June 1, 2021

  

Every Morning for the past couple of months I have been starting the day by reading one poem a day from the new collection “While Crossing the Field” by Deborah Banks (published Pottersfield Press 2020). I have decided that this is the way I love to savour poetry, one each day with time between  to savour the images and ideas.  It’s been a long while since I have been really been inspired by poetry.  This collection is marvellous with just the  perfect amount of description and always leaving me with a thought-provoking resolution.

 

As a young child, I delighted to my Grandfather reciting Robert’s Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee”.  One of the highlights of my trip to the Yukon with Jim was going to Lake Lebarge.

 

 In high school, I was besotted with Dylan Thomas, reciting “Under Milk Wood” (“never should have married- if she didn’t have to”) and  I loved Thomas’s “Altar-wise by Owl-light”. Every Christas when my children were little, I read them “A Child’s  Christmas in Wales”.

 

In University, I delighted in the quirky writing of  Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”.  

 

Now for many years, I have let poetry disappear from my life.  I myself write word pictures, my attempt to capture beauty with words instead of paint.  I occasionally write rhyming verse to celebrate an occasion.  But I haven’t given other poet’s my full appreciation as I raced from one passage to another, not lingering to absorb the resonance.  With Deborah Banks collection, I am again excited about poetry.  It is like a huge gift to anticipate discovering the entire genre of poetry in small daily bits.  Of course, I will never get through very much poetry with only one or two selections a day, but I also know that I won’t run out of this pleasure in my lifetime.  So all of my other friends who are poets (Rosalee Peppard,  Sheree Fitch, Harry Thurston, Lesley Choyce, Rita Wilson) are next on my list!!!  And although I am a trying hard to help my friend Laurie, make the the Elizabeth Bishop House sustainable, I haven’t given Bishop’s  poetry close attention.  She’s on my list too.

 

 

Loons in April By Deborah Banks (shared with permission)

 

At last the loons have returned to the land.

Quietly coupled, they drift on a soft wake.

I have missed their hollowed winnowing

and the weighted aftereffects of it,

how my life in those moments is enlarged

and diminished simultaneously.

The riddling universe is asking us

to consider this sharp duality.

Both moments are the other and neither.

the loss in the loon’s call and what is found

in the residue of the silence after,

the deep wrinkles growing in my skin

and the fact that it does not matter-

only the lake echoes now and always.