Hold the Rain in Your Hands: Poems New and Selected

Charles R. Steele was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Glen Sorestad’s Hold the Rain in Your Hands is advertised as a “definitive collection of the best from five earlier books” (published between 1975 and 1984), plus 29 new poems. It is a good collection which represents accurately Sorestad’s unpresumptuous technical competence, his quiet voice, and his domestic scope and vision. His is the kind of verse that the British critic David Lodge would term anti-modernist. It is verse that privileges content above form, verse in which the subject, whether it be the human drama of a prairie pub, a Vancouver childhood experience, a poet’s travels in various parts of Canada, a Cree fishing guide, or a natural scene or image, is presented through the media of transparent language and unobtrusive form.

Sorestad’s vision is also fundamentally humanistic. His preference for life over art is declared from the outset in his introductory “Poem for Sonia”:

That this is not an idle or occasional sentiment, merely the stuff of a love compliment, is demonstrated consistently by the collection’s focus on the human scene. “Poems are accumulations of images,” Sorestad says in “Hamburgers and Beer,” and “some may be real.” But even though poems may metaphorically “write themselves / every day in this city,” they are “remembered / or imagined”; they are, in other words, products of human perspective and articulation.