Rip Current

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

Harold Enrico is a poet of cosmopolitan interests who lives in Washington (remarkably, in the small town of Cosmopolis) and publishes poetry with Sono Nis, a small-press publisher in Victoria, B.C. His poetry draws on the European modernists, and the title poem, “Rip Current,” is a rendering, among other things, of the last period in the life of the symbolist poet and wanderer Rimbaud. Many of these poems invoke European scenes and poets with a confidence which bespeaks familiarity and shared experience. Enrico likes to join with Rimbaud, Montale, Holderlin, Cezanne and others, a community of artists, in tasting the pleasures and pains of an earth that seems remote from North America. At the same time, Enrico knows his territory of the North-West and sets out with his poetry to explore its cedar forests and mountains and the human communities there. The poem “Margins,” adorned with an epigraph from Rimbaud, brings us to scenes which are visually and thematically those of the North-West Coast:

On the two-lane highway past the lake

In late afternoon log trucks exceed the speed limit.

The chained logs weep for the raw forest.

In these characteristically clean lines, Enrico’s verse displays again a belief in poetry as a way of living which creates meaning and thereby keeps us going, on this continent as well as the other,

Torch lifted against torch under the

A margin of hope

Pitted against a margin of despair.

This attitude of romantic struggle is undoubtedly attractive and readers may only regret that Enrico has not lifted more torches and written more poems: a publisher’s note tells us this is his second book in eleven years.