Impromptus

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

This is a book that deserves only one response: enthusiasm. Like Yeats, Ralph Gustafson has reached his Byzantium and has learned to sing the songs of “what is past, or passing, or to come.” These poems find Gustafson immersed in, yet also somehow out of, time, lifted out by the artifice of art.

The voice of a crotchety old man rasping out his words of wisdom alternates with a sprightly wit and lightness of touch which, ironically, is most often invoked when he is staring into the abyss of death. By immersing himself in art, particularly music, he finds life. Or, rather, he finds the truth which illuminates life, which is in life, but which can only be seen in the clarified reality of art. I must confess that I’ve usually found Gustafson a bit too coy and precious, but there’s none of that here. This is true poetry.