Republic of Solitude: Poems 1984-1994

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

A recurring theme in this collection is how the spirit of a natural
landscape shapes, and is inseparable from, our own sense of self:
“Geology is a study of spirit.” The sense of self is not a finished
one, but is as open to change as the landscape: “This place is twenty
years of me, / The stark coastland of a question.” At death, self
seems to merge with landscape again, almost in a Wordsworthian way.

Greene’s stoicism is developed in a series of very fine religious
poems. Like Blake, he sees that evil as well as good lies in the design
of things; he presents the paradox starkly, without attempting a
comforting but false resolution. The profound “Isaiah 55:11”
develops the implications of stoicism for the divine viewpoint. With the
balladlike drive of a song from the Carmina Burana cycle, the poem
reflects on the agony of God, Whose desire for loving kindness and
justice on the earth goes unmet, but must be endured by Him. Here, in a
powerfully creative reversal, it is we who are the dark night of God’s
soul.

There are some weaknesses in the collection, related to the challenge
of presenting stoicism poetically. Endurance of how things are can shade
into an acceptance of traditional poetic language that produces
imaginative inertia. “Swan” has echoes of Yeats and Eliot that are
too loud. Further, the diction of the poem brings a tone of
almost-Victorian memorializing of death, where saying “no” to life
is tantamount to saying “no” to creating the new in poetry.
“Another Country” conveys its waste of life in wars in comfortable
Betjeman-like imagery and almost plummy tones; what is not conveyed is
the tragedy of the waste.