Even This Land Was Born of Light

Bob Lincoln is the director of acquisitions at the University of
Manitoba Libraries.

James Deahl is a romantic poet immersed in nature. His poems respond to
the changing weather, animals, and the march of the sun across the sky.
In a landscape of elaborate conceits, Deahl ranges widely, tethered to
an assembly of companions. It is a comfortable, if somewhat predictable
life. There are a procession of events that occur often in contemporary
poetry—a sexual encounter on a beach, a rainstorm and a moonscape, a
travelogue of a return to a former home—and poems dedicated to
departed artists. In his poems Deahl encounters towns, cities, and
countrysides and transforms them into a palette of color and
activity—a village lies in a blaze of trees, a pond cycles through a
morning sunrise, layer by layer.

Deahl transforms the ordinary into heightened glimpses of insight. His
lines are a rich mix of words and metaphors. Writing of men on a goose
hunt leads the poet to speculate on death and spiritual release when he
closes the poem with “... those shotgunned geese are a huge red oak /
striding vivid through sudden dawnbreak storm.” The difficulty with
many of the poems in this collection can be traced to these very leaps
of description and the overly full plate served up as the poem. The
lines are not up to the task set out, as in “Ars poetica,” or in
another poem where the wind “rises like a shoal of mackerel / through
darkness.”

Poems centred on the Canadian landscape and on this country’s history
form the third section, entitled “The whole earth alive.” Deahl, as
a poet of places, explores the North, lakes, Atlantic headlands, and a
Peterborough winter’s night. The poems at times flirt with becoming a
roadside checklist rather than capturing an essence, or a story. Many
poems capture emotions using an abundance of imagery that sometimes
contradicts itself. The use of the term “blue of words,” followed by
“blue flowers” and the shouts of boccie players, expresses not the
mutability of existence but more realistically the repetitive insults of
the game, which have little to do with orioles.

Contrasting sharply with the lyrical nature poems are the “hard”
poems of steel towns and the people who work them. These stronger, more
precise poems are of an earlier style that Deahl has unfortunately
abandoned.