Ghosts: A Glossary of the Intertext

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

According to the back-cover blurb, Scobie’s latest book (consisting of
59 prose poems arranged in alphabetical order by title) explores the
ghosts of words, the “memories, mirrors, and shadows” of language,
“the traces of allusion and connotation, the echoes of previous
usages, the reflections of traditional associations.” The book does
all that, and more: it jumps across the synapses of life, romps through
juxtapositions and along parallels, chatters with homonyms and
homophones, and plays hide-and-seek with possibilities, probabilities,
and echoes from the past that echo still, through time, to this time,
causing us to reflect as they themselves reflect and refract. These
pieces are terse, poignant observations (most of them barely half a
page, or less), showing a mind that is highly innovative and
imaginative, yet also carefully trained and disciplined, and finely
attuned to the sounds of words, to the many layers of meanings in
language, to the echoes of time.

The topics of the 59 reflections range from “A - Z” to
“Writing,” from “Berlin” to “Calgary” to “Paris”, from
“Derrida, Jacques” to “Livingstone, David” (“looking for a
living stone”) to “Pound, Ezra” (echoed in Scobie’s poem
“Metro,” with “the apparition of these faces in the crowd”) to
“Stein, Gertrude” (another kind of stone) to “Wordsworth,
William” (“the ghost that will haunt Canadian poetry”). Ghosts are
found all through the collection; words that conjure up others, conjure
up images and memories, lead from one thing to another to another,
generate echoes of their own across the lines, across the poems, and
across the pages of the book. From the obvious to the deeply
subconscious, from the personal to the universal, from the historical to
the mythological and mystical, the echoes of the “ghosts”
reverberate through the poet’s time to gather, one presumes, on the
empty page of the focal poem, “Ghosts.” Or, perhaps, in the final
line of “Cats”: “Its dreams are poems in the grace of night.”