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Coureurs & Cassocks: Early Narratives
Don Gutteridge
Coming soon
The intense and poignant collection from Gutteridge, which he wrote as a 23-year-old apprentice) examines human courage, resilience, spirit of adventure and exploration through poems that cover the lives and deaths of the early French-Canadian explorers, Jesuit missionaries, and fur-traders. The book begins with Champlain, whose voice tends to speak clear and true, with the despair, the hopelessness, the grief, and the resignation all finding their expression in his ponderings as he lay dying recalling Per Christam Dominum nostrum: “Hands stretched . . . cold as words . . . shreds of shadow/ And one did not leave his name on a country’s/ Lakes rivers rocks, nor the soul’s ink on its face,/ And he knew through the silent eye of his dying/ That each man must make this end his new beginning.” This is followed by another long poem sequence that explores both the difficult exploits and the last moments of LaSalle (better known as Robert de La Salle, a French explorer who sailed the length of the Mississippi River and claimed the lands around it for France, thus creating the territory of Louisiana). The next one takes on the early fur traders (coureurs des bois), finally moving on to Jean de Brébeuf, and emphasizing his gruesome death. The last part of the narrative—“Well, it was over now,/ For Brébeuf. He died as he had lived: with the quiet/ Strength of a strong lithe river, knowing/ The sea waits for the faithful.” —beautifully accentuates the latter’s sense of resignation as “the warm vesture of death clothed his agony.” Gutteridge writes with clear passion, demonstrating both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the conventional and the allegorical significance of life-events.
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