Love en Route

Carrie MacKinnon was a personnel officer for a large Toronto insurance company.

Gregory M. Cook’s first book of poems, Love from Backfields, was published in 1980. He edited Critical Views an Canadian Writers: Ernest Buckler and is Executive Director of the Writers’ Foundation of Nova Scotia.

Cook’s second collection of poems, Love En Route, is prefaced by a quotation from D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse: “Man thinks with his blood.” The book is comprised of two sections, “Rites of Passage” and “Unending Dance,” but blood and love imagery is central to both sections.

The theme of “Rites of Passage” opens the first poem: “We are on the road.” The language is simple and straightforward, the imagery powerful, with a hypnotic rhythm suggestive of motion and travel. The difficulty with choosing such mundane topics as car trips is that their depiction often sounds like cliche. Balancing that, and perhaps more frequently winning, is the poet’s success at helping the reader rediscover and re-examine the world. Cook seems to delight in undercutting traditional poesy (Spring’s first human sign is the bottle picker”); but he loads his commonplace images with too much meaning and symbolism. “He is the auditor of our sham accounts... picking up stories and dreams of summer.” Sometimes, in life and in poetry, commonplace objects remain commonplace, for all their costumes.

The poet’s visit to Ernest Buckler’s house, “House of the Continuous Banquet,” is marvellously evocative: a loving portrait of the house that shelters the man, his life, his books. A similar love and respect and longing — this time for the poet’s first father and his second — radiates through “The Same Wind.”

The final poem of “Rites of Passage” is an eight-section work, “Bringing Home the Blood,” describing the honour and burden of acknowledging parents’ and grandparents’ love and labour. While the work is intensely personal and full of touching, delicate details, Cook captures and conveys a powerful love “en route” — while we are on this road.

The second half of Love En Route, “Unending Dance,” is not as successful. The imagery is, in general, more cerebral and less evocative, the language more intellectual and cleverer but less moving. An exception, however, is the title poem of the section, “The Unending Dance,” in which the poet regains that magic combination of common events and emotions clothed in wonder, made new with words and a different perspective.

Love En Route combines some clever, some corny, some hackneyed phrases and views, with a few truly startling revelations about life and love that raise this poet’s work and thought to that lofty height that defines Poet — a thinking, creative, feeling, laughing, singing Man. For those few gems alone — and how can we ask for more? — Love En Route stands above the common dross of so much modern Canadian poetry.