Poetry
Two of Canadian poetry's elder statesmen died in 2005, Richard Outram in February and Sheldon Zitner in early spring. Zitner's last poems are reviewed at the end here, though you'll guess how quickly his book came to press after his death (he had sent the finished manuscript out for consideration before entering hospital) when you learn that it includes an elegy to Outram. I like to think that when a poet is alive, the poems are in him (the burning fuel of always more ...), and that when he dies, he enters into the poems, and continues to journey there. These were both great minds, and I think their celebrity (particularly for Outram, whose courting of the muse was a lifelong, all-absorbing affair) is still to come. I want to kick things off then with Outram's 'Epitaph for an Angler,' and wishing what still lives of him in the poems godspeed:
To haunt the silver river and to wait
were second nature to him, his own bait.
Unravelling at last a constant knot,
he cast his line clear, and was promptly caught.
Near the beginning of Barbara's Pellman's One Stone is a small sonnet cycle about building a house, or failing to build a house (if the ending tells aright). The house is not just a house, as it turns out in the book, but a marriage, and the investments one makes in a family and career; knowing that one lived in them but seeing 'Wall still pencilled with measurements, walls / with studs like hungry ribs, the builder packing / his angry tools, before he finished plans / for a hot tub on the wooden deck, trees / and shrubs and deerproof flowers, curving steps – / a blueprint of opulence unchecked.' These are rather good lines – an architecture equal to their subject – though they are not always indicative of the level of word-crafting we get in the book as a whole. And yet I liked this volume quite a lot. While Pellman writes about what it feels like to be heading into one's senior years, she is nonetheless a poet of morning, dawn, the entire volume reading like a kind of wistful aubade with all its questionings and startings-out. Note for instance how quietly and simply she evokes the memory of a former lover, as though the memory itself – in its freedom from what ages – were a kind of dawning: 'He never grew a paunch / lost his hair / became grey or tired – / never turned his back in sleep / or sat in silence at a restaurant. / My Sunday lover, brief blossom, / sitting always in a chair by the window / while London sun throws cool shadows / on the pages of a book / I once read and loved.' I counted three sestinas here, a pantoum that depends I think too much on the independence of [End Page 197] each separate line, and a very attractive glosa that uses Yeats's exhortation to old men as the quatrain. They make a fitting window on the book: 'What else is there to do but sing? / Dance a slow tango, your partner a hooded cloak / who whirls and dips and drops you / even before the last note drifts from the cello – / What else is there to do but dance? / the grind of bone on bone, the rust of hip, the best / is past, and yet body uses groans for drums, / laments for melody; song gathers in the throat / and chants a blessing / for every tatter in its mortal dress.'
I am a great admirer of David Solway's poetry, his sturdy ear and excavating intellect. He has put his talents to work this year in a translation of – or better to call it a collaboration with, as Solway himself does – the Greek poet Nesmine Rifat, entitled The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat. Her 'unpublished divan' of poems, Solway informs us, in an afterword that is as well-written as it is in need of a more...
