I Heard That Voice Before: Selected Poems

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

God-fearing Christians and defenders of traditional values, rejoice. Ray Reed, destroyer of evil with his “Sword of Kindness” is here. Vermont-born Ray Reed (1909-1959) in between the many jobs he held as farmhand, truck driver, salesman, organ assembler, etc., wrote poems as a hobby. As a tribute to his memory, his children lovingly put out this book on their family press, Brook Farm Books. The poems are not typeset; it would have been too pretentious if they had been. They have been hand typed on a rather shaky manual typewriter, and this primitive method of production suits the naive innocent quality of the verse.

The poems are divided into five sections: Life’s Mystery; Love’s Mystery; Child; Whimsy; Stories. I won’t go into a detailed structural or thematic analysis, save to say that the poems rhyme, a phenomenon that has not (with rare exceptions) occurred in modern poetry for some time. The following lines give one an idea of what to expect: “I’m waiting for the train to Heaven, / I bought a ticket long ago; / The price I’ve paid with gladness, / To Satan I’ve always answered ‘No’!” Or, “I’d like to take the Milky Way / Out of the sky so blue /And sew on it until I had / Made a starry dress for you.” There is, as you have probably gathered, some tried and true homespun philosophy here, amidst these innocent happy lines; i.e., the final reward by virtue of a pure life; the soothing qualities of early monogamous love; the redeeming qualities of Godly love, and death; the folly of questioning the reason for existence; and the necessity of blind faith. It is not all dead serious, though. There is some humour. After all, Ray Reed in his early life sold a number of jokes and cartoon ideas to magazines. The humour here is most evident in the section “Whimsy.” There are funny poems in this section (including one about the fat big-wigs of a public school squeezing down a slide), but “October 18 1951” is a gem: “I don’t go out in daytime, / I sneak around at night! / I’m so afraid that someone / Will have me shot on sight! / Or they’ll investigate me, / Now listen to me, psst; / Does wearing red wool underwear / Make me a communist?”

There’s really no point buying this book unless you have a terrible yen to escape modern civilization and return to the quiet rustic values of the past, or unless your book budget is large enough to accommodate your every whim.