Singer, an Elegy

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

George Fetherling, who wrote as Doug Fetherling until 1999, has a
written an elegy for his father, but it expands the form, creating a
full biography of the man whose life he is commemorating. The
commemoration is not a mere tribute—we get the complexity of the man
with frankness. Most elegies are in honour of celebrated people or
promising young poets. Fetherling’s father worked in industrial jobs,
mostly as a machinist, and the poetry gives a strong sense of what that
kind of work is like. In his afterword, Fetherling scorns Thomas
Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” for sentimentality,
but it was Gray who first thought of commemorating the “short and
simple annals of the poor.” The poem is not only an evocation of a man
who endured the Depression but also a dialogue with the tradition of the
elegy, so that Tennyson and Milton are subjects as well as the senior
Fetherling.

The style is straightforward, free verse couplets, and the choice of
detail and the use of aphorisms are more important than rhythm and
figurative language. This is a work of true maturity that has been
written with care and compassion. The compassion does not preclude
frankness about Fetherling’s family life.