Precariousness of life examined
Moose Jaw poet Robert Currie brings a collection of his poems to us again, and in gratitude we devour his very humane take on life, such a precarious thing in such a fearful, troubled, beautiful world.
Currie’s title — The Days Run Away — is about a man approaching 80 who sees the days running before him like the fast horses on the book’s cover. And out of that niggling uneasiness that each day feels as if it’s shorter than the last, he takes us in the first sections of the book to memories of a young boy’s apprehension of the world, one coloured by fear. Here are poems of young love that turns painfully awkward, of a boy’s window onto love and marriage being that of his parents fighting, and the lovely and painful prose poem That Saturday, about a boy who finally asks a girl out on a date only to be foiled by his own inattention.
In He Learns There Is Much to Fear, Currie remembers a failed attempt to hear the poet Alden Nowlan in Regina as he names some of Nowlan’s famous poems, many of which are about the worst kinds of fear; being mistaken for the condemned man at a hanging, for instance. As if to justify this fear, Currie asks in Last Week Someone at Work Called Him the Old Guy, “Is it foolish to envy a bird,” recalling similar feelings in previous poems where the persona has wished to fly up and away from the unpleasant world below. This poem about an old guy ends with one of Currie’s most poignant lines: “before anyone/ knows, he’ll be gone, his mark on the world/ a fingerprint smeared on a glass in the sink/ where already someone is running hot water.”
No, as Currie makes very clear in Bulletproof, “never again will I feel/ quite as safe as I felt till now,” but there’s still lots of room for joy. There’s bailing some drunken friends out of trouble in After the Party, the father’s Lincoln, “a bone caught in the throat of the night,” hung up on a power pole’s guy wire, or hopping into a Corvette and “leaving/ the speed limit far behind,” as he heads home in Long Weekend Coming. These feelings of love and laughter rise to a crescendo of gratitude and contentment in Say, Did I Ever Tell You, with its last line, “Was it a bit like living in Eden? It must’ve been,” in Sometimes I Know Why We’re Here, and in Out of the City. Then the tide of life turns again.
The collection’s last section is about the death of Currie’s good friend and friend to the Saskatchewan writing community, Gary Hyland. Here, Currie chronicles the realization of Hyland’s illness, ALS, and the days as they wind down: “Once he inhaled poetry like oxygen,/ but it’s not enough, no metaphor/ can fill his lungs.” Through all the fear that can assail a life, there is the joy that helps us rise above it, and the love of friends, as Currie shows in these last poems to Hyland, that keep us going through the most frightening of darkest days.
One time Saskatoon resident Mark Abley, who studied at the University of Saskatchewan and at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, returns with a new and selected collection of poems, The Tongues of Earth. And what are the tongues of earth? Well, for one thing, they form the last line in the last poem in this collection, a poem about the increasing loss of languages in a modernizing, homogenized world. Working backwards from there, we see Abley’s keen interest in last bastions of civilizations being driven under by militarily superior powers. Poems such as the multi-part Gloria and Credo (from Asian Mass), Lhasa, 1950, Efenechtyd, Radnorshire, and the clever Goodsoil, entirely composed of Saskatchewan place names, many of them disappearing from the landscape, show how cultures and their languages can wither away, or be destroyed, and what we lose when they are gone.
But there are other tongues of earth, as well. In the lovely Mother and Son, Abley opens, “You are the voice in the kitchen singing,” and closes, “I overhear your love song by the counter/ and my small heart thumps assent.” The poem … Perlis, Chamba, Tannu Tuva … is about a man looking through his childhood stamp album, marvelling again at tiny squares of paper with their strange, in many cases disappeared, place names, relics of colonial pasts, all of them tongues of his own and others’ long gone life.
A Labrador Duck gives voice to a stuffed bird in a museum, looking out at the curious descendants of those who shot all of its kind, muttering, “you’ll never know ... why we had so little/ chance against you — and I’m not telling.” A Wooden Alphabet opens, “My summer project is to learn the script/ these withered twigs spell out against the air,” while the poem Labrador tells of “the earliest-known ceremonial burial in all of North America” near L’ Anse Amour, giving voice, or tongue, to that piece of earth people have passed by for centuries.
While Currie turns to sonnets on occasion in his collection — and good ones they are, too. Never forced or laboured — Abley is the formalist of the pair, employing not only sonnets, but self-imposed structures, as in Into Thin Air, with its upside down pyramids, idiosyncratic rhyme schemes, as in K’tunaxa and the marvellous Expecting, and the variations on each stanza’s first line in Kicking Down Mount Rundle. It is those readers’ delight to realize they are in the thrall of a rhyme scheme they hadn’t noticed at first. Both collections provide readers with delight and emotional and intellectual challenge in equal measure.