West into Night

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

Sorestad’s eighth collection of poems probes the transforming power of
memory, in later life. Remembering can transport childhood to us, not
just us to childhood, refreshing and sustaining the present. It can draw
together a remarkable new perspective, as adult and earlier self
reintegrate lovingly in the closing circle of life.

A number of strong poems speak in a voice that is quiet with simple
sincerity. This is simplicity won by a complex command of how to speak
the most fully from an uncluttered tongue.

The nature and effect of memory is explored in a variety of dimensions.
Remembering childhood is no withdrawal from life, but as much a part of
the vigorous cycle of life as courtship rituals and nesting habits in
birds. Such remembering is built into our natures like the essential
urgings of a homing instinct (“What Brings Us Back”).

For Sorestad, as for Klein, poetry should break the restrictive
Wordsworthian requirement of remembering in tranquillity. He suffers the
anguish of guilt, in recalling his “self-righteous ignorance” in
opposing the wish to die of someone on their last legs (“Good
Night”).

At a profounder level still, Sorestad shows, like Thomas Hardy writing
for his dead wife, how the poetry of remembering can create a close and
deep love for another that the bustle of life had denied (“Two Fish,
One Morning”).

At their best, Sorestad’s poems capture memories in their concrete
individuality, language creating the freshness of discovery. On
occasion, however, sprinklings of overly familiar images stop discovery:
“birdsong cascade,” “grim peaks,” “faded wash” (“Early
Morning, Redstreak Mountain”). Sometimes, a poem fails to create a
sense of who was remembered, or even of what occasioned the remembering
(“Moon Thoughts”). One memory, or poem, will become like another, at
this level, losing individuality.

Sorestad is not well served here by his image of memory as being like a
well (“The Well”). In several respects, this image helps poetic
thought. Memory can refresh and sustain us, and it yields what has been
long conserved. But the analogy fails in one respect; and,
unfortunately, Sorestad pushes the analogy in this direction. One
mouthful of chilly water from the well will taste much like another.
Sorestad speaks of spilling memories to his taste. But then memories,
and poems about them, will be barely distinguishable.