2 Legs in the Afternoon

Roger Nash is a philosophy professor at Laurentian University and the
author of Night Flying.

Castlebury’s first book of poems is a particularly revealing record of
a poet’s growing awareness of failings and achievements in his craft.
He seeks to reject undue influence by great writers of the past, for
this produces a “sickness” of poetic thought and language: one form
of words merely imitates another without being true to wellsprings of
experience. However, he does this in a poem that could learn from poetic
achievements of the past, since it is dotted with such lifeless
abstractions as “truth” and “beauty.”

On occasion, Castlebury tries to avoid the dangers of imitation,
abstraction, and gesturing in poems reminiscent of surrealist automatic
writing. A danger of this style is that sense is not created in the poem
as a whole. Castlebury is aware of this, calling one such poem a
“House of Cards.” But isn’t a poem about the failure of sense a
failure as a poem? Castlebury is at his best in poems where the
speaker’s voice is that of someone elderly and forgetful. Here
reshufflings of form help shape sense.

Castlebury is masterful in his craft in a number of autobiographical
poems that occur in the last half of the book. In “Seeds,” his
poetic voice as a remembered child tells of his releasing lobsters into
the ocean. The trustful voice also gains its own magnificent release
from the stilted, disassociated, and self-conscious in poetry.