No Solid Ground

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

No Solid Ground, Richard Lush’s fifth book of poetry, is divided into
three sequences of poems about travel in Latin America and Europe. The
book’s title picks out a double theme. Huge vistas, wild weather, and
tenuous Andean trails challenge the traveller to make sense of the
landscape he clings to, and the people in it. Then there is the
challenge of re-creating a sense of self, as the disorientation of the
landscape mirrors back, and magnifies in the traveller, a dissolution of
the self.

The first sequence makes powerful poetry, showing Lush to be amongst
Canada’s finest poets. Here, vertiginous poems capture the vastness of
the vertical slopes, where up and down themselves become uncertain, with
the loss of a discernible horizon (“Yalalag”). Acutely focused
imagist perceptions of sunset in a peasant’s yard reveal a self so
sure in its perspective, that it is free of the need for additional
ruminative comment (“At the Pension Real”).

There are also some fine poems in the last two sequences. However, the
sequences are weakened by an increasing number of poems that stumble
over integrating landscape or self in the unity of a poem. In “The
Colours of Chimba Urcu,” the poet is “at home” in a landscape that
lost its sense in the preceding poem. Self and landscape interpenetrate
in a “spiritual landscape” of light on mist. He knows this landscape
“precisely.” But this seems an illusion of knowledge and precision,
if the landscape lacks sense. This is borne out by the poem’s not
developing any concrete experience of what is known precisely. Here
precision is invoked, not created.

Failure of a sense of self is a crucial theme for modern poetry. It
cannot, however, be expressed in poetry as a failure of poetic sense. At
times, Lush seems unable even to ask who he is with any poetic depth. In
“Morning Like a Window,” “if I shave will I know / who I am”
sounds like a parody of a philosopher on self-identity. It is not until
the last poem that a real context is given to the question in a probing
of loss of self in the inability to express love (“From the Hill”).