Stream Under Flight

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

The prose-poems of that make up this collection are discrete, lyrical,
and reflective in character. Recalling the old Chinese tradition (or
rather, the tradition of translated Chinese poems) of the retired, or
cashiered, or self-exiled scholar who has left the Imperial service for
a secluded rural hermitage, the poems are very personal, but evince a
self-critical, ironic detachment. What sentimentality exists is tempered
by a sardonic, Swiftian-like touch.

There are many beauties of phrasing, and the image projected sometimes
has deep spiritual significance, as in “then your days will fall like
leaves from a tree that never dies” or the more gnomic “don’t
waste time on frowns and woe. Your ashes can sleep for eternity.” The
title of the poem “Cold Mountain” has double significance: the
manmade mountain built over garbage, visible from Saskatoon; and the
echo of the Chinese poem of that name. Clark is a close observer of
nature in all her seasons: witness the image of a night sky in
“Orion’s diamonds, strewn over black silk” or “a solo magpie in
the lattice of elms, tail feathers flashing in the bitter wind.”

Stream Under Flight is very much a bedside book to be browsed through
at random. Throughout, Clark maintains a mature, consistent style and
tone, urbane, lyrical, sensitive, meditative. In a world of manmade
mundane detail, he can still see a deeper, transpersonal principle: what
else, but the Tao?