Widely acknowledged to be Prince Edward Island's greatest poet,
Milton Acorn was born in Charlottetown in 1923 and died there in 1986.
He was a significant contributor to the Canadian literary scene of the
1950s, 60s and 70s, friends with such literary notables as Al Purdy,
Eli Mandel, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton and Patrick Lane. The original
"People's Poet," Acorn received a medal and cash prize from his peers
at Toronto's Grossman's Tavern in 1970 when his selected poems, I've Tasted My Blood, failed to win the Governor General's Award. He went on to receive Canada's highest literary honour for The Island Means Minago, published in 1975. Acorn was the author of ten books of poetry, and, with Cedric Smith, he co-authored the play, The Road to Charlottetown.
Although he lived in various Canadian cities during his lifetime,
Acorn's finely tuned homing instincts always brought him back to "The
Island."
Since I'm Island-born
home's as precise
as if a mumbly old carpenter,
shoulder-straps crossed wrong,
laid it out,
refigured to the last three-eighths of shingle.
Nowhere . . . is there a spot
not measured by hands;
no direction I couldn't walk
to the wave-lined edge of home.
—From "The Island"
Now Anne Compton, another Island poet, brings us The Edge of Home: Milton Acorn from The Island, a collection of Acorn's poems written about, or rooted in, his home province of Prince Edward Island. Selected from his books published between 1956 and 1983, the 62 poems range in topic from nature and landscape to Island people and politics. In her Preface, she writes,
Although he moved away in 1951, Acorn never "left" the Island, and he returned permanently in 1981 to live out his last years on the "wave-lined edge of home" and to contemplate anew the sea, the wind, and the horizon that appear in so much of his work . . . . Like the character "Callum," in the poem of that title, Acorn was "from the Island," a fact he pronounced proudly, and although he lived most of his adult years "away," he carried the Island landscape with him, within him, carried it "from the Island."
Her critical essay entitled "The Ecological Poetics of Milton Acorn" takes this idea further, showing how Acorn's "Island" infuses many of his finest poems.
Even when he was a continent away from the Island... even when politics capsized the poetry... he was never away. He carried within him the slap of sea on shore: "My lifepulse moves in waves to hit rocks, / Ebb back, replenish, come back for more shocks" (Jackpine Sonnets).
Dr. Anne Compton, an award-winning writer, literary critic and lecturer in English Literature at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John campus, is the author of A. J. M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical (ECW Press, 1994) two collections of poems, Opening the Island (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2002) and Processional (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2005), which won the Governor General's Award for Poetry.
What the poets have said about Milton Acorn
"Now when I read Milton Acorn's poems and come across lines like
"I've tasted my blood too much / to love what I was born to" or his
marvellous jeu d'esprit, "The Natural History of Elephants" ... they
take on deeper meanings for me, for I know they're intrinsically his,
as much as the gravelly rasp, the cheeks' expressive gouges and the
cauldrons of love he has for fellow beings stubbornly battling for
freedom and dignity against those who would keep these from them."
—Irving Layton, "Reminiscence by Irving Layton"
"You could go for years without seeing him, yet he'd always be there
somehow, a great craggy presence at the back of your mind, a gnarled
tree in silhouette on the horizon."
—Gwendolyn MacEwen, "To Milton"
"Acorn is an affirmative voice, a gentleness masked in ferocity, the
best of our traditional wisdom expressed in forceful up-to-date
diction."
—Fred Cogswell, "Three Arc-Light Gaps"
"His politics are as much a poet's communism as Shelley's were. He's
a romantic radical, looking to awaken or "find outside the beauty
inside me." He has the romantic sense of man's perfectibility.... But
he doesn't romanticize the poor in the way the bored bourgeoisie do. To
be honest about the world (Acorn's intention and his strength) you have
to include yourself in it."
—George Bowering, "Acorn Blood"
"Certainly, more than a decade after his death, Milton Acorn--as
both People's Poet and Governor General's winner the only Islander to
achieve significant national recognition for poetry—prevails as the
very symbol of poetic expression on PEI...."
—Thomas O'Grady, "Advice from Milton Acorn"
"And Milton was also that shabby and shambling figure I noticed
crossing an auditorium floor years ago, passing other people, but
perfectly remote from them, a planet unto himself...."
—Al Purdy, "In Love and Anger"
"He carried his love like a handful of berries, / the deep stain, the delicate strength / he wanted love to be. Even in sorrow."
—Richard Lemm, " Milton Acorn"
TRADE PAPERBACK • 124 pp. • ISBN 0-919013-35-X • $15.95
Institute of Island Studies