Angel Ruckus

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

That this book is a part of a Bahб’i Voices series made me a bit
apprehensive. Was this going to be a piece of propaganda written to lure
me into a religious group? Well, yes and no. There are no exhortations
to repent now or be born again, but there is a strong message that
Filson has found something he values and would like to tell us about it;
his pitch is low-keyed.

Part 1, Circling Zero Hour, is about Filson’s boyhood; the poems
present a number of prairie epiphanies. “Wrapped up in a blue-black
night / I saw, where the fabric was thin, / a great cosmic light shine
through / in prick-points of star pins” (“Once upon a hill”).
Light imagery is important throughout the book (“Bahб’i” means
“seeker of light”).

In Part 2, “The Coinage of Illusion,” Filson leaves the prairies
for the city; he discovers much to excite him, but basically loses his
way in the world. In Part 3, “Angel Ruckus” (which obliquely
promotes the Bahб’i religion), Filson returns to the theme of
spiritual epiphany, though now the poet is mature and able to deal with
his experience analytically.

The book’s three-part structure is very Wordsworthian. The child has
an instinctive feel for things spiritual. In young manhood, he becomes
too involved with the world and loses his way for a time. In maturity,
he achieves a compromise that is a synthesis of his two earlier selves.
The adult may lack the emotional spontaneity of his childhood self, but
his loss is more than compensated for by his fuller awareness of the
meaning of his experiences.