Unearthly Horses

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Mr. Friesen’s fourth collection contains 39 poems that successfully achieve what all poets strive for: a unique, recognizable, and powerful voice. The voice was evident in the poet’s last collection, The Shunning (1980), but it emerges more clearly in Unearthly Horses. The core of the book is the moving sequence entitled “pa poems” — poems addressed to the poet’s father, who died of cancer. Mr. Friesen manages to break through most of the overused emotional clichés about parent cancer deaths in poetry — particularly male poets “coming to terms” with their father’s death which occurred too young, too damn often from cancer, and from frustration and disappointment. These tough, muscular poems zap at the heart of the matter:

I remember those carpenter’s hands

thick fingers drumming the table

fingers tightened around my bicep

lifted me off the kitchen floor

down basement steps

and there we were in front of the furnace

me pleading across your knee                     pa poem 4: naked and nailed

The reader is transported to the world of childhood with all the immediacy of wonder and fear and being in the mysterious company of uncommunicative parents who are larger than life. Then the growing up, the realizing that: “though it didn’t occur to me till now /that pa was riveted by knowing /there was nothing more /on earth for him.” The rest of the collection is written from an adult perspective but with concise imagery, controlled diction, and narrative dynamism: hearing these poems spoken out loud would undoubtedly heighten their considerable emotional impact. Mr. Friesen has given us a wonderful collection and Turnstone Press has produced a most attractive book.