Shadow Weather

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

Charles Lillard is an intensely regional writer. His region is the
Pacific Northwest, especially the stretch from Washington to Alaska. But
he does not usually write about grand vistas of land or sea, or of a
generalized West Coast. Instead, he focuses on specific sites. This book
is a veritable gazette of coastal place names—too many, perhaps, for
the reader to take in.

Lillard is also a poet of high realism and of macho masculinity. At
times the stance can be tiresome, even sexist, but when he avoids
swagger and sticks to the truth of the experience the effect can be
magical, as in this passage about testing himself by doing something
dangerous: “Once I dove from an A-frame’s highest strut. / When I
was down as far as my dive would take me, / my ears bursting inside the
deep closeness, / a chivvy of light bloomed, closed, bloomed again, /
and I was a coho mesmerized by a lure / in that cold darkness”
(“Petroglyph at Tidemark”). Ironically, through an act driven by
ego, he goes beyond self and finds a new identification with nature.

Charles Lillard died while I was preparing this review. His gifts will
be missed.