A Heart of Names

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

Heritage and memory are the central themes of this new collection of poems by Toronto writer Robert Billings. The author journeys into his past like an investigative reporter, connecting snippets of history with bits of himself. A Heart of Names, Billings’ third book, resonates with ancestry.

The book is divided into three sections: “Cayuga,” “A Ring of Stones,” and “Fruit Cellar Poems.” “Cayuga” is a cycle of eight poems about the author’s visit to his grandparents’ village. Here Billings writes about the familiar things of rural daily life: the old swimming hole, Sunday morning at church, a funeral, writing with humour and compassion about the people and places of his memory. His images and connections are as striking as the photographs you find in your grandmother’s attic and cherish for life:

was Mrs. Colter’s fox fur

its head still on

glass eyes, a hard black snout

“A Ring of Stones” collects sixteen poems about change and memory in central Ontario. The images here reverberate with meaning. In “Migration” Billings writes: “Warm air Smell of ice melting /The heart accepts one small crack at a time.” In the final poem of “Fruit Cellar Poems,” the author writes: “I believe I am wings and dust /My cells die and regenerate /without warning.” Billings’ poems are the wings and dust of memory: dusky, troubling, ghostly, and beautiful.