Allan Briesmaster’s new volume yields the rich gifts of his long, involved bond with poetry. Behind his careful work pulses an instinct, both genuine and inevitable of a writer who sees poems everywhere, all the time.
There is a Gerard Manley Hopkins feel to many early pieces, an ecstasy in nature and a meditative music that turns on pure energy. With unwavering concentration, Briesmaster wanders through the natural world to rediscover the human. A late Romantic in love with rural Ontario, he packs these poems with the precision of a sensual cartographer, carefully charting the “reptilian repose” of “Reedy River” with its “flat sidewise architecture” through memory and depth to “the blue empty surface and breadth// of dry heaven.” Easily connecting systems and realities, Briesmaster feels a change of season in November buds as “Light weight, on emptiness// of the invisible keystone in earth’s arch” (“Curved Light”).