The End of the Age

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

In the afterword, A.F. Moritz writes that The End of the Age could be
read to mean “the goal of ageing.” Nevertheless, there is something
in these 27 works that repeatedly calls to mind a fin de siиcle
bleakness, and the transition from one epoch to another. The poem
“Search and Research” begins: “To reach the country of the savage
giants they had to start / from their own desert, from its empty cities
and pass its pits and trenches.” The poem “Prehistory” opens with
an eerie, threatening image: “Around and over large metal wedges, men
with metal rods / were creeping.”

The overwhelming feeling is of decay, melancholy, and sadness, of the
fall of an empire—perhaps the one in which we live, or perhaps an
imagined one. Or perhaps it is a more personal passing. There is a
repeated sense of Yeats’s phrase from “Sailing to Byzantium”:
“That is no country for old men.” There is little to anchor these
poems to a particular time or place. They are mood pieces, heavy, solemn
and symbolic, and as with most dense poetry, they are best absorbed
slowly and thoughtfully.