Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation

Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation, is not a pretty picture book meant to entice those from “away” to spend their tourist dollars on the “Rock”. Rather, Greg Locke’s collection is that of a professional photographer who has travelled the world as a photo-journalist and is now turning the camera on himself—so to speak. Where most would frame the picture to focus on the picturesque and avoid the eyesores; this book makes them front and centre. The last crumbling shack in an Outport depopulated by the policies of Joey Smallwood; children playing in the loft of a stage-euphemistically called a day-care; fisherman struggling to rescue their nets from a berg. The text which accompanies these pictures by Michael Crummey mirrors in words the pictures they describe. I might have preferred that they be incorporated more fully into the body of the work rather than appear as a lump at the beginning but together words and text present a lament for a way of life that is gone and will never return. It may have been hard-scrabble but it had dignity that was passed from generation to generation. These two are among the generation that were forced to leave the “Rock” to make a living and managed to make their way home again. Something about an island home stays in one’s soul even if one lives out one’s life “away”. This book attempts to illustrate the point and tug at the heart strings of all their fellow Newfies. It’s a sad world in which it’s illegal to row out and jig for your supper. There are no Newfie Jokes here.

E. J. Pratt

Edwin John Pratt was born in 1882 in a Newfoundland Outport to a Methodist Minister Father and as many a lad has done followed in his Father’s footsteps though he never served in a parish, choosing instead to become a teacher of Psychology and English Literature at U of T’s Victoria College.  He taught there until 11 years before his death in 1964.  Until I embarked upon reading his selected poems I knew of him only as a Canadian Poet added to an Anthology taught in my High School Curriculum.  I have a copy of that text which I studied forty years ago just 2 years after the author’s death.   The poem in question was Dunkirk—a fitting subject for a Canadian given the number of Canadian boys killed, injured and captured in that debacle.

 

It is interesting to note that although Pratt lived well into the second half of the Twentieth Century, his poetic style is rooted in the Nineteenth.  And, although he studied theology his personal philosophy tended toward agnosticism in his latter days.  His poetry, though lyrical, leans toward historical and technical matters—he wasn’t a writer of love poems.