A Coastal Range

Bob Lincoln is Director of Acquisitions at the University of Manitoba
Libraries.

Reading Charles Lillard’s fourth collection of poems, A Coastal Range, is a pleasure. Small ironies nip at my mind; this is not poetry of mountains, in spite of the cataloguing-in-publication information that labels it so. The poems are Lillard/are the land/are the sea. Imagination and reality follow a common chart here, and connect. The poems are not descriptions but events into themselves. The mist rolling in becomes the breath of the priest Feodor. Throughout the collection the language is lucid, exact, and rich. There are some fine ironies and logical contradictions. In “Orbea,” Lillard sets the poem off exactly with:

When poets gather for this

or that, better to stand

back, make excuses

and ends with an image of the Pacific pulping stone. Some poems have appeared elsewhere and show changes here. They allow the reader to hear, touch, and see because they are true. “Neilstrom Island” captures for a moment that state of innocent male pre-adolescence where the child hears the language of adults but does not understand; there are tensions of breaking away and running home.

Charts and navigators are notorious for giving reality to non-existent lands and tidal races; but their words live, the psychology is correct. Lillard teaches words — fireweed, mull, burl, argillite, head-gasket, Arne, Klu-sa, Fynn, Dane — and gives us time and people. And the paradoxes: there should be no poets, only a few poems, winter brothers.