Schedules of Silence

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Schedules of Silence is the first collection of Yates’s longer poems, containing his most significant work of the last quarter century: “Canticle for Electronic Music,” “The Qualicum Physics,” “Esox Nobilior Non Esox Lucius,” “Fugue Brancusi,” are reprinted in their entirety; there are also substantial selections from “The Great Bear Lake Meditations,” “Breath of the Snow Leopard,” and “INSEL: The Queen Charlotte Islands Meditations.” Yates’s “West Coast surrealism,” which characterizes many of these poems, makes a few of them somewhat obscure on first reading, such as “Esox Nobilior Non Esox Lucius,” comprising 54 short pieces titled with variant spellings of “muskellunge.”

This fact, however, should not deter any reader from sampling this astonishingly rich volume of poetry. The selections from “The Great Bear Lake Meditations” are particularly spellbinding: in this prose poem the narrator’s surreal vision combines with realistic depictions of the Arctic winter and practical survival information for startling effect. In fact, Yates’s description of the north in this poem may stand as a description of his verse in general:

No one acclimatizes to the extreme north. Aurora never seems quite familiar nor natural. And the tortures of light and dark remain a threat. All previous assumptions concerning order vanish suddenly; proportions become dislocated; emphases fall differently.... Just behind the mad light subsists an ideal lack of light.

Yates has traversed the northern landscape extensively, both physically and imaginatively, gathering through his poet’s eyes countless images and insights. In Schedules of Silence, he has given us a storehouse of unique and valuable treasures.