Alterations

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

George Payerle’s second book of poetry, Alterations, is firmly rooted
in his life in Roberts Creek, a village on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. As
he presents himself in these poems—and Payerle deliberately asks us to
read the speaker autobiographically—he’s a deliberately crusty
Romantic poet, with a sense of the transcendent available from nature
alongside a carefully held sense of loss attending upon life.

The poems shift between short, intense lyrics, some of the best of
which catch a sense of the natural world, and longer narrative tales,
often about the lives and deaths of friends and acquaintances, the
humour of their behaviour, and the good times associated with their
presence in his life. “These Blossoms” is a good example of the
former, with its “sun-yellow washed saffron, / blood, / burgundy /
among eucalyptus leaves’ chalky jasper,” while the tall-tale-like
“Al’s Shack” represents the latter. There are also poems paying
homage to the artists in music, literature, and painting Payerle
admires.

Payerle refers specifically to 9/11 in a number of poems, and to the
political fallout in such things as the Bush administration and the Iraq
war; this works best when he doesn’t actually refer to these things (I
agree with his politics, but rhetorically they interfere with the
poetry). He does a much better job elegizing friends and acquaintances,
as in the lovely couple of poems for a young rider whose horse killed
her. Indeed, there’s an elegiac tone to much of this book, concerned
as so many of the poems are with growing old, seeing friends and family
age, and coming to terms with the death of those we love.

Payerle’s verses move between long, almost prose lines, full of
straight sentences to tighter, imagistic, and more rhythmically complex
ones. When telling tales, he seems to take things a little lightly; when
remembering loss, the poems sharpen. Alterations satisfies most when it
concentrates on its elegiac purpose as directly as possible.