Origins

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.

To say that George Whipple is well into his 70s and still improving may
sound either flippant or condescending, but it is sincerely intended as
a compliment. He has blossomed in the last few years as a poet with an
engaging sense of life and a capacity to express it in verse that is
readily accessible without being in any way facile, ingratiating without
ever sounding casual. I found myself grinning with a satisfied pleasure
at almost every poem as I turned the pages.

This is all the more surprising since his most conspicuous topics in
the present collection are aging, death, and religious faith—subjects
that usually attract solemnity and even stodginess. Not here. Whipple
possesses an uncomplicated and untrendy Christian faith that can, I
suspect, alike please the believer and earn the respect of the skeptic.
In “Christmas Sonnet,” for example, he evokes the secular atmosphere
of the modern holiday season of “hot cider, mincemeat, puddings,”
etc., then adds: “Christ / hears our clinking glasses through the
rough / parched sounds, ordained, of nails in wood.” “A Prayer
Before Curtain Time” playfully but seriously pleads: “Bless this
movie, Lord,” entreating that it be rewritten, recast, reshot “if
it’s not as good / as the reviewers said” because “all things are
possible for you.” The stress is not so much on the request as on the
redeeming innocence that can make it. His poems are never forecastable.

Whipple’s titles show the range of his sympathies—or, at least,
interests: “Adolescence,” “Remembrance of Time Past,”
“Pooch,” “Funky Blues,” “Darwin’s Theory of Domesticity,”
“Hockey Game,” “Dante,” “Dying,” even “(S)ex Libris”!
All life is celebrated. Moreover, the final section contains graceful
translations from the French and the Québécois. Laforgue, Jammes,
Valéry, Cadou, Vigneault, and de Nerval are all represented.
Miraculously, the resulting poems do not sound like translations but
read as good poems in their own right.

An altogether gratifying book.