The Edge of Time

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.

The Edge of Time, a collection of new poems and translations, is
published to celebrate Robin Skelton’s 70th birthday. And there is
much to celebrate: not only a phenomenal number of books of poetry (like
Auden, he has brought out Collected Shorter Poems and Collected Longer
Poems, and even those represent only the tip of the proverbial iceberg),
but a shelf full of scholarly books, including several that focus on the
nature and technique of poetry.

The present volume is a remarkable blending of his theoretical and
practical poetic interests. As he writes in the acknowledgments, “I
have made use of the traditional verse forms and metres of several
different languages in this collection, as I continue my survey and
exploration of world prosodies.” Indeed, a majority of the poems here
contain subtitles identifying the technical forms employed, and range
from Greek and Italian to Indian and Celtic.

All this may sound stiffly academic, but it is nothing of the sort. The
poems are preoccupied with the elegiac themes of memory and approaching
death, and the technical forms, far from being constraints, stimulate
and inspire the writer. There are poems here that flow with the kind of
passionate ease and rhetorical vigor that one has rarely seen since the
death of Yeats.

Take, for example, “Night Thoughts: Bosnia,” which contains the
following lines: “Back in the cushioned house once more / we watch the
screen, see the cities where / the one remaining word is War / as deaths
of children choke the air.” I quote this particular poem because it
effectively silences any suggestion that Skelton’s work is “pure
poetry” or that his poetic experiments are mere exercises in prosodic
archeology. They are not only technically consummate specimens of poetic
art (though they are that) but verse of lyric intensity. His lines are
instantly memorable; once experienced, one feels one has always known
them. And of how many recent “contemporary” poets can that be said?