So Far

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

For Wah, who won the 1986 Governor General’s Literary Award for
poetry, the task of poetry is to “protect” us from overtravelled
paths of imagination and thought (“What Prevails”). Somewhat like a
dream or half-waking state, a poem can draw language together in
“freer” ways. Then poetry can shape new sense in our lives, new
“assizes” or judgments on them (“April or maybe March”).

In dissolving familiar syntax, Wah’s poetry seeks to dissolve our
familiar sense of self. It can record deeper, “heart-logged”
impulses, where workaday rationality fails (“April or maybe March”).
Often, Wah’s deepened sense of self centres on the realization of the
smallness and brevity of his life in the face of the Rockies’ vast
nonhuman landscapes, ruled by geologic time, where our minds inevitably
flail idly, unable to make a measure of the whole. His poetry’s sense
of the vastness of the landscapes grows in proportion to his withdrawal
of human claims on them (“Limestone Lakes Utaniki”). There is a
kinship, here, between Wah’s verse and the Buddhist discipline in the
poetry of Gary Snyder.

Wah’s work places high demands on the reader, who must co-create
sense with him in the poems. As Wah charges us, the picture a poem makes
is something “you decide” (“Accidents of Colour 2”). We are
explicitly invited to become accomplices in the creation of meaning:
“do you know what I mean” (“April or maybe March”).

However, a co-creative balance between poet and audience can be lost,
with certain poems seesawing steeply against the reader. In parts,
“Limestone Lakes Utaniki” reads like fragments in a private hiking
journal—fascinating, but threatening indecipherability as they stand.
Wah says revealingly, at one point, “I talk to myself . . . I talk
more to myself than to others.” But since he says this in a published
poem, he is talking to others, or at least intending us to overhear and
understand. There is a difficult balance to keep between the
often-intense solitude of writing in the mountains and the essentially
public nature of poetic sense. In this respect, you are never alone if
you’re creating poetic sense.