Riding the Long Black Horse

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor and author of Night Flying.

Raymond Souster’s characteristic strength is an ability to express
uncommon insights and experiences in plainspoken language. His stubborn
empathy with what is freshly and sometimes unnervingly real in the
unpretentious and unsung is shown in “Wind at the Intersection,” in
which red traffic lights shape the poet’s encounter with a roadside
wino. The poem reflects on the limits imposed on the poet’s compassion
by the simple fact of his having to drive away as the lights change.

At the heart of the collection is a series of poems on the death of
Souster’s father. The best of these poems, “A Matter of Dentures,”
strikingly evokes how a dying man may lose that intimate sense of
embodiment that once enabled him to put his dentures in. In “Seagulls
and Bluejays” the presence of the poet’s father is summoned as a
seagull drops in on a ballgame. In a number of these poems, Souster’s
conversational tone deteriorates into baseball “chit-chat” that
evades the reality of his father’s slow death. “Sunday Visit” and
“Notation, Mid-February” make explicit mention of this evasion and
explain it away as an integral part of the sense of the poems. Which
begs the question, can merely noting the evasion of meaning create it?