Timely Departures

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

Timely Departures is a series of vignettes, experiences, and
observations set in a wide variety of locations, including Newfoundland,
Sable Island, the prairies, London, and North Africa. But it is
definitely not a travel book. Each poem in it is a frozen moment, a
statement of significance. Together they constitute a kind of album.
Turn the page, and there’s another snapshot, another scene or person,
and always there’s the intelligent observer, the poet as practical
sentimentalist, who is at one and the same time aware of the limitations
in himself and in the moment, yet reaching beyond them with his
emotions.

While I admire many individual poems, especially “Blue Murder” and
“Vandals,” the whole strikes me as less effective than the parts.
Maggs doesn’t break free of individual and specific instances to
create a book with an ebb and flow, or any sense of overall
construction.