Voices from the Cradle, Echoes from the Grave: A Volume of Verse

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island and an honorary chief of the Mi’kmaq of Prince
Edward Island.

“Webster was much possessed by death,” T.S. Eliot once wrote. So is
septuagenarian Hugh Oliver. In this volume of verse, he ponders the
nature and purpose of life and death. His assessment is frank
depressingly pessimistic: after life comes “the long night / that ends
without tomorrow.”

Possessed of a very wide reading background, Oliver is a master of the
short, telling phrase. Witness, for example, the heavy, tense irony of
“Paleozoic Sea” or of “cryogenic bliss.” The night nurse
“steals like a thief through the room,” while the hospital doctor
wears “the seamless robe of his authority.” Man alone is a
“vicious omnivore.” At one point, he turns the shaft of satire on
himself: “wisdom is something / I have yet to discover.”

Hugh Oliver shows courage in presenting this “self-confessional,”
but it is not likely—or perhaps even intended—to appeal to the
general reader.