Scoring in Injury Time.

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.

Francis Sparshott may well be the least recognized significant poet in English-speaking Canada. Though highly regarded as a distinguished scholar and teacher of philosophy, he is on record as saying that poetry is the only thing he takes seriously. In many ways a paradox himself, his poetry is also often paradoxical—and much of it comic. (Witness the title The Hanging Gardens of Etobicoke,  which contains, in “Concise History of the Kalamazoo Kazoo Company Incorporated,” arguably the most delightfully funny poem in Canadian literature.) But Canadians are traditionally suspicious of the combination of comedy and seriousness, especially when the comedy is highly allusive, often satiric, and even sardonic.

His earlier poetry was remarkable for extravagant verbal play (one anagram-poem contains 75 lines and is confined to the letters in his own name—which contains no “e”), some wicked literary parodies (I remember one of Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge” and another of Wilfred Campbell’s “Indian Summer”), and various “found” poems, plus experiments with haiku. They were detached, erudite, often obscure to less versatile mortals.

This is Sparshott’s most personal book. A poignant note records the death of his “dear wife for more than half a century,” and adds that she “would have liked the poems to be more cheerful but these are what I have.” Written in retirement, they occasionally recall his earlier work (“Heidegger in 1945,” “Ludwig Wittgenstein Went to War”), but are more often moving, frequently sad poems about ordinary sights and impressions (“Bunting”) or the general decline of things (“Valedictory observations on Scarborough, Ontario”). These are late poems by an old, wise, and highly gifted man, still expertly crafted but notable for expressing a sense of lacrimae rerum. We now need, belatedly, to assign him his true place in the company of truly accomplished Canadian poets.