Kurgan

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.

Don Coles’s latest book of poems (his ninth, if one includes a
“Selected” published in England) contains 18 new poems and revised
versions of 15 earlier ones, and in some respects it can be regarded as
a celebration of his 25 years as a published poet. His first book,
Sometimes All Over (1975), established him as one of our most dedicated
poets of meditation, circling around a small number of crucial themes:
memory, childhood, the responsibility of art—especially the
photograph—in freezing the moment and so, paradoxically, reminding us
of the inexorability of change and the tyranny of time.

All these subjects recur here, yet the older poet can bring to them a
greater experience of life and a more sharply honed poetic craft. He has
always been able to catch the immediacy of seemingly casual thought in
his rhythms, and this is managed with a wonderful effortlessness—or,
rather, a convincing illusion of effortlessness—here. One feels that
Coles has reached the stage when he can do anything he wants to do with
words and cadences. The combination of apparent colloquialness with the
exquisite mot juste is masterly.

For example, the title poem refers to a Russian burial mound. Coles
retells the story of an authentic excavation, reproducing the
archeologist’s feelings as the body of a 20-year-old princess who died
2000 years ago is exposed (a palpable but never vulgarly conspicuous
sexual element runs through the poem). His thoughts as a scholar and his
emotions as a man are deftly blended in a wonderfully poised monologue
that has the delicacy, elusiveness, and sadness of his much acclaimed
“Forests of the Medieval World.”

The reprinted poems are seldom radically revised; for the most part,
comparison shows a fastidious concern to get the poem exactly right by
altering line lengths and occasionally replacing a merely adequate word
with a more suitable one. These are the signs of a truly dedicated
poet—and Coles is one of our finest.