Keeping in Touch

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

“Speak that I may see thee,” said the veteran Elizabethan Ben
Jonson. Eugene McNamara does just that. This collection of new poems and
others published earlier spans a period of 30 years or more. It shows
this teacher of creative writing at his best. Using sequential sights,
sounds, experiences of life, he fashions his personal
commentary—variously reflective, pensive, and nostalgic—as found in
“Keeping in Touch” and “For Margaret” (his wife), as well as in
the more upbeat “My Father’s Watch.” He can also be engagingly
conversational, using the short phrase, the run-on line, the uncompleted
sentence. His images are invariably fresh and original: “water / cold
as a bite into an apple,” the pathetic fallacy of “the dank air in
the green house / holds its breath,” and (perhaps a personal
reminiscence?) “Cold as early morning feet / on bare linoleum.” The
titles he gives his poems are also evocative, as is the book’s cover
design, by Amy Land. As an aside, it may also be worth mentioning one
other contribution McNamara has made to Canadian literature. He founded
the University of Windsor Review in 1965 and was its editor until 1987.