Collected Poems of Raymond Souster, Vol. 8: 1991-1993

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.

There was a time when Raymond Souster was a poet of some importance. He
has been publishing for over half a century, and has never been a very
critical selector of his own work. In other words, he has always
published too much; but his earlier volumes also contained a reasonable
number of bull’s-eyes, so that one was prepared to work one’s way
through the indifferent attempts and the boss shots.

But the successes have become fewer and fewer as the years go by, and
even Souster’s most fervent supporters would be hard put to find much
to admire in the present collection, which brings together the work from
1991 to 1993. He writes about anything and everything in a pallid free
verse that nowadays rarely rises to either elegance or profundity. The
lines are readable enough, but they leave little or no impression. And
often the effects attempted seem far too easy.

It is saddening to write this. I have admired a number of Souster’s
poems in the past, and thoroughly approve of his determination to write
about commonplace things for ordinary people. But for many years now,
the poems themselves have remained commonplace. I open the volume at
random and find a poem beginning: “That year when our team failed / to
make the Junior playoffs, / I was asked to move up to the senior squad
...” That is surely no more than indifferent prose, let alone verse.
Too many of the 130 or so poems here are as verbally undistinguished.
For all my old-fashioned respect for my seniors, I have to state that
this collection is slack and depressing.