Reaching for Clear: The Poetry of Rhys Savarin

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.

David Solway established his poetic reputation with several books (The
Road to Arginos, Stones in Water, Bedrock), products of a number of
extended visits to the Greek islands. Later, in 2000, he published
Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis, purporting to be the work
of a wandering Greek mariner-poet who was in fact an invented alter ego.

In this volume, he takes his passion for islands and poetic
complexities one stage further. Reaching for Clear is similarly
subtitled The Poetry of Rhys Savarin, and offers itself as the work of a
contemporary poet of Dominica. Like its predecessor, it comes complete
with an introductory essay, glossary, notes, and a bibliography
containing a few authentic items plus entries that move increasingly
toward academic parody. But one of the many differences is the fact that
Solway’s personal experience of the Caribbean is, to say the most,
decidedly less than of the Aegean.

This doesn’t matter. The poems themselves are vintage Solway, but
filled with semi-tropical rather than Mediterranean detail. As usual,
despite the glossary, one needs a good dictionary at hand for his rich
vocabulary (“vetiver,” “theremin,” “crinoids,” etc.). These
poems are conspicuously geographical—the majority of references
identifiable on a Dominican map—but also celebrate Dominicans, like
the young protagonist of “Goddess” and the centenarian in
“Elizabeth (Pampo) Israel.” As usual, they are full of memorable
lines (“the only thing that’s high is rainfall,” “a cassava
squeezer to die for,” “beauty is always encompassed by dread”),
many including verbal puns (“Purple-Throat is humming like a
short-wave radio”; Dominica described as “the world’s last
resort”).

The language varies radically, even within a single poem, from the
traditionally formal to Caribbean vernacular. In explaining a
linguistically complex island (“the native patois interweaving with
Standard English and Continental French”), Solway is able to write in
“a macaronic of several languages” and draw upon “a curious
mixture of registers and tonalities,” thereby reflecting his own
situation as an English-speaking poet in multicultural Quebec.

Yet another accomplished performance from one of our most consistent
and talented poets.