Crossing the Salt Flats

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.

Christopher Wiseman invariably writes poems about basic human
experiences, and in this collection, one of his finest, he is especially
concerned with his family and ancestors. He emigrated from England as a
young man, and his wife has relatives in the United States, so many of
these poems involve travel—but travel to one’s human origins.
Because the emphasis is on emotions we all share, however, the poems are
never obviously or embarrassingly private; on the contrary, they are
readily accessible and make an immediate impact—though their
subtleties may not reveal themselves until they have been reread and
fully absorbed.

He is also a traditionalist insofar as he does not believe in poetry as
either psychological therapy or heart-on-the-sleeve confession. He knows
that it is an art, and that human qualities fully reveal themselves only
when they are presented with sensitivity and rhythmic skill. Most of
Wiseman’s poems presuppose a basic iambic pentameter, but with
extraordinary musical delicacy, he offers us cadences that imitate
educated ordinary speech, that can convey pathos, resignation, and a
remembrance that is always more than mere nostalgia.

There are 40 poems here (I wish, by the way, that Porcupine’s Quill
had provided a table of contents). All of them are worthwhile, and
three-quarters of them are poems I shall want to return to again and
again. Most of them are poems of muted sadness, poems of an aging man
coming to terms with the remorselessness of time and an uncertain
future. They are mature, accomplished, civilized. And this is rare
nowadays (two poems, different in tone from the rest, that attack
postmodernist trendsetters with magnificent rhetorical savagery explain
why). The volume ends sombrely, with an uncharacteristic but effective
millennial poem, distanced to Russia in 1899, and a sobering image of
“howling ... at night” that was “coming closer.” These are
melancholy poems, but for anyone depressed by the factitiousness of so
much of our much-vaunted contemporary verse, they are as exhilarating as
they are fulfilling.