The Presence of Fire

Les McLeod taught in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

Some of the 76 poems in this volume have appeared in one of George Amabile’s previous four volumes, and others were published in large and little magazines throughout North America before their current collection. Amabile, born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1936, now teaches English at the University of Manitoba. Earle Birney has talked of poetry as “the art of appearing simple and offering complexity,” and this is the effect of George Amabile’s poetry, which is characterized by a frequently confessional use of the first person, an urge to narrative, and a prevailing clarity of language and imagery. He resembles Birney also in that many of his poems are set in Latin America and Europe, as well as in Canada and the United States. Clearly, many of Amabile’s poems are autobiographical, but they are saved from being personal in any tactless way by their honesty and irony. These are especially evident in the book’s longest poem, “Generation Gap,” in which Amabile reveals the angry, even violent relationship between him and his father. There is great love and pity and understanding in Amabile’s elegy, even though these are the very qualities the father could never show the son. In six pages of poetry, Amabile does not once pluck a false string. The poem concludes:

I got drunk once

in the wind & streetlights.

The stones were old

the air clear

the moonlight very sharp over the bay.

I wanted to punch the pain out of your head.

I wanted to talk.

But there were green smells

& the withered folds at your throat were disastrous.

Your scratched voice blew off in the wind.

Amabile’s natural images are particularly strong — one poem, “Gaspé,” could almost have been written by a Confederation poet. Its images (and those in, for example, “Prairie” and “Spring Tree”) coalesce for me into a satisfying whole. Too often, however, the concluding image or idea in a poem fell flat or, alternatively, felt forced into significance. This is the last paragraph of “Accidental Death,” in memory of the poet’s young brother:

But when I pressed

my palm against the sculpted heap

of crossed hands in his coffin

vision drained off into the ground.

But finally there is no denying the evocative power of Amabile’s poetry. Here is the haiku, “Vermeer”:

Light hovers

at the foot of a Dutch bridge.

It is morning.

No one comes.