The Hunt on the Lagoon

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.

The late S.P. Zitner was a distinguished professor of English, famous as
a superb teacher, who didn’t publish his first volume of poems, The
Asparagus Feast (1999), until well into his retirement. This book is his
third, with Before We Had Words (2002) in between.

One of his admiring ex-students once remarked to me, years ago, that
his wit was so dry that it almost ceased to be wit. Something of this
quality comes through in these beautifully polished and eloquent poems.
They provide sometimes amusing, sometimes sad, but always piquant
reports on 21st-century experience. Only Zitner, one feels, could have
written a poem titled “Lullaby for the First Child Born with a Bar
Code.” Another begins, “There are more poets per capita in Canada
than in any other country,” glossing the phenomenon by maintaining
that we “venture into the bush, heavily laden, prepared for the
worst— / to be stung or bitten, or not to be heard from again.”

Or consider the shortest poem in the book, a one-liner: “Here lies,
as usual, a Jew d’esprit.” The pun may seem excessive, but it
changes in tone dramatically when one recognizes the additional pun in
the title: “Trial Epitaph.”

Zitner died six days after his 81st birthday, a few months before the
book appeared. But he will be remembered for a long time by his
ex-students, ex-colleagues, and friends—and longer (one hopes) by
admirers of crisp, rhythmically assured poems that display an enviable
range of taste, culture, and emotion. They include the personally tender
(“Julia on Her Tenth,” a memory of his daughter as a child), a
deeply felt lament for the victims of tyranny (“The Disappeared”),
some discerning and exquisitely observed poems about art (including the
title poem), and numerous others communicating an old man’s wisdom and
humour and grace.

Zitner’s poetry is conspicuous proof that poetic mastery derives not
from creative-writing courses but from a lifetime of reading, thinking,
and listening. He is distinguished from the multitude of self-styled
poets in Canada as one of the few who are unquestionably genuine.