Configurations at Midnight

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

Ralph Gustafson is a major Canadian poet and any book by him is an
event. Configurations at Midnight is a kind of memoir in verse. It is
not a prose memoir, he says, because prose is more likely to use
fabrication. It provides only a few biographical details: we learn more
about Gustafson’s relatives than about him. As epigraphs he uses
quotations from Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. He shares with Stevens a
concern for beauty and a faith in the imagination and its supreme
fictions. Like Pound in the Pisan Cantos, he creates a texture of
remembered places and people using a variety of styles. His travel, his
meetings with famous people like Villa-Lobos, works of music he
loves—these are his memories, his memoirs. Running through the book is
an awareness of the value of love and an understanding of the
counterweight of human evil and suffering. Frequent descriptions of the
natural setting around his home in North Hatley, Quebec, keep this work
of recollection anchored in the present. “Conditional joy” is what
Gustafson attains, via art and human relationships. This is an autumnal
book, like Wallace Stevens’s Auroras of Autumn, but not a gloomy one.
There are no masterpieces among the mostly brief poems that make up this
quilt of memories, but it is thoroughly readable.