Visible Stars: New and Selected Poems

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University, and
the editor of Spring-Feaver: An Anthology of Poems from the Ontario
Division of the League of Canadian Poets.

Like the metaphysical poets, Bruce Whiteman is concerned with
integrating thought and passion. The two are wondrously fused in a
number of poems. “Ayre” reflects on the limits of language in love,
when words become sighs. The poem sequence “A Nature Murder”
provides a series of Wittgenstein-like snapshots of possible ways of
reconceiving things. Here the starry heavens become a “series of
hinges,” antagonisms between literature and philosophy are healed, and
conventional boundaries between poetry and prose transcended. Elsewhere
the conceptual snapshots collapse into internal contradiction. People
are reduced to Cartesian points of consciousness, and the “outer”
world is regarded as an unworthy poetic subject. The result is a poetry
weakened by hazy abstractions and bereft of passion or context. Whiteman
seems to recognize this when speaking of language that produces only a
“jumble.” Visible Signs is the work of an individual who appears to
be working his way through a poetic crisis.