A Sparrow's Food: Poems 1971/82

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

A Sparrow’s Fool, Shikatani’s first major collection, offers the reader a wide-ranging selection of his most important poetry from the seventies and early eighties. Meticulously crafted, the poems in this volume reflect Shikatani’s skill in handling various forms of the genre.

The poetry is organized into six sections: “Bird and Other Desires,” “Red Leaf,” “Focus,” “Photographs,” “Poems from Europe,” and “A Sparrow’s Food.” The title section features some fine experimental work, such as sound pictures (“Language: voice hitting the form…”), a few concrete poems, and eight poems entitled “Movement Study series.” The “Red Leaf’ section also contains some quietly successful experimental poems, most notably “Day Alphabet.” But Shikatani seems to be at his best in his imagistic poems. These poems are often noticeable for their sparsity of verbs: images are suspended, impressions arrested. Shikatani is master of the stark, bare image which draws in the reader, fusing thought and emotion. These lines from “Hot Steam from Pouring” are an example of this technique:

black button beside teacup,

farther from teapot.

black button cradles

embracing teacup

embracing teapot.

now, there is just this china hand.

Shikatani recreates language in his poetry, easily transforming the common into the elegant and the normal into the bizarre. In “After a Reading of

the tree stands,

makes me a farce.

driving me crazy,

in my very face.

This sense of perplexed delight in the face of his newly created realities fills much of the book. A Sparrow’s Food is a collection that should help to establish Shikatani as a poet of some significance.