Why Is Snow So White?

Laurence Steven is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
author of Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction.

F.H. Low-Beer’s most satisfying poems illustrate the role of
observation in making reality. For the most part, the poems are
observations—glimpses, sudden surprising sightings, delicate perusings
of an object, or a creature, or a setting. But observation is not
passive; as the poet says in “Early on Pitt Lake,” “Black gives
way to vision— / slowly above a still neutrality / the lake lifts its
face / to an unseen partner, / trees walk into consciousness; / then
white at lakesend / the one assertion against which / other things are
set....”

The setting is vision, but not in itself; it reveals itself out of
“black” into the observer’s sight, and in so doing inevitably
orders itself in terms the observer can see: the white at lakesend is an
“assertion” that organizes the scene into a meaningful whole, just
as assertions organize arguments in human discourse. Low-Beer captures
this relationship succinctly in “Graves”: “... it is sweet / to
find the world / fulfilling / the forms of mind.”

Because the world inevitably shapes itself to our perception (or we
would not perceive it), there is a continuous danger that we will shape
the world as we wish to perceive it; and there is a world of ethical
difference between the two. In “Rabbit,” Low-Beer exposes the manner
in which our “forms of mind” can appropriate things external to us.
The rabbit is “a shooting gallery / cardboard cutout / that fits too /
nicely into words, / a checkerboard to / play on inside / our private
club / cut off from the / dirt he sits on; / the wide eyes /
reproach.”

The subtlety necessary to genuine perception is Low-Beer’s stress; in
“On the Giving of a Telescope,” he moves away from observation to
reflection and meditation on the need for a delicate eye: “Unless
observation has a sense / that subtly flows into the thing observed— /
... / then perception fattens not the thing / perceived /... / Yet there
are some whose eye is fire: / stay ever so— / you need no lens to make
mere matter glow / the hidden heart of common things / cries out.” The
ambiguity in the last three quoted lines (is the “hidden heart of
common things” crying out that “you need no lens,” or is its
nature simply being described?) is Low-Beer’s deft way of manifesting
the subtle relationship of observation.

On the back cover of the book, George Woodcock is quoted as saying that
Low-Beer’s poem’s “grow on the mind.” The ones where he shows us
how to observe fruitfully surely do that.