Fathers Never Leave You

Brian Burch is a teacher, writer and poet and author of Still Under the
Thumb.

Richard Harrison’s first book, Fathers Never Leave You, was runner-up to Maxine Tynes’s Borrowed Beauty for the 1987 Milton Acorn Peoples Poetry Award. Because of this, I expected it to be a collection of powerful poetry with a uniquely Canadian vision or a clear commitment of social transformation. I was somewhat disappointed as my expectation of memorable poetry was not quite met.

Fathers Never Leave You is primarily poetry about family relationships from the perspective of a sensitive father. We are given glimpses into the range of feelings that a father goes through, both in terms of his relationship to his own father and in terms of his relationships with his children. Reading these poems provides a good feeling within the reader. Unfortunately, upon closing the book distinct images quickly fade and we are left with a slightly unsatisfied feeling.

Interspersed with these fatherhood poems are a few poems that are rememberable and overshadow the thematic thread that runs through most of the poems. “Iran Under the Shah,” which deals with the torture of a woman in Iran and the linking of the torturers to our North American lives, is perhaps the most powerful poem in this book. The violation of the woman with a snake echoes the manipulation of Eve by a snake in the Garden of Eden. Biblical images also appear in “The Mourning of Lot’s Wife” and “Ham, the Father of Canaan.” These poems, together with “Iran Under the Shah,” have images that linger long after the reader has finished the book.

Harrison’s poems that deal with the personal realities of fatherhood, such as “Stepfamily” and “Fathers,” seem to be well-edited journal entries more than poems. He has not yet learned to distance himself from the subject he is dealing with and it is hard to bring into one’s own experience some of his.

Richard Harrison’s Fathers Never Leave You contains the work of a thoughtful and young poet who has suffered a great deal in learning to come to an acceptance of the pain and joy of parenting in the 1980s. He is to be commended for dealing with such intensely personal matters and his work will improve as he gains the ability to deal with his pains and joys as he can do with that of a mother leaving her friends to die in a city that once offered her shelter — with strong empathy and a slight detachment from the story.