Charge

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

After 19 years as a teacher and educational administrator in Nova Scotia, Leigh Faulkner, a native of Bass River, Nova Scotia, has become a full-time poet. Charge is his first published collection of poems.

Most of the 18 poems suggest night, darkness, ice, or winter, with an underlying sense of emptiness, numbness, and resignation. The poet’s choice of words and images enforces the mood: “night, thick as old blood,” “your thighs, / graceful guillotines,” “knife-eyed hunters,” “long shadows are knives,” sunrises are “blood sacrifices.” Darkness, and all it connotes, is threatening and oppressive; the poet responds passively: “the wind / shall not find me asleep / during the dark hours.” “Silence and wings: the dichotomy of excellence,” he proclaims in “A White Mold Lengthens.” “Not even my wife knows my love of silence,” he admits in “Charge.” His love of silence and his preoccupation with night and darkness make the poet’s world a still-life. A dead mouldy feeling emerges, culminating in the final section of non-love poems. “Love / Is dark / And has great weight — / like suicide.” To this poet love is the darkness, just as threatening and annihilating.

The poems themselves are lifeless, flat, and unstimulating. It is difficult to pinpoint why. There is a small possibility that it is intentional to support the theme. Many of his words are underworked, requiring a little more expansiveness to be intelligible. Some images are forced and difficult: “leaves roll edges away from the sky.” Faulkner almost — but not quite — succeeds in writing good poetry; something is missing.