Ghost Safari

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

Marshall, a teacher and an editor at Quarry Press, writes more as a
literary historian than as a poet in this collection. There are poems
here that are travel pieces, fragments of dreams, recollections of
friends, and memories of literary greats. There are poems about other
poets, and while these offer fertile ground for literary fact and
fancy—personal treasure-hunting—they are often uninspired or
strangely coy and distant.

There is some satisfaction in reading Ghost Safari, but more because
Marshall has known and commented on so many contemporary poets and
poetry, and his opinions are engaging, and his memory clear. But this
aspect of his book is also its weakness; these poems often need prose
explications to come alive. Marshall, in his quest for a “more direct,
fluid and clean language,” has obscured the substance of his subjects
for ordinary travelogue. He is rhetorical in the same way a tour guide
is: engaging, informative, a bit of a character, and worth the
price—but six months later it’s hard to remember exactly what was
said.

Marshall is a good lyrical poet, concerned with the natural landscape
and colors of Canada. He is also writing on the surface of events,
content with naming names and dining out. The strongest poem is an
epitaph for a dead professor. Ghost Safari is a pale reflection of what
has been.