One Leaf Shaking: Collected Later Poems, 1977-1990

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Robin Skelton has been writing verse for half a century. This book is a
supplement to his Wrestling the Angel: The Collected Shorter Poems,
1947–1977 (1993), and is arranged along similar thematic lines. There
are poems about the natural world, time, love, places visited, and art
(especially the art of poetry), as well as several that are devoted to
the Vancouver Island life and landscape in which he has lived for some
30 years. These are traditional poetic subjects, and Skelton is in many
respects a traditional poet. His command of rhythm and cadence is
unsurpassed, and his poems have the merit of good prose as well as that
of good poetry—no barbaric yawps or craggy ungrammatical fragments for
him. The poems in this collection are as accomplished as the earlier,
and I find them even more impressive and moving.

I have long admired Skelton’s elegance, poise, control, poetic
learning, and technical mastery. But even that did not prepare me for
this superb collection of recent poems. In the average book of verse,
one is accustomed to finding (at best) a modest number of good poems
among many that are indifferent, yet here it would be difficult to find
one dud among the lot. He has worked through to a limpid
simplicity—which leads, paradoxically, to a new depth.

Here is a specimen, appropriately entitled “The Simple”: “Make it
simple / I told myself. / But it was simple. / I didn’t need / to make
it so / but to unmake, / let go the leaves / and see the sky.”

Throughout the volume (which contains more than 200 poems), Skelton
commands an artful ease that is as ancient as the Chinese Tang poets yet
indisputably contemporary. This poetry is delicate, memorable, special.
It deserves a wide readership.