Alley Alley Home Free

David E. Kemp is head of the Drama Department at Queen’s University.

The images that inspire Wah’s poetry are some of the most catholic of
any modern poet. His poems are a response to classical legend, music,
writing, films, images of cities, and especially visual art. This, his
14th poetry collection, is the second segment of Music at the Heart of
Thinking (1987). His Waiting for Saskatchewan won the 1985 Governor
General’s Literary Award for poetry.

Stylistically, Wah’s poems do not offer immediate gratification or
accessibility, with their unpredictable syntax, eccentric grammar,
knotted phrases, and pregnant silences. But the body of work pays
handsome dividends in direct relation to the effort one makes to come to
terms with it.

Wah did graduate work in linguistics, and his knowledge of that subject
manifests itself in his poetry. In an almost improvisational-jazz
manner, these poems consciously disrupt meaning even as they give new
life to language. It is music that is at the heart of Wah’s
poetry—the simple melody of the straightforward sentence or the
clashing cacophony of the uncompromising structure. Through it all comes
a message that both sheds new light on the obscure and undermines what
seems certain. This collection may provide little in the way of
assurance, but it provides a great deal of thought-provoking and oblique
insight.