Open Fires

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Blaine Marchand is an active belle-lettrist in Ottawa. He has been the editor of poetry magazines and the organizer of local writers’ groups, including a committee which arranges literary events in the capital during National Book Week. Open Fires is his second book of poetry. The title is taken from one of a series of poems on Africa which the author evidently visits as part of his work for the Canadian International Development Agency. The non-African poems don’t sit unhappily under the title because they include a number based on neighbourhood life in Ottawa, and neighbourhoods, of course, are villages. Marchand is an observant and witty writer, good at travel vignettes, dialogue, and social scenes. We are given a variety of locations including Ottawa porches, African markets, and Trafalgar Square, London. It is perhaps in this spirit of social reportage that he writes “Fonctionnaire” in a mixture of English and French, and captures a fact about Ottawa. But the poem also moves from the frozen Ottawa to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where the whales disport in spring, and one realizes that the social detail is nothing without the context of human feeling to which Marchand appears to be sensitive, no matter which continent he is on.