Climbing Croagh Patrick

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.

Sixty-four of the 78 poems in this collection are sonnets, though
Timothy Brownlow rings some changes on the traditional sonneteering
conventions. First, they do not employ rhyme. Second, the title is
always part of the poem, constituting an extra half-line. Third, each
sonnet works up to a final line that partakes of the commonsense
directness of a folk proverb (examples include “Nods are good as winks
to a blind horse,” “Let your anger go with the setting sun,”
“Scabby sheep like to have scabby comrades”). They range from the
semiformal to the endearingly colloquial, and show how, in the hands of
a truly talented practitioner, originality can still manifest itself in
a highly traditional form.

Brownlow was born and brought up in Ireland, and his cultural allusions
and references hark back either to Irish writers (Yeats, Joyce, Mangan)
or to the British rural tradition (Wordsworth, Clare, Bewick, Hardy).
But religious figures, painters, and cosmopolitan writers are also
generously invoked. Brownlow, then, is an unabashedly intellectual poet,
though he wears his learning lightly and elegantly. Indeed, his Irish
capacity to embrace a personal cultural tradition readily and
unselfconsciously is one from which many determinedly Canadian poets
could learn.

I am deeply impressed by the civilized sincerity of these poems.
Brownlow makes no effort to attach himself to the fashionable
mainstream, but instead confidently explores the terms of his own
nature, interests, and instincts. Paradoxically, his blend of
sophisticated allusion and earthy folk wisdom is achieved without
tension or fuss.

The collection ends with a superb poem in memory of W.H. Auden,
apparently dating back to his death in 1973. It is an appropriate
tribute to an esteemed mentor from a young poet who, like Auden, takes
his art seriously.

A teacher at Malaspina University-College in British Columbia, Brownlow
is a careful craftsman who manipulates words and rhythms with a
combination of verve and dignity. He is a welcome addition to the roster
of genuinely disciplined Canadian poets.