Remains

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

Remains brings together 46 short prose poems by Governor General’s
Award winner Stephen Scobie. Scobie explains in an afterword, that the
title is to be taken as noun and as verb, “as relics, and as that
which actively lives on.” A central concern in the poems is with what
merely survives from the past, or what fate imposes, and with how a
creative response can transform this inert inheritance into a life that
is vital, autonomous, and free.

Scobie’s theme is at the heart of both living and writing vitally.
Scattered through his poems are references to the writers, artists,
singers, and literary theorists whose influences he inherits. But his
poems show him to be unswamped by this complex inheritance; he
transforms it into lean lines of minimal imagery that gracefully and
gratefully allude to the inheritance without sinking the poems by trying
to state it. Here is an object lesson for young writers, who, in our age
of mass communication, are in danger of being overwhelmed rather than
nourished by influences.

There are some striking poems in which Scobie explores dimensions of
being dominated or enriched by fate and the past. A snapshot of Alice B.
Toklas shows her stacking rattling dishes that are about to speak in our
presence. Savannah heat preys on any sense of autonomous self, as does
the tyranny of consumerism and intrusive government. Strength to
struggle on as poet and performer can come from enacting fundamental
historical values rather than one’s immediate needs; though these
values still enigmatically produce both bloodshed and justice. The
poetic imagination can re-pattern life more truly as “home.”

Occasionally, the lean lines come closer to producing anorexia of the
imagination than to conveying terse meaning. Not enough poetic work is
done to give sense to the “Other,” whose shadow in our lives human
creativity can fill with color. Is it childhood fear, carried into adult
metaphysical anxiety, that something is the matter? Is it the challenge
to encompass even death in imaginative thinking? But here, too, Scobie
is closer to renewing than to repeating language.