It's Over/It's Beginning

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Frank Watt is straightforward. It’s Over/It’s Beginning, his first selection of verse in book form, is designed to immerse the reader in the poems immediately. No introduction, no contents, block the way. The first words of the first poem repeat the title, an unexpected pleasure which calms the mind and tells it not to worry about discovering which poem relates to the title and why. His poetic style, clear images and basic vocabulary, reflect these organizational techniques. Style never imposes on content but blends with it.

The poems are delightfully coloured with a light William Carlos Williams wash. Many are about the farm, chores, nature, spring, the country horses. Sometimes nature and man are parallel. In “The autopsy,” the unexpected death of a seemingly healthy maple is described — “(a dark stain/right up through the heart)” — with an arresting concluding comment: “Maples/ (it seems) /die slowly/from the inside out.” In “Spring song,” the poet realizes that man, unlike nature, is “too old and fouled” to be washed clean by spring.

Watt has a way with words that gives a new dimension to day-to-day things; for example, “Good boots” describes the fate of winter boots in summer. He paints indelible pictures; in “City burial” we see the funeral procession fresh from the “warm chapel’s perfumed consolations” arriving unprepared at the “gaping raw hole.” He brings people alive, especially in “Grandfather takes off.” “Letter to my parents,” perhaps the best in the collection, shows how the poet’s parents, though dead, are alive in him, still easing his way.

Watt’s poems are mostly written in the third person as he describes the people, places, and objects he observes. The few first person poems are among the best, such as “The apple trees,” and “Letter to my parents.” A few of the poems are wordy and lose the reader. Although the 55 poems seem simple, they are not. They cannot be read quickly, all at once, but deserve careful attention and several readings to taste their full flavour.