Transformations

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

John Reibetanz is a remarkably versatile poet. His first book, Ashbourn
(1986), was a poetic recreation of a typical rural village in Suffolk,
England, with skilfully controlled poems put into the mouths of
individual villagers (a remarkable tour de force for a young North
American). His most recent was Near Relations (2005), a deeply personal
product of a visit to the United States after years of self-imposed
exile in Canada. These books might be said to represent the opposite
poles of modernist impersonality and something approaching (though never
equatable with) confessional poetry.

Transformations, though to some extent structured around Ovidian
interests in metamorphosis, is less unified than either of these, and
more “academic” (though, I hasten to add, not in the bad sense of
that word). Readers aware of the close connections of mythopoeic poetry
with Victoria College, University of Toronto (where Reibetanz has taught
for most of his adult life), will be intrigued by a number of
reinterpretations of mythical stories—“Narcissus,” “Marsyas,”
“Orpheus Appropriated,” and several others, all reflecting
Reibetanz’s individual approach. “Baucis and Philemon on the No. 5
Bus” is an especially engaging instance.

This last-named poem also illustrates one of the most prominent
(because unexpected) features of these poems, a bold and almost always
successful indulgence in the fanciful. Examples include “Petit
Ballet,” where his computer’s mouse is mysteriously transformed into
real performing mice, and “Prehistory Revisited,” in which he
whimsically (yet at the same time seriously) imagines a “New School of
Enlightened Archaeology,” which will be more imaginative than
scientific.

Also noteworthy is a preoccupation with wordplay, as in “Winged
Victory,” which begins: “We never speak of hollow defeat / as though
defeat always came round / packed solid.” And he is not above foisting
excruciating puns on us, as in “Home Groan.” Like all genuine poets,
he is invariably conscious of what he calls in one title “The
Neighbourhood of Words.”

This, then, is a poetic miscellany, calling up a variety of moods and
reactions. One gets the impression of an accomplished and established
poet perpetually in search of new experiences.