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Nightwatch: New & Selected Poems 1968 – 1996

by Dennis Lee

It is impossible to calculate the contribution Dennis Lee’s long career as poet, theorist, editor, and children’s writer has made to Canadian literature. One of the epigrams to “Civil Elegies,” the epic lament that opens Nightwatch, states “There is only one word that I know now,/And I do not know its name.” I would venture that the word, for Lee, is Canada, the elusive, illusory home that this sequence, and indeed Nightwatch as a whole, seeks.

“Civil Elegies” sets out to map how our (British) colonial past and (American) colonial present have damaged the national identity: “Many were born in Canada, and living unlived lives they died/of course but died truncated, stunted, never at/Home in native space.” The poet here speaks “not as a/lyric self in a skin but divided, spinning off many selves to attend each mortal yen as it passed me.” “Civil Elegies” proposes not only a new vision of Canada, but a new stance for the poet.

Throughout Nightwatch the poet’s voice alternates between a public and a private positioning; from the civic squares of “Civil Elegies” to the bedrooms of “Riffs.” “People, people I speak from/private space but all these/civil words keep coming and they/muddle me” (“The Death of Harold Ladoo”). Along with Lee’s public concerns comes an almost breathtaking lack of artifice, a shockingly honest emotional directness.

Though it is the product of almost 30 years of writing, Nightwatch is astonishingly of a piece. Lee’s powers as a poet – and his obsessions – are remarkably consistent, and the circular nature of the book is very satisfying. Lee begins “Civil Elegies” outlining the terrain “that informs our lives and claims us”; he ends the final sequence in the book, “Nightwatch,” with the boy who stood “claimed by the hush of the Shield – the slow dark/blotting the pines, and across the fretted/lake the loons re-echoed, and the excellent chill of infinity/entered my blood to stay as I went on listening, went on/listening.” While the home, the wholeness, that the poet seeks remains, ultimately, inaccessible, he does come to accept the “difficult sanities” of its absence.

What wealth here. So many gifts: Lee’s almost perfect pitch for the musical qualities of language; his genius for the luminous, numinous phrase, for the swift mastery of implied narrative; the meandering sweep of contemplative thought that structures so many of the poems; the sneaky, playful sense of humour that leavens the mostly elegiac mode. How easy for us, too, to go on listening; how lucky we are to have among us one of finest poets writing in the English language.

 

Reviewer: Rhea Tregebov

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $15.99

Page Count: 208 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-7710-5215-4

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 1996-7

Categories: Poetry