Bread from Stones

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 first epigraph chosen by Peter Stevens to preface his latest
collection of verse is taken from a poem by Stephen Dunn. Part of it
reads: “finally the personal / is all that matters.” This comment is
certainly applicable to Stevens’s own work in general, and to Bread
from Stones in particular. These are intensely human poems drawn for the
most part from unglamorous ordinary experience, and as often as not from
trivial happenings that most of us would not consider “poetic.” An
ad in a casually opened magazine catches his attention—and the result
is a meditative poem. On another occasion he notices the potential for a
poem in the sight of just-emptied grocery bags, part of “a chaos of
kitchen.” And then, of course, there are past memories that insist on
invading—and unsettling—the present.

Stevens offers, then, a poetic running commentary on everyday living,
but at the same time he has a keen eye for the uncomfortable, the
disorienting, and the threatening. One poem begins: “The world can
turn topsy- / turvy on the most ordinary / day—something, someone can
/ give it a kick on the axis.” I quote this initially for the
troubling thought, but it provides a good illustration of how Stevens
manages to evolve a natural, sometimes gruff speaking voice that can
often encompass startling imagery and an enviable range of
language-levels. Even the poems invoking memories from the past are
sharp, vivid, piquant, never weakly nostalgic: “A tumble of people in
my head, / people from long years ago standing / sullen.” The last
word is typical. Sometimes the poems can even contain a mischievous wit;
one is entitled “Remembrances of Things Written by Email.”

And occasionally the experiences are anything but everyday. The opening
poem recreates his daughter’s carefree imagining of bizarre disasters;
another records the poet watching flamingoes being released from
cardboard boxes when just delivered to the Calgary Zoo. Though basically
realist, Stevens has a sense of the magical. This is a rich and
accomplished volume.