Echoes in Silence

Thomas M.F. Gerry is an English professor at Laurentian University.

The pleasures of attending to this volume’s seasoned voice are
numerous, especially its skilful formulations of “the intricacies of
silence.” Keith, a professor of English at the University of Toronto,
guides the reader through an exploration of many aspects of memory,
ranging from the private to the universal. Although it is his first,
this collection reveals an accomplished poet at work.

In Section 1, Keith delves into his past in England, where he was born
and grew up, by relating his present impressions of the place from which
he came to Canada more than 20 years ago. Vivid memories of his youth in
wartime England are the core of Section 2. While the events recalled in
this sequence are distinctly nightmarish, Keith deftly handles their
narration, revealing without sentimentality (or any of the other
pitfalls attending such a topic) their significance to the boy he was.
Section 3, a series of “Family Portraits,” moves from memories of
relatives distant in time as well as degree of relation, to his closest
relative, “H,” the person to whom this book is dedicated.

Section 4, framed by poems written while the author traversed in a jet
the international date-line, is a playful intertextual performance in
which the poet not only “reads” Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past, but describes his visits to Proust’s homes, and, most
interestingly, recounts Proust’s visits to him. This section of
“Proust Poems” thus forms a transition from the more private
exploration of memory to an almost theoretical meditation on the nature
of poetry in “Self-Reflecting Poems,” and to the final section,
“Prayer, God, Silence.” This last section is a daring sequence of
poems that ask essential questions about the nature of God, selfhood,
faith, and prayer. The following lines suggest the wisdom that Keith
delivers to the reader of Echoes in Silence: “I thought I was praying
to God, but perhaps / it was only to silence (a silence / that always
listens).”