Near Relations

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.

This is John Reibetanz’s sixth volume of poetry. I have read several
of the earlier ones, and enjoyed their intelligence, technical
expertise, and poignant yet unsentimental handling of human emotion. But
I was not prepared for this extraordinary book.

At its centre is an absorbing prose section in which Reibetanz and his
family drive from Toronto to say goodbye to his mother, who is dying in
the United States (which he had left in the troubled 1960s for what the
cover blurb calls “a more accommodating country”). En route, they
visit various American tourist attractions: the site of the battle at
Gettysburg with a conspicuously patriotic guide, the Museum of Air and
Space (“a shrine for the gods of American technology”), and the
Capitol with its “rotunda ceiling of George Washington in
apotheosis.” But they also visit the Museum of American History, with
its acknowledgment of the slave past (“the black tragedy at the heart
of the Union”), and their hotel is surrounded by an area where “the
people are living in hovels, on a diet of poverty and cocaine.”

This vivid portrayal of the world he has left is framed by a collection
of remarkable poems about people, some involving his family and friends,
others about “near relations”—which means all human beings. In
this poetic world, all men are brothers and all women sisters. And they
all know pain, physically or mentally. Reibetanz is unrivalled at
conveying “the tears of things.” We may begin a poem that seems to
be about remote places and remote people, but are always drawn into the
sadness that accompanies our common humanity.

Reibetanz writes middle-length poems; only two in this collection are
contained on a single page. This is because, here at least, he is not a
lyric poet but one who builds his effects slowly, carefully—sometimes
even remorselessly. He writes in an apparently detached, natural style,
but it creates a powerful visceral impact. I finished the book a sadder
and a wiser man, emotionally drained, but enormously impressed.

This is a book of poems that matters.