Standing on Our Own Two Feet

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This is the first book from this 32-year-old Saskatoon poet, and it consists of three main sections, an introduction, and closing poems. The cover is very beautiful, but the print is annoying, consisting occasionally of varying type-faces within the same poem.

Robertson writes with skill and compassion of the events of everyday life. The first section, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” is concerned with the complex, painful, yet fascinating process of growing up. The poet treats it with dignity, honesty, and humour. Several pieces deal with the limitations of poetry in the real world. “Standing on Our Own Two Feet” explores the world of the emerging adult and his responsibilities to parents, spouse, and children of the reconstituted family. Robertson shows sensitivity to, and perception of, the worlds of children and women. The pain and violence inherent in this section are made explicit in “The Silence After,” which moves from the tranquillity of the Pre-Cambrian lakes to a world of loss and death by suicide and the legalized murder of war.

Throughout, relaxed colloquial diction is given energy by bold enjambment; imagery is germane to the poem’s content, as in “Mechanical Man,” where there is “golden evening sun welding him/into place in my mind.” In a love poem, Robertson writes of “tightly holding a common thing/uncommonly tight,” and in this book he has done so, and done himself proud.