Needle in the Eye: Poems New and Old

Carolyn Bett was President, CEBET Bibliographies.

In R.A.D. Ford’s years as a diplomat, his geographic location changed but the feeling of bleakness, expressed in his poems, permeated tundra, forest, and desert alike; the political situation continued to worsen. Occasionally, an otherworldly spiritual light obliterates the bleakness in a moment of remembered love, but I find the true redemption rather in the fierce determination of life itself against all odds:

I am struck dumb by the camels of the present

Moving like exalted silhouettes away from

The Delta green, straining, like the Syrian

Monks, toward the deserts of contemplation. (p.88)

Ford’s images are consistently forceful and amazingly various despite the overriding presence of snow or desert sands. The opening line sets the standard: “This is a decade of insomnia.” The subject matter is similarly broad-reaching, from the Mongolian invasion of Russia (p.26) to present-day land mines (p.31) to a lynx hunt (p.46). All sorts and conditions of people pass under his pen: the isolated woman in the Canadian North (p.45), Siberian prisoners (p.50), Andean refugees (p.70), “half-starved children /In the desert slums” (p.81), and his beloved, celebrated in many poems.

Ford’s meticulousness as a translator from the Russian is carried into the careful crafting of his original works and also into his use of grammatical images. There is an expressed concern with the shape and meaning of language and of our literary heritage, as if the purposeful activity of writing is necessary to force some meaning on the disarray of human events and the formidable forests of nature itself.

Ford’s considerable contribution has been recognized by other poets, by other diplomats sensitive enough to acknowledge his literary as well as his diplomatic achievements, and by the Canadian literary community, who have bestowed upon him the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.