Divinations

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Allan Brown, former editor of the prestigious literary magazine Quarry,
has published poetry in newspapers and journals across Canada. Most of
the poems in Divinations, his 11th collection of poetry, have appeared
either in previous collections or in such literary journals as The
Antigonish Review, Dandelion, Poetry Canada, and Quarry.

Divinations is about celebrating those moments when the immediate and
the domestic are transformed into the mythic and the archetypal. This
metamorphosis is examined in the opening piece, “Garden or
Wilderness,” in which the poet suggests that opposites, rather than
being in direct antithesis, often interpret, and that the absolute
abstraction is also the source of all definitions. Whether dealing with
myth, religious insight, sensual awakening, or loss, the poet appears to
be striving for a sense of balance. The garden and the wilderness are
metaphors for the opposites he seeks to reconcile.

The apotheosis of Brown’s poetry is the belief that earth is
constantly in search of heaven and that even though it is an aspiration
that cannot succeed, the journey itself is nevertheless worthwhile. To
draw on the theme of antithesis, the poems that make up Divinations are
challenging yet accessible, abstract yet moving, and subtle yet
wonderfully revealing.