Cape Enragé: Poems on a Raised Beach

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.

The attractive dust jacket, designed by Lochhead himself, reproduces a
panoramic photograph showing a stony beach in the foreground, then hard
sand and an approaching tide, and in the background further landforms,
clouds, and sky. This is the physical setting for his newest series of
short, meditative poems that present the solitary poet confronting and
humanizing his landscape. As he remarks in a preface, “Most of the
time I was alone in the strong company of the clouds, the sea, the
beach, and the stones.”

The book consists of a hundred short poems, each between one and seven
lines in length, and reminiscent of his memorable collection High Marsh
Road, which appeared in 1980, and the later Upper Cape Poems and
Dykelands (both 1989). As before, these poems are made up of fragmented
phrases that reproduce, by a stream-of-consciousness effect, the process
by which environment impresses itself on the mind. The following poem is
representative: “the surety of stone, the raised beach / is in a mist
today. fog. low cloud. / but the stones. the stones stay. their /
presence breeds some kind of confidence.”

This is a style that Lochhead has made his own, a carefully honed
personal mode of expression that has developed gradually over a
dedicated lifetime. He has now been publishing for over 40 years, but it
is in the last twenty that he has indisputably perfected his craft. And
this collection shows him at his best. These poems express “the
certainty / of sea, sky, and beach,” each formed as smoothly as a
sea-polished stone. In this delicate, eloquent, and enigmatic
collection, Lochhead captures the tang of the sea waves, and celebrates
both the maritime world of plant, bird, sand, and rock and the human
aspiration toward love and creativity. Inner and outer blend; sea and
flesh become one; the poet dances and the stones speak.