Double Tuning

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

Robert Finch’s volume is founded on admirable craftsmanship, stimulating thought, and effective rhetoric. Well-made and elegant, his poems employ traditional forms of metre and rhyme in new ways. His relation of sense and sound units is engaging because his handling of metrical schemes is informal and formal at the same time. His poems concern themselves with paradoxes, with the relation between mental and physical reality, and with mundane and spiritual aspects of literature. Never sounding egocentric, the poet speaks about general as well as personal experience; he aims at a social sense of judgment and authority. He addresses the reader more in the first person plural than in the singular. When he challenges idiomatic expressions and the dicta of established poets, such as Blake, he is not eccentric. His allusions correspond with the sensible style of his voice. While usually scholarly and learned, they are not systematic in a doctrinaire fashion. This is especially true of his Christian references, which form understated and oblique schemes rather than serve as salient, aggressive tropes.

The initial poems are about time. The first concerns the elusive mental existence of memories, presenting this elusiveness as necessary to a sense of the future. This subtle rationalization of mental frustration is matched by three sonnets, each with a different rhyme scheme, which unravel concepts about the present, the moment, and temporal continuum. The first dissolves the gap between “before” and “after” in terms of cosmic space, making it a figure enabling the poet’s mind to contain a creation higher than nature’s. The concepts of moment and continuity are conveyed by arguments based on visual illusions, the moment presented as converging and diverging images, and continuity as the mediation of seasonal light through a small window. In other poems, Finch uses visual imagery and paradox to explore poetry and words. Likening the creation of poems to falling snow, he illustrates the paradoxical sense of preparing himself to compose but being surprised by his compositions. Pointing out that poems are not snowflakes, he argues that the reader’s eyes turn the winter of the page into a perpetual spring. He sees interesting paradoxes in the relationship between people and language and between readers and poets; paradoxes asserting and denying parallels reveal his fondness for setting schemes against tropes. In “Armiger,” he treats heraldry as a figure of a natural heraldic sense that is opposed to the institution of heraldry. Similarly, in “Portrait D’Inconnu” he presents anonymous faces as ideal models of art because artless. He assents and denies that social reality is an art gallery when he celebrates anonymous figures as masterpieces which outlast pictorial images because they sign their distinctiveness without a name. Paintings are knowable only because people are anonymous.

Finch’s major achievement is the revitalization of the sonnet. On this form he works countless variations. He enjoys splitting it into stanzaie units as well as developing a wide range of argumentative structures. He makes the form serve ironical disclaimers about his own poetry. He employs it to record and invent idioms which enable the form to possess a function of strict definition. He writes interesting sonnet sequences. One sequence embraces historical drama by dealing sympathetically and satirically with an aristocratic lady who perishes in the French Revolution. Another sequence, one with eleven sonnets, gives a serious and whimsical history of letter writing; its final poem proposes that the sonnet is the ideal form of correspondence. He celebrates the constraints of the form, arguing how much they contribute to poetic and moral awareness. The ability to balance communicative and reflexive meaning is one indication of this poet’s exceptional wit and passion, craft and humanity.