Night Flying

Bob Lincoln is Head of the Acquisitions Department at the University of
Manitoba Libraries.

Night Flying, Nash’s third book of poetry, is firmly rooted in family
life and the natural landscape. Nash takes a detached, philosophical
view and writes with clear and direct images. He is a commentator on
events, deliberately seeking an answer to his life through poetry. He
chases ideas like an angler, spinning a line below the surface. Some
poems in the section “Trial by Ravens” are more narrative than
compressed, and he takes chances with the one titled “The World’s
Last Poem”—which is clever but lightweight—because Nash does not
really believe that poetry is just symbols on paper. Poetry is a device
to communicate.

The poem “Deep-water fugue” is an elaborate metaphor that invites
the reader to make an exotic connection: a church service and all those
assembled are like sea creatures in their natural habitat, with the hymn
moving like a whale through the water. Nash often imbues inanimate
objects, like windows, with emotions. These are unusual, startling
conceits, as in “To my wife of twenty years” or “The new bank
building.” Nash delights in reversing ordinary description; he writes,
“My name still frequently / forgets me when it sees you looking, and
floats away” or “records often listen to the lives that play
them.”

At times the poems slip and seem to examine not life, but rather
language itself, and they lose their intimacy and surprise. The poem
“A Dream” is a poor evocation of a Cairo beggar, and seems to
examine only the guilt of a transient visitor. The rest are good poems
that force the reader to readjust, and focus on the heart and mind.