Nocturnes: Poems of the Night

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

At the age of 84, Vancouver surrealist poet, fabulist, and painter
Michael Bullock just keeps rolling along, crafting his short, polished
gems of nature transmogrified. In recent years, Bullock has intermingled
retrospective work with new creations, providing the reader with the
opportunity to revisit earlier, more expressionistic work and see its
movement into more austere and steady rhythms and cadences.

Nocturnes: Poems of Night is a hymn to night in all its transcendental,
magical forms. Each poem presents a distinctive and original image of
night. The jagged edge of “Night reflected in a broken mirror / sheds
purple blood, gashed by the glass / flowers blossom beneath its skin /
erupt in a rash of leaves and petals” contrasts starkly with the
alliterative assonance of the poem “Night Scene”: “The sea moves
slowly / along the gloomy shore / the ripples glisten with glints of
moonlight / as they creep up the beach.”

Wings of the Black Swan includes selections from poems written during
the period from 1936 to 2001, as well as new, unpublished work.
Bullock’s imagery, always powerful and vivid, retains in these later
poems the emotional intensity of the earlier work, though with a
newfound tranquillity and strength. Color is dominant in many of the
poems: “The night lies beside us / a great black dog / with its head
on its paws,” he writes; and again, “A white song would blossom on
the ceiling / and someone wearing a green hat would take it away in a
basket.”

Bullock has now published more than three dozen volumes of poetry and
prose, and is the subject of a major critical study by Jack Stewart (The
Incandescent Word, 1990). He deserves the increasing readership he is
now receiving.