A Season in Lowertown

This fine book of poetry by David Blaikie - A Season in Lowertown - is a young man's odyssey through the bars, hotels, and creaking beds of Lowertown in the 1970s - one of the oldest districts in Canada's national capital. David Blaikie fled a marriage he got into too young and spent a memorable but introspective year in the "unpretty and undomestic" bars, hotels, and creaking beds of Lowertown in the 1970s - one of the oldest districts of Canada's national capital, not far from Parliament Hill and the landmark Chateau Laurier Hotel. The neighbourhood still had the feel of early Canada, memories of loggers who had danced and drowned on log booms, of nuns and prime ministers who had prowled its streets, and the ghost of Colonel John By, the sadistic genius who built the entire Rideau Canal in six short years at a cost of a thousand dead labourers.

It was just before the developers came "with their aftershave and blueprints / and remade it in the image of the board of trade" into the Byward Market of today. Blaikie lived in a back street room, spent "long afternoons" at the Chez Lucien Hotel, a since-razed landmark with "more stories than god could tell," and ate at all-night diners "with women out to make a buck / and men with wallets on a chain." He also saw the last of Le Hibou, the famous Ottawa coffee house that in its day featured everyone from Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton to Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell, plus an array of local artists like William Hawkins, a man "who stapled poetry to light poles / and drove a Blue Line cab."

This award-winning collection of poems also recalls the nightlife of Hull (now Gatineau), across the Ottawa River, where Blaikie got "busted one night / by the drug squad there" and was carted off to "the dark Hull jail / somewhere up Saint-Franois" - and spent "a sleepless night there / plotting nave revenge." He also frequented the raucous main drag of Vanier to the east, which pulsed with strip clubs, hotels, and motorcycle gangs, or when all else had closed for the night, an illegal blind pig up Bradley Street "where noiseless shadows fell / and moonlight wept / on dented cars." Through it all he threads the poignant demise of his marriage to a young school teacher and her departure to the West Coast of Canada, as well as his enduring friendship with "a radio man" named Alan who likewise had "a woman back there / in his rearview life" and was looking in bottles and books to find himself.