What I Remember from My Time on Earth

Chris Knight is managing editor of the Canadian HR Reporter.

Patricia Young’s poems race across space and time, often drawing
thought-provoking links between the two. The reader of this collection
eavesdrops on the thoughts of an early hominid in a museum display;
surveys the history of kissing, from the Greeks and Celts to the
inhabitants of central Russia and Borneo; and visits Pompeii (“Almost
two thousand years since a world / was obliterated beneath pumice-stone
and ash / and still your fingers are legible on my skin”). In
“Seventeenth Century,” time seems to melt: “It must be dusk, that
century of famine and plagues ... Though the bed we’ve just enjoyed /
is the antique we bought all those years ago / at a farmer’s
auction.”

Love and its loss are explored in many poems, and there are surprising
images throughout. In “Three Days Before Christmas,” the narrator is
“watching three boys swish down / a sidewalk in T-shirts and jeans so
enormous / they might have been small, / fine-boned angels / shuffling
toward / the bright waters of heaven.”