So Dance the Lords of Language

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.

Marius Kociejowski is an Ontario-born poet hitherto published only in
England, where he now lives. Canadian readers used to the kind of verse
that currently gains prizes and receives whatever publicity poetry
enjoys nowadays may find his work puzzling. It is unabashedly learned,
presupposes a wide range of cultural experience, and is technically
assured. But those who respond positively to the work of such poets as
Robert Bringhurst, Richard Outram, Jeffery Donaldson, and Eric Ormsby
(who is credited with help in preparing this publication) will almost
certainly find him congenial.

I cannot honestly claim that I responded to all the poems in So Dance
the Lords of Language. Some of them seem to require an intellectual key,
which I do not possess. In such cases, the verse can be enigmatic to the
point of frustration. Yet there is much to enjoy. Kociejowski is at his
best, I believe, in poems that comment obliquely on matters of art and
culture by constructing meaningful scenes from the past or creating an
exuberant imaginative world that, often by contrast, becomes profoundly
relevant to our own times. There is, for example, one poem spoken by the
early 19th-century Italian poet Leopardi, one exploring the relationship
between Chopin and George Sand, one about the Romanian pianist Dinu
Lipatti, and even one about a Sicilian bandit. All are inventive,
intellectually challenging, and notable for a finely honed precision of
language.

Along with the poets I have mentioned earlier, Kociejowski insists,
like the currently unfashionable modernists of almost a century ago, on
the impersonality of major art. As he writes in one poem of an Assyrian
monument: “The man who commits into stone these final agonies makes
sure they are / As finely carved as the ringlets in the beard of the
king who burns alive / The children of his enemies. // The sculptor
faithful to what he sees will always be at a distance from what he
serves.” The reference is to ancient history, but it applies
disturbingly to our own era—far more so, one suspects, than the work
of many Canadian poets currently touted.