Close to Home

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.

Like the late Ralph Gustafson, one of the two poets to whom Close to
Home is dedicated, Raymond Souster has published an extraordinary number
of books of verse. These have been appearing regularly since the 1940s.
Yet whereas Gustafson’s final volume was as crisp and eloquent as
anything else he had ever written, this latest Souster collection is
numbingly fore-castable. The back cover makes the point unintentionally
by announcing: “This is Souster at his most familiar.” All too
familiar.

Souster has always published too much. Where other poets sift their
work and publish only what they consider their best, Souster would seem
never to have discarded anything. This, at least, is the impression one
carries away from the present book. The poems are readable enough, yet
they fail to impress. The interest depends upon the intrinsic nature of
their subject matter (including poems on the deaths of both his
parents), not upon the verbal excitement generated by a poetic use of
language. One poem is described as having been taken verbatim from a
speech by J.S. Woodsworth in the House of Commons, and too many of the
others suggest mere sliced prose.

Characteristically, Souster has an answer to such strictures—in a
squib-poem titled “Dear Defamers”: “Let all those who hate / or
despise my poetry, / step forward one by one, / so I may shake their
hand. // Without you, dear defamers, / I might easily have despaired /
and given up years ago.” A clever piece of defiance, but my point is
that such verse conveys and exhausts its meaning at first reading. At a
second reading, the thinness becomes apparent.

Close to Home contains a number of poems from his continuing
“Pictures from a Long-Lost World” series (one of which, “A German
Soldier Photographs the Warsaw Ghetto, 1944,” seems to me the most
successful poem in the book), several other poems set in World War II,
and the usual lyrics and squib-poems about everyday life in suburban
Toronto. For those who know the best of Souster’s earlier work, the
sense of déjа vu is disappointing.