Nightwatch: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1996

Hugh Oliver is the former editor-in-chief of the OISE Press.

This volume contains several of Dennis Lee’s longer, previously
published works (“Civil Elegies,” “The Death of Harold Ladoo,”
“Riffs”), a dozen or so of his shorter poems, and some new pieces,
including a powerful sequence called “Nightwatch,” a pessimistic
recapitulation of Lee’s creative experience. “Sweet jesus it’s /
hard. Hard to / sit and accept—there is nothing more to imagine, /
right now in my life; and also, how / empty the night gets.”

That Lee is a good poet, there is no doubt. Whether he is a great poet,
it is perhaps too soon to judge. Like most modern poets, he writes
directly about his feelings and draws on per-

sonal imagery. The question is whether he presents the particular in
such a way that the generality is apparent, and whether the range of
experience on which he draws is deemed significant. The answer to these
questions must wait a few years.