller Prize and two Gemini Awards and is a Member of the Order of New Brunswick and the Order of Canada. He was appointed to the Senate in 2017.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pottersfield Press (Aug. 15 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 126 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989725953
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989725955

Susan Wismer

Susan Wismer (she/her) is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog.She is a poet whose recent workhas been published in These Small Hours(ed. Lorna Crozier) a Wintergreen Press chapbook,Pinhole Poetry,Orbis International Literary Journal,Poetry Plans(Bell Press),Qwerty,Prairie Fir,,and inPoets in Response to Peril (eds. Penn Kemp,RichardSitoski). www.susanwismer.com.