A recent series of television ads promoting B.C. tourism urged viewers to discover “Super. Natural.” Anyone wondering what the advertisers meant could do worse than turn to B.C. poet Paddy McCallum. The four sectionsof his new book Parable Beach, are unified by an updated, West Coast version of what the English Romantics called “natural supernaturalism.”

In a beach landscape or at a river mouth, McCallum discovers the sublime and the uncanny, both in the forms of nature and the human response to them. The speakers of his poems sometimes literally disappear into the shorescape. In “Floats,” for example, the speaker contemplates those “crudely coloured glass/balls wrapped in bits of twine” until he himself becomes a “single/blue eye … wrapped in bits of hair.” In “Badger,” the speaker identifies with the tricksterish animal to the very point of personal transformation.

McCallum does more, however, than listen until he hears the voices in shorescapes, animals, or carved gargoyles (in much the way Rilke famously heard the voice within an ancient bust of Apollo). He also turns to the journals of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, to Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, and to George Jehoshaphat Mountain’s 1846 Songs of the Wilderness. His interpretations of these historical voices enact passionate, complex collisions between the languages of Bible and Empire, of human desire, and “soil and weather.”

McCallum’s excavations and identifications, along with his restrained and traditional poetic forms, recall Seamus Heaney. Neither flamboyant nor a breathtaking phrase-maker, McCallum nevertheless achieves a sometimes gothic sense of darkness, and an impressive poetic concentration.