Midgic

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 enigmatic “Midgic,” Douglas Lochhead informs us, is a Mi’kmaq
word that may have meant “[a] point of highland into a marsh [the
Tantramar].” And he describes his poem as “a love story. A
celebration. A gathering of lyrical word-moments which reveal how one
person came to know and care for a village.” “Word-moment” is the
perfect word for these 74 short poems that, in characteristically
understated Lochheadian fashion, evoke the Tantramar Marshes, between
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which he made his own, poetically, in
High Marsh Road (1980). Ever since then, he has found what he calls here
“a way / of saying” all that he feels about his favourite landscape
in quiet, tentative, memorable poems (in this book never more than nine
lines in length).

I quote one such poem chosen almost at random: “a day of sun / Midgic
melts / into itself // wetlands / with new waters / the slow green
beginning[.]” Notice the unostentatious alliteration; the simple yet,
in context, unexpected adjectives “new” and “green”; the
slightly staccato rhythms; the way “beginning” subtly suggests
open-endedness (there is no punctuation at the end of the poem). It all
looks easy enough, but Lochhead has spent a lifetime honing a style that
is now recognized as his own and inimitable. Happily, he has lived a
long life; Midgic appeared in his eighty-first year, and is the most
recent book to communicate his gentle, emotionally satisfying,
earthbound love of the local expressed in passing “word-moments.”

A short, elegantly produced little gem of a book. Poems to be
treasured.