Psalms from the Suburbs

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

This is Roger Nash’s second book of poems (following Settlement in a School of Whales 1983). Nash is a philosopher at Sudbury’s Laurentian University and one section of this book — “The Earth’s Own Body Sings” — makes use of the northern environment. The simple act of “Well drilling at 40 below” introduces the general idea of the human drilling and gouging of the rock of the earth’s crust. In a more urban poem (“The mound of the Viking chocolate bars”) the trivial act of throwing away a chocolate bar wrapper opens up a view of history as an accumulation of such human deposits on the surface of the earth. It can readily be seen that Nash’s general poetic approach places everyday scenes and incidents in perspectives which confer, on perhaps, reveal, the larger meaning of ordinary life.