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Come Rain, Come Shine: The Last Poems of Raymond Souster

by Raymond Souster

Raymond Souster’s earliest published poems appeared in various Toronto newspapers when he was a teenager, and his first solo book came out in 1946. He won the Governor General’s Award for poetry and drama (as it was then denominated) exactly 50 years ago for a collection called The Colour of the Times – a book that, unusually for Canadian poetry, went through five printings.

come-rain-come-shineSouster, who died in 2012, wrote prodigiously, right up to the end of his life, by which point he was blind; he continued to produce poems with the assistance of an amanuensis. Come Rain, Come Shine (a characteristic Souster title) collects his final poems, the very last one composed less than two weeks before his death.

In a poem entitled “Barbershop,” an unidentified man who is pretty clearly the poet is called “an ancient frog,” but if the poet in this book occasionally wheezes, he also sings a great deal. As usual for a poet who wrote Williamsesque occasional verse for over 75 years, Souster’s observant (and sometimes trenchant) eye is on the local and the quotidian: the trickle of water in a spring, for example.

Unsurprisingly, many poems in the book treat mortality in various guises, from a piece about the Styx (frozen over in winter) to allusions to the afterlife (paradise is a road that “leads from your house to mine”). There are also funny poems (the three-line “Apple” runs: “She was the apple / of his eye, / then she went bananas”) and throwaways with bite (“Big Deal,” a two-liner, memorializes Souster’s lifelong love for jazz: “He finally rode / Strayhorn’s ‘A’ train.”).

With the establishment in 1952 of Contact Press, Souster (along with fellow writers Irving Layton and Louis Dudek) gave Canadian poetry a huge boost at a time when poets had difficulty getting their work into print. The press lasted until 1967, and published first and early books by many of the figures who would define the 1960s and ’70s, including Atwood, Purdy, and Bowering. It was Souster’s wish that his last book come out under the Contact imprint, which has been revived for the posthumous publication of Come Rain, Come Shine.

 

Reviewer: Bruce Whiteman

Publisher: Contact Press

DETAILS

Price: $30

Page Count: 308 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 978-0-99382-100-4

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: January 2015

Categories: Poetry

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