Something Blue and Flying Upwards: New and Selected Poems.

Lydia Forssander-Song is a sessional instructor in the English
Department at Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

Something Blue and Flying Upwards is Roger Nash’s seventh book of poetry. It is a feast that is satisfying, surprising, and sumptuous. This latest banquet introduces nine new poems and includes selected poems from each of his previous six collections: 14 from Settlement in a School of Whales (1983), nine from Psalms from the Suburbs (1986), 14 from Night Flying (1990), 14 from In the Kosher Chow Mein Restaurant (1996), six from Uncivilizing (1997), and eight from Once I was a Wheelbarrow (2000). As a result, the collection represents a satisfying survey of Roger Nash’s oeuvre to date.

In addition, Something Blue and Flying Upwards presents Nash’s sustained and active interest in the ordinary and extraordinary, transcendent and mundane, expected and unexpected. These wide spectrums make space for surprise both in subject matter and in language. For example, the title of this collection is taken from the last lines of “This is my mother’s camera”: “You turn your head and look / right through me, snapping furiously. You have got / the shots you were waiting for, and leave me with / something / blue and flying upwards in my life.” The literal description of the scene is clear. This collection’s cover appropriately features a heron. However, the “something” isolated on its own line conveys a vagueness, an abstraction, and a poignancy. These lines also balance a sense of focus through the eye of the camera and a sense of diffusion through the fluttering up and away of the blue thing.

This sumptuous and delicate balance is also apparent in the speaker’s tone and attitude. No poem is too salty, sweet, spicy, bitter, or salty. Instead, by controlling the flavours carefully, the speaker is often able to inject humour and insight into the lines. For example, “Five Signs That You’re Not the Reincarnation of Someone Famous” describes the Israelites, the Egyptian pharaoh, Jesus, Michelangelo, and Hamlet facetiously, but ends with “Like the window/ that even though dirty, lets in both dark and light.”