LIGHT, FLAME AND MEMORY: PRIOR’S POEMS ILLUMINATE
Burning Province: Poems Michael Prior | Mcclelland & Stewart $19.95, 63pp
“Write what you know,” that anodyne academic slogan, is good advice for the aspiring author, but it fails to go far enough. The challenge for a creative writer is to alloy experience and observational detail with dreams, imagination and well-chosen images to create something far stranger and more powerful than simple reportage.
Michael Prior’s second book of poems, the newly released Burning Province, provides ample evidence that the poet understands this challenge.
The poems in this collection draw on the history of his family and of this — literally and metaphorically — burning province, the searing experience of Second World War internment suffered by his Japanese grandparents, the flames of desire and the ashes of loss.
The poems’ accounts of nature and memory are illuminated by repeated images of light and colour. From this material Prior crafts lovely, elegant verse.
Poets, of course, are in dialogue with both the world, with memory, and with other writers, and Prior is no exception. His polished lines reflect his wide reading, and allude to Katherine Anne Porter, James Merrill, Annie Dillard, Kenko, Virgil, Robert Lowell, Joan Didion and James Schuyler, to name a few. None of this seems pedantic, pointless or ostentatious.
Far from suffering from Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” Prior cheerfully incorporates and celebrates the work of others and the way their work feeds his own. He does note, however, in “The Light From Canada” that “… Some nights I worry/i’ve studied the field guides/ more than the fields,” and frets “Is it true that the first things we read and feel/never leave our vocative?”
But these worries are raised only to be allayed by the maturity and force with which this poet deploys not only what he has read but what he has seen, loved and mourned. This collection moves from strength to strength, evoking the careful folds of origami one moment and the fall of light on water another, and grounding all this beauty in closely observed renderings of B.C. locales like Steveston and Minoru Park.
He can also craft a moody and touching love poem like “The Night,” and then pivot to “In Cloud Country,” a poem of almost metaphysical reach — think John Donne beside the Fraser.
“At this latitude, /the textbooks declare the heart and uncracked/ robin’s egg-the mind a clever mockingbird’s” Prior writes, and this lovely book invites us to travel with him to latitudes only a poet can find.