Ten Thousand Views of Rain

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Terry Watada’s poems are the fruit of a lyric sensibility and a fine
mind. Nurtured by two cultures, the dual inheritance of Japanese
Canadians, they reflect that richness along with “the stickiness of
memory.”

The form is free, the connections suggestive, often tenuous. Images
tumble one on another, some more powerful than others, like “a wound
of bad weather” and the image of rage “vomiting” a word. Watada
plays with words, ideas, and emotions, even with individual letters,
like a juggler or magician. Childhood is “like a slow tumble of
thunder / as my eyes liquify ... and then close / shut with / the glue
of night.”

In the final section, “Nikkei Monogatari: Impressions of the
Japanese-Canadian Internment Experience,” Watada catches contrary
moods such as joy at the beauty of first snow in Sandon’s valley and
smothering claustrophobia “in the grip of a clenched fist.”
Tradition and modern life mesh in his imagination.

Watada, a Torontonian, is the author of one previous poetry collection,
A Thousand Homes (1995); a story collection, Daruma Days (1997); a play
published in Canadian Mosaic; and several nonfiction works. Ten Thousand
Views of Rain is a slim volume with a triple punch—lyric, aesthetic,
and intellectual.