Driving Offensively

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Mr. Stevenson’s second collection is vaguely comparable to Dave Godfrey’s important novel The New Ancestor’s, in that it chronicles the extent of WASP acculturation when a Canadian teacher goes to Africa to teach at a Teacher’s College in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in West Africa for two years. Although the book has a narrative thread (the poems, or many of them, are about a voyage by car across Nigeria), the powerful impact created is more the result of the poet’s attentiveness to detail and nuance, and his ability to begin to perceive a very differently constructed cultural reality with a degree of self-deprecation and humor:

The jolting aspect of this new reality is described acutely throughout:

Each of the poet’s six senses is in full flight and comes through vividly in all four sections of the book; in addition, pidgin dialect is interpolated into many of the poems. (“Mastah, come! Bring money ...I tink you sake, isn’t it?”). Mr. Stevenson succeeds in making the reader much more comfortable with this very foreign culture by the end of the book, and this is quite a feat. Driving Offensively is both a book of first-rate poetry and a human document full of compassion and wisdom. Highly recommended.