An Exchange of Gifts: Poems New and Selected

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

It is impossible to read An Exchange of Gifts without feeling a sense of personal loss that Alden Nowlan is dead. His poems, some published here for the first time, others previously published in other collections of his work, speak so directly and honestly that they cannot fail to touch the reader, whether with the welcome weight of a friendly hand, or with the cold shiver of a surgeon’s knife. Nowlan wrote of the things that mattered to him, of “what you feel deepest and hardest,” as he explained to his young son. That sometimes meant, in his case, stray facts about Boswell and Johnson, about Aleksandar Obrenovic, King of Serbia, or about Herman Ott, an unhappy carpenter forced to earn a living as a grave-digger. More frequently, his poems reveal the poet himself, his love of life (however exquisitely painful it at length became), his family, and his friends. Nowlan was a wonderful poet, and this parting gift is one to be treasured.