Air Canada Owls: Travel Poems

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

The poetry of Eliot’s Prufrock expresses a failure to love. Somewhat
analogously, Sorestad’s collection of travel poems often expresses a
failure to truly travel: a failure to travel with a sense of the wonder
and strangeness of travel. Eliot wrote about the failure to love and
made that into poetry. Sorestad’s challenge in writing poetically
about the failure to travel is deeply paradoxical and, perhaps,
insurmountable. At any rate, it weakens the poems it underlies in this
collection; and the strong poems here have quite other purposes.

In “Flying into Toronto,” Sorestad travels with “jaded
familiarity / . . . this route” that has “dulled my senses”; with
“indifference” as a “blasé traveller.” He recognizes a lack in
himself by contrast with the exclamations of wondering surprise in other
passengers. But he is unable to recapture their sense of imaginative
experience, and can say only, and blandly, that they make him “feel
good inside.” Here the deep paradox is how to write with imaginative
energy about jaded experience. Prufrock speaks from a failure to love,
but is never blasé in that failure.

Relative indifference to the experience of traveling takes different
forms in these poems, and creates different weaknesses in them.
“Oktoberfest in Munich” does little to capture a concrete sense of
this colorful event; the poem moves at a general level of narration and
description. “Llano Estacado” begins to give intensity to New
Mexico’s plains by viewing them from the perspective of
conquistadorial history. But then this sense is opposed by making the
poetic speaker, in this apparently autobiographical poem, “ignorant of
the past.”

The strong poems in this collection celebrate the wonder and
strangeness of travel, not its lack. “The Frankfurt Shadow” speaks
from the eerie disorientation of time-lagged travelers. “Night
Flights” meditates on the unnerving and magical nature of flight in a
poem that can remind one of the poetic excitement with flight in
Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars or Night Flight. And “The
Woman from Montreal” explores the peculiarly confessional quality of
talking with strangers on a plane.