Brides of the Stream

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

Mr. Rosenblatt’s new book is a substantial collection of about seventy interconnected poems ranging over eighty pages; actually, it is one long poem or poetic sequence about the metaphysics of trout fishing on Vancouver Island. If “trout are always writing aquatic novels,” then it follows that some flyfishermen are justified in writing paeans to their muse, the elusive and mystical “Order of the Aquatic Tabernacle” — i.e., trout. Many other writers, such as Roderick Haig-Brown and Norman Maclean, have written important literary works about trout and flyfishing, so Mr. Rosenblatt is in good company and he makes the most of it. This is by no means a clichéd collection, despite the prevalence of the theme in other works; on the contrary, it is completely original and identifiably bizarre, as are the poet’s other works. The narrative line is loosely about a flyfisherman’s meeting with his dear, departed uncle, named Nathan, who has been reincarnated as an irascible trout warning his overzealous nephew to keep away “from my brides.” The poet’s point of view is presented remarkably from two perspectives — the flyfisherman’s and the trout’s — and this point of view shifts back and forth, reeling in a whole host of major poetic themes along the way. As the narrator finally becomes what he beholds, “wooing...in another dream motel,” the poems slide into the subaqueous underwater realm, and a regenerative world is born, one that is both comic and romantic and one that is exceedingly tentative and continually dangerous: “abandoned /to an abstract maggot dreaming snow.” Powerful, fluid images abound throughout, and a reader can almost feel the sensation of moving upriver through the poems. Mr. Rosenblatt has produced a totally original work that lingers in the mind, characterized by first-rate poetry.