The Names Leave the Stones: Poems New and Selected

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

The emotions on display in Berzensky’s poems run the gamut from
lighthearted humor to the devastation experienced by the mother of an
abducted child. In the book’s first four sections, the poet writes of
his childhood, his estrangement from his father when he decided to
become a draft-dodger and move to Canada, and the final days of his
dying mother: “you are a child grown old and pale / dreaming among
your fragile boneclouds / of the heaven you have always longed for.”

The section titled “Solo,” about the poet’s early experiences in
Canada, includes a love poem about his Royal typewriter, which is
attempting to commit suicide because he has been neglecting her. The
next two sections illustrate the poet’s profound love of the natural
world. The haunting poems in the “Under the White Hood” section tell
the story of Louis Riel’s hanging. Poetry and those who create it,
including Eli Mandel and Pat Lowther, are celebrated in “This Imagined
Garden.” The last section, “Luminous Plumes,” includes the
wrenching story of Osip Mandelstam, based on documents and imaginings of
that man’s life and unrecorded death in Siberia. Even greater anguish
is found in the section titled “The Veil,” which explores the
emotions of a mother whose abducted child is never found.

Berzensky has published five books of poetry and his work has appeared
in 40 anthologies. In this collection’s afterword, he writes,
“Poetry is the breathing gift of light and sound that I pluck
sometimes from the silent net of surrounding darkness.”