The Arrivals

Bruce K. Filson was a freelance writer and critic residing in Chesterville, Ontario.

This is Robert Clayton Casto’s second collection of poems. His first was A Strange and Fitful Land. Casto is co-editor of the literary journal Waves and lives in Toronto, where Studio Press is located.

Such virtuoso voices as Cleanth Brooks and Ralph Gustafson highly praise Casto’s poetry, citing its “vigor” and “delicacy,” its “drama” and “innocence” respectively. I do find it vigorous, but also pretentious. These 19 poems are curious, competent, and forceful, but also ungainly, puerile, and out of focus. They are ambitious but not obscurantist, and I praise him for that. The poet takes a sardonic view of humanity, preferring marginal oddities and Baudelairean spleen. Life, it seems, is nasty and pointless. The possibility of redemption, or some little light, is introduced so that it can be squelched and spit on. I really wonder how the book gave Gustafson “pleasure.” In spite of this Weltanschauung, the poet states “because we are less than gods / we are holy, holy, holy.”

In the final analysis, I would compare it to some of today’s art that looks like bad graffiti and blunt out in my naive innocence: “Gee, that’s bad graffiti!”