Winter Journey

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

I don’t like this fifth book by Allan Brown. It gives us just what Canadian literature doesn’t need: nymphs, Ariadne, and aubades. The introduction by W.J. Barnes suggests that we must submit ourselves to these difficult poems if we wish to be enriched by them, but after a couple of readings of the book I doubt if there’s all that much enrichment to be found in it. I don’t know Mr. Brown at all, but if his poems are any indication I would judge that he is a long-time academic who teaches Eliot, Pound, and perhaps the Metaphysicals, and who has a strong interest in classical poetry, particularly as it influences modern literature. To put it in a word, his poems are bookish. Like the vampires in the movies, they shrivel into dust at the first contact with the light of the common day.