Parables and Rain

Wayne Ray is president of the Canadian Poetry Association and author of
Giants of the North.

Ian McCulloch is a poet of great evocative powers, whether bringing to
life an old woman’s apartment in “The Exile” (“the apartment is
small / and dark behind her / cluttered with things / that simply
adhered / over the long dry living / of these residential years”) or
the human proboscis in “Face Value” (“his nose extended / by some
malignancy / into a grotesque mushroom, / a fleshy ball connected / by a
thin stem / to his true nose”).

The poet masterfully broadens his scope and displays his talent for
scene depiction in “Scarifying Love” (“sometimes on her break / he
asked for a dance / pulling at the front / of his hat and digging / a
quarter out of his pocket / working it in his fingertips / he’d say he
had saved / it all week and / play the same song / as violins as sweet /
as a harvest breeze”).

These poems are not spontaneous poems, composed out of the whim of a
memory or present image; they are rather poems dragged into focus and
moulded to create an exact replica of the images McCulloch sees and
wishes to convey to the reader.