Poems for Little Cataraqui

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island.

This book is a study in miniature of humankind’s origins and
development, as applied to 394 hectares of Ontario land known as Little
Cataraqui. Eric Folsom sedulously traces this evolution through a series
of timescapes. The earlier poems have a hymnal quality about them,
encapsulating spiritual heritage. Indeed, “Palaeo-Ontario” might
well be called an ode. The late poems are more matter-of-fact in style,
as befits their historical content. There are occasional twinkles of
humor, as in the poem about Champlain’s lost compass, and occasional
personifications of natural phenomena, as when sugar maples “like
solemn families / walked the hills.” Folsom expresses the moral for
today’s Cataraqui Creek in a short prefatory note: in order to
preserve an endangered natural inheritance, the memory of a former
spiritual heritage should in no way be discounted. A helpful
drawn-to-scale map appears at the end of the book.