Anonymity Suite

Peter Roberts is the former Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

McFadden has written a lot of good poetry. Now, in this latest
collection, he has written more good poetry. There is a sense of words,
which is what poetry is about. There is every corner of the
imagination’s world, and many corners of the real world. There is wit,
but there is as well nostalgia and even anguish. Here are some 60 poems,
together with a dozen adventures in literary animadversion (which
McFadden appropriately calls “Quartz Flakes”). Every poem is
accessible, readable, startling in metaphor, rhythm, and rhyme.
Everywhere there are echoes of the old poets; the “Quartz Flakes”
make these echoes into an art form, a quite brilliant exercise in
usurping the work of Marvell, Donne, and others less well known—but
especially Thomas Hardy, whose cadences and language are caught as only
a fellow poet could catch them, yet whose sense is turned to another
purpose.

For this reviewer, the most moving poem of this most moving collection
is “Parenthood.” Speaking of children, McFadden writes, “Such a
coward, I can’t bear to think / Of their deaths, unless they’re old
and wise / And the final gong has flushed me out / Of this amazing maze
in which we’re trapped.” His message is clear, in these lines and
throughout the book.