Selected Poems

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

Written over a 30-year period, these selected poems cover a wide variety
of genres. The speaker in “Old Elijah Speaking” reflects on how we
step out of time, becoming old as children and childlike in maturity.
“The Imperialists’ Attitude” brilliantly captures a sense of decay
that is both biological and political. “Beginning with North” uses
an old frame house as a metaphor for how poetic creativity can keep the
forces of nature at bay.

Some of the earlier poems are burdened with academic terms that are at
war with the poetry’s sense of lived experience (“recombinant,”
“variform,” “simulacrum,” “recrudescence,” “portions,”
etc.), but the poet demonstrates an increasingly finer touch as the
volume progresses. This development seems reflected in several verses of
“Rites of Alienation”: “Old wallpaper / down down, layer after
layer / each one nearer the truth.”