Footsteps on the Water

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 George Whipple’s eighth book of poetry, at least half of them
published since he entered his 70s. Though a deeply traditional poet, he
writes in an engagingly relaxed style that makes his verse refreshingly
accessible. Like many elderly poets, he creates numerous poems out of
memories of the past. Such poems, of course, are common to the point of
cliché, and only writers with a sound command of technique can get away
with them. Fortunately, Whipple has mastered the all-important
discipline. He can thus avoid the numerous pitfalls and attain an
enviable originality. His own process of remembering is wittily offered,
and exemplified, in the image of “hibernating bears / who suck their
claws in caves / dreaming of honey.”

He is also a deeply Christian poet, but not in any stiffly orthodox
sense. He can always be relied on to surprise. A poem called “Speaking
in Tongues” is immediately followed by “World Series”—but it is
the latter poem that is introduced by an epigraph from St. Augustine!
Another is called “Jericho Jive.” There is no trace of the
puritanical asceticism that mars some forms of Christian poetry. Imagine
a writer with a style that reads sometimes like that of Margaret Avison,
sometimes like that of a William Blake born out of due time.

Richard Wilbur’s poem-title “Love Calls Us to the Things of This
World” perfectly sums up Whipple’s attitude. His vocation, as he
notes in one poem, is praise. Though he never draws attention to
himself, he is a poet who quietly nudges us into considering everyday
experience in a new way. Simply yet memorably (and therefore typically),
he persuades us, to our surprise, that “We live in more dimensions /
than we know.”