Narrative Transparencies & Other Melodies canlit.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from canlit.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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”).