Flying Lessons: Selected Poems

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University, and
the editor of Spring-Feaver: An Anthology of Poems from the Ontario
Division of the League of Canadian Poets.

Flying Lessons is a representative selection of poems by Paulette Jiles.
The poems are drawn from Celestial Navigation (1984), The Jesse James
Poems (1988), and Song to the Rising Sun (1989). The collection also
includes the suite “Ragtime” (previously published in Malahat
Review), which celebrates Scott Joplin’s music and world.

Poems from Song to the Rising Sun illustrate some of the developments
and continuities in Jiles’s work. Her continuing interest in
celebrating the landscape of the Canadian Arctic is reflected in
environmental thoughts as well as spiritual landscapes (“We have to
walk on earth as though we lived here”). In evoking the great cycles
of life within which we must learn to abide in continuous harmony, these
poems rely on a visual imagery that moves them into fairly abstract
terrain. However, Jiles’s difficulty with general images in her Arctic
poems is absent in “Ragtime” and in the Jesse James poems, where a
concern with narrative, and with individual human lives, concretizes
things richly and often comically.