In 1995, prolific Brantford poet John B. Lee won the CBC Tilden Award for “Kicheraboo, We Are Dying,” an ethnographically valuable series of poems about slavery and the history of blacks in Upper Canada. The sequence has now been collected, along with four other alternative poetic histories, in Lee’s new book, Tongues of the Children: The Upper Canada Chronicles.

The subject matter of “Kicheraboo” is undeniably fascinating. But even with a prefatory poem called “Appropriated Voice,” in which the white poet presumes to pre-emptively argue that he “will not be/bruised into silence,” the sequence is unsettling. Here Lee writes like someone brutalized by the slave-owner’s whip, too often pushing the acceptable limits of empathy, historical reconstruction, and engaging verse. The easy rhetoric of “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Master” for example, with condescending linguistic misappropriations like “He may have…/Suckled his babes at mammy’s breasts,” or the unattributed quotation of black demotic like “‘Is us slaves gonna be free in heaven?’,” at times make for poetry more embarrassingly self-righteous and politically uncritical than offensive or incorrect. Still, despite these shortcomings, the “Kicheraboo” poems are representative of the book’s technical strengths.

Each section follows the same successful formula, presenting a slice of Upper Canadiana in a suite of narrative lyrics about “real,” and often obscurely romantic, Canadians. Meticulous research and an understanding of the untold stories that compose our history make Lee an enormously engaging chronicler.

Beginning with simple and allusive prose poems, Tongues of the Children grounds us in a language of the past. Eventually, broad descriptive gestures are distilled into a clipped and disembodied presentation of traditionally silenced voices. Lee’s is a poetry of harsh reality and a fair-mindedness that sometimes borders on equivocation; one that’s both beautiful and ashamed of its beauty, with rhythms that approach narrative goals cautiously. The incremental progress of “Cholera,” a poem documenting part of the experience of Irish Canadian immigrants, serves as just one example of his technique: “They lie in a bliss of sickness/suffering the long hallucination/of quarantine/on green Grosse Isle/where lost to the beauty of death/they learn to warm the grave….”