Sailing Home is British Columbia poet Gary Geddes’s voyage into the past, his “male menopause” (as his daughter calls it), and his exploration of history both personal and far-reaching. Accompanied by the ghosts of Charles Darwin, Francis Drake, and his deceased parents and grandfather (who disappeared in English Bay), Geddes set out aboard the Groasis, a 31-foot sailing sloop, with the dual purpose of exploring his own life and the history of the B.C. coast, and of writing a book about the results.

It is the specific intent of writing about his explorations that creates a minor problem in this otherwise impressive work. While it is an interesting gambit to have questions of authorial intent in the forefront, there is a sense throughout that Geddes is self-consciously filtering information, experiences, and decisions with at least partial concern for how they will be read later. It is fascinating to watch the authorial mind at work, but Geddes runs the risk of interfering with the immediacy of his narrative.

From his childhood in fishing camps to his youth working the boat rental in Whytecliffe Park in West Vancouver to his first teaching experiences on Texada Island, Geddes outlines a range of experiences that will create considerable envy in the reader. His experiences, however, almost pale alongside others he encounters over the course of his journey, and against the natural and human history that he recounts.

This wealth of material is handled with a casual dexterity, an ease that can only come as a result of years of work and experience. Geddes’s prose is magnificent, building from a basis in the pedestrian – memory or biology or history – to a rhapsody of ideas and images that vividly evokes the richness of the West Coast. Geddes may not be much of a sailor, but he is a masterful writer.