Earth's Crude Gravities.

Lynn R. Szabo is a chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

In this collection, prolific poet, dramatist, and essayist Patrick Friesen continues the fine work of crafting the music and spirit of his search for identity. Calling on multi-sensory allusions in many forms to sustain his poetic voice, the cadences of the King James Bible and modern poets riddle his free form poems. Ironically, these poems cohere around a loss of faith in not only “god” but also the idea of certainty. In this, Friesen’s postmodern acceptance of such a fate is articulated in the many sites of interior examination that personify his poetics. He calls on Bill Gaston’s The Good Body for the epigraph of the volume; it coolly voices Friesen’s overarching theme: “Caught helpless by the demands of heaven / yet helplessly mired in earth’s crude gravities.” The poet situates himself among those who have “no exit”—failed lovers, lapsed believers, hopeless addicts, relentless adventurers—yet do not refuse the “crude gravities” of life.

The courage and endurance that is required for these conditions carve out the spaces of a beautiful terror, blind-leading the poet through a series of geographic and aesthetic transpositions of identity profoundly voiced by Friesen’s commitment to the integrity and honour of human/his life. The sophisticated musicality of the language plays upon highly alliterative phrasing, forceful enjambment, erudite and common allusions, and internal rhyme. It is counterpointed by stanzaic structures that, although often symmetrical, move the reader beyond their absent punctuation/capitalization and syntactical fissures into the interstices of foreclosure required for luminous interpretation: “you’re singing puccini against the wall at least something you’ve heard it feels like rodolfo / your arms spread like a tenor onstage all voice and sluttishness an ecstasy of a kind of transfiguration[.]”

On occasion, the poetry represents an over-thought, relentless self-examination that frustrates in its angst. In this, it joins many Canadian writers whose poetics are a meronym of adolescence in world literature. On balance, Friesen’s deployment of memory as the medium of maturation both in situation and style casts this work in an artistry fully worthy of his stature as a Governor General’s Award nominee and an important poet in our times.