Science Lessons

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

Science Lessons is a series of sonnets about a boy in his early teens
from urban B.C. who has gotten into some sort of trouble and has been
sent to the B.C. interior for rehabilitation. It apparently works. I say
apparently because the entire narrative structure of this series of
sonnets is a bit hazy. I know it’s all kind of Wordsworthian, with the
young lad finding redemption through a close association with nature.

It takes a certain bravery for a poet to take on something as big as a
sonnet sequence in his first book. And, possibly, New is a bit
foolhardy, because the collection is not a success. For one thing, these
poems are leaden. There is little joy or uplift in them. A sonnet needs
lightness; it is a lyric—a short, personal musical piece. These have
too much gravity weighing them down.

Furthermore, I find the voice puzzling and inappropriate. It would
appear that the centre of consciousness of this collection is a boy of
about 14, yet the diction does not match that consciousness. The
following is typical: “Is growing up congenital, he asks himself, /
and is he nothing more than blastula, doomed / embryo, fulfilling
nature’s destiny? / Or is he clay, coagulated till he’s / bent,
stretched, moulded to a local norm?” (“Standard Deviation”).
Pretty heavy stuff for someone in Grade 9. I should add that these do
not appear to be recollection poems in which an older and wiser man is
looking back on the boy he once was. This is a book of professor
poetry—academic verse by someone who is intimately familiar with the
tradition, but not skilled enough to write his way into it.