God Loves Us Like Earthworms Love Wood

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

As long as there are some good or very good poems in a collection it does not matter if one has to wade through recurrent images or repetitive phrasing. One overlooks this in the hope of finding another gem. In God Loves Us Like Earthworms Love Wood Allan Safarik produced some excellent poems. One is “Instructions from the Soul”, which, as a political poem, avoids all of the pitfalls of that genre. This poem refers to the political situation in El Salvador and Latin America. It is not directly satirical or outrageous, but it makes its point with a stunning relationship between a person gathering seaweed on a beach and a faceless revolutionary.

Safarik’s poem begins by describing a person gathering seaweed at the edge of a rotting town. This person is struggling to make a living. He is faceless, like one of the crowd, perhaps an innocent victim of a stray soldier’s bullets — a person who might easily develop a shoot-them-before-they-shoot-me mentality, a person whom the generals fear. Suddenly the relationship between the person on the beach and the faceless contra leaps into focus:

to make a living

With this connection the poem rises from the level of today’s news into good literature. As in other poems in this collection, the poet himself becomes part of the process he observes. The even flow of line and his lyrical eye explore the human-animal correspondences. The intense images are stretched to the breaking point in the process of examining natural events. For example, a crab grows into a huge creature that scuttles into Saskatoon — is this to shake up landlocked governments or smug minds? One nice touch is the openness of Safarik’s final lines. There is usually no attempt to wrap up a message in a neat package. The poems pause and subside, rather like gentle waves. In many ways the questions that are raised — of social relationships, love, beauty — have no tidy solutions. And where is the author? In front of us, and this is his occupation, and his living.