Seasonal

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

Seasonal is an attractively designed book composed of twelve sonnets (or variations on that form), one for each month of the year. The poems are songs of innocence and experience, reflecting the words and deeds of a year in the life of the poet’s young daughter, Nicole. These words and deeds are combined with, and given form by, the poet’s own, adult, impressions of the world.

Through Nicole, the world is made new again for her father. The young girl sees the world as the still centre of the universe, her innocent perceptions recorded in a poem such as “Nicole: January 6”:

“I go round and round,” you say, “become dizzy

when I think of the world turning.”

Similarly, the gleeful ease with which a child can overcome in her own mind the physical laws of the cosmos is seen in “Nicole: June 21”:

around the world at arm’s length, your laughter

muted as your feet swing round, circle above

Wearied of this flight, I spin you, gently down.

At once you leap lightly into my arms and laugh:

“Look, I tricked gravity! That’s what pulls you

The child is master of her universe, and, it seems, the forces of life. Yet, reminders of a darker side in the midst of this innocence are present throughout the year; they are symbolized, among other things, by the madrona tree, which “sheds leaves and bark through summer.”

Although each of these poems plays upon the same theme, each is made unique through variations in rhythm, length and division of lines, and subtle internal rhyme. Seasonal is a brief, disciplined, joyful dance through the year, weaving together youth and old age, innocence and experience, into a life-affirming wholeness.