Collected Poems of Raymond Souster: Volume Three, 1962-74

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

A poet is like a baseball player. If he fails 70% of the time he’s doing well. If he fails only 60% of the time he’s one of the greats. Souster is good but not great. There is a lot of failure in this collection, including banality, overt cleverness, and an irritating tendency to tell us, in the last line, what the poem really means. But, as he takes us along on his life’s journey from year 41 to year 53, Souster does use language to do some solid contact hitting with reality.

Youth is over. There are fewer new discoveries. Nostalgia becomes a factor. Thoughts about death emerge. He becomes one of a generation of men who look back to the “good times” of World War II.

This last point is for me the essence of Souster’s multi-volume Collected Poems. It is a portrait of a generation, in reality two portraits: one of the generation of artists who took Canadian writing into the modern era, and one of the generation of Canadians born in the twenties, and now approaching retirement, who have had to cope with so much of the madness of this century. To his own generation Souster offers self-knowledge, to succeeding generations a chronicle of how we got to where we are.