Orts and Scantlings

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

These poems by long-time teacher and editor H.C. Dillow are intelligent and thoughtful. They are obviously the result of long contemplation and of careful attention to craftsmanship. There is not a bad or silly or embarassing piece in the collection. And yet, there is something missing. A poet is like Prometheus: a bringer of light and warmth; but the fire is missing from this book. I am willing to bet that Dillow is a student and teacher of the great moderns (Yeats, Eliot, and Pound) and of Donne and the Metaphysicals, because their words echo through his own. But the power isn’t there. Perhaps he’s been an English teacher too long. In his poems he deals with the “big” issues (which is a good thing to do), but he too often does so in the language of the classroom lecture, as if he were addressing a group of third-year students on the problem of free will in Paradise Lost. The poems have that kind of discursiveness about them; theirs is not the language of poetry. Dillow himself unintentionally points to the problem in “Putting the Garden to Sleep” (p.33), when he writes of “thin soil, stretched and brown as a worn drum.” There is something thin about this book — call it lack of spirit or heart — which does not allow it to nurture a strong response in the reader. Even though there is much to be praised in this book, it suffers from that fatal absence.