The Moving Light

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

This is the twelfth book of poetry by Eugene McNamara, a writer and teacher of writing who lives in Windsor, Ontario, and who, in his poems, works with the everyday world and incidents of the streets, fields, and offices of the North America we know — shovelling snow, coming in to supper, waiting for the paperboy. McNamara makes these ordinary things significant, and draws our attention to the human desire to make meaning, to read significance in our existence, to anticipate, to amplify and expand, to see beyond, and, hence, to travel in a moving light of consciousness. His book is prefaced by a quotation from Thoreau.

McNamara does not let it all flood in. Selection is guided by an elegant sense of form. These poems are carefully built and poised so that the drama and tension of existence lies behind the even flow of language and the reader is obliged to reach for the excitement of the larger sense of things. It is all good, honest stuff.