|
SANCTUARY
Ken Cathers
Reviewed by Ian Dempsey.
Volume 20 Number 2
If you have senior students looking for poetry by region for their independent study assignments, Sanctuary can be labelled and shelved with British Columbia poetry. The author spent long enough in the east to obtain an M.A. from York University and then returned to British Columbia and went to work in a pulp mill, where he is working still. There are thirty-one poems. Many are one page long, some longer - up to eight pages in length. Most cover the same territory gone over by other poets: personal experience within a particular landscape - the inner and outer weather of a life. We arc taken on a tour of the B.C. wilderness - sea, mist, heron, gull, seal, wind, sky, whale, sea. This is a tour of the primitive, natural world, and we tourists arc entranced. But all the time that we are gazing on the natural, neutral wonders, we are getting entangled in the wilderness that grows out of the poet's mind - an internal tangle that shares primitiveness with the external world. The sea that holds whales and seals and feeds hawks is also the place his father dropped him as a child and said "now swim ya bugger" and I did, says the poet, trusting him always
When the poet leaves the track of the familiar landscape and wanders into a cerebral wilderness, as he does in the title poem "Sanctuary," we all get lost a little. Where we stay rooted in known territory, as we do in the long poem "Coal," we can allow ourselves to experience the chill of the unknown and the illumination of knowing, even in the black pit with the mummified miners. These are mainly accessible poems that should encourage students to read on and try writing themselves. Ian Dempsey, Cambridge, Ont. |
1971-1979 | 1980-1985 | 1986-1990 | 1991-1995
The materials in this archive are copyright © The Manitoba Library Association. Reproduction for personal use is permitted only if this copyright notice is maintained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copyright information for reviewers
Digital Collections / Collections Numérisees