Observations on War and Other Poems

Mark Bastien was a Toronto-based journalist.

This is the fifth book of poems by veteran writer Bonnie Day, a retired journalist who lives in Toronto. Day, a Quaker, has been active in the civil rights and peace movements. Her religious conviction is evident in this collection, Observations on War and Other Poems.

The author calls her poems “innocent and old-fashioned and on the surface deceptively simple” but warns the reader they may “explode with meaning” when he least expects it. I agree with the first part of that statement but am skeptical about the second part, Day’s writing is old-fashioned, sometimes even archaic: her ABAB rhymes and sing-song rhythms severely limit the effectiveness of her poems. And she is working with Big Themes, which require clear, precise words that avoid preachiness. The arms race, crime, environmentalism, and spiritualism are all tackled by the author, and the results are mostly unsatisfying. Poems entitled “The Language of Diplomacy,” “Advice on Military Strategy” and “Beatitude with Annotations” promise much but deliver little, disintegrating into misplaced homilies.

What the author does have on her side is the assuredness that what she is writing is the truth. Some of the poems bloom with this conviction. “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down” and “White Narcissus” are conventional poems in style and content, but they are better thought out than most of the poems in the collection. They are carefully crafted and not preachy. They don’t explode with meaning, but they are filled with tenderness.