Unlit Roads

John Walker is a professor of Spanish at Queen’s University.

Bernard Heydorn was born in Georgetown, Guyana, but has lived in Canada
since 1965. The Newmarket, Ontario, resident is a novelist, playwright,
poet, and newspaper columnist. His previous works have dealt with his
West Indian past, especially the 1950s in Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados,
and Bahamas.

Unlit Roads is a miscellany of prose and poetry based on Heydorn’s
life in two worlds, the Caribbean and North America. The first part of
the collection contains 39 articles on such diverse topics as codfish,
lighthouses, American cowboys, pop culture, birds, forests, cotton,
photography, telephones, outhouses, circuses, clotheslines, hucksters,
folk songs, calypso, hairstyles, and money. His technique, generally, is
to give an overall history of his topic and then present national (West
Indian and Canadian) and personal manifestations of the chosen theme.
Visits to the Gaspé, England, and other places (outside of his two main
worlds) round out these reminiscences of departed friends and family and
a disappearing way of life.

The poetry is divided into two sections. “Caribbean Calling” is
made up of 23 poems (some in the West Indian dialect) that evoke some of
the themes treated in the articles—Christmas flowers, market life,
carnival, and especially the poet’s valley home. “The Castaway”
contains 41 poems that reflect the Canadian side of Heydorn’s life
(Winnipeg, Toronto, Quebec); in these generally more philosophical
poems, he ponders life and death, past and future, time and memory,
religion and God, the love of his wife, and his own mortality.

Unlit Roads ultimately represents a search for roots, a coming to terms
with the here and now, and a preparation for the future.