Before We Had Words

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.

Sheldon Zitner spent his working years as a professor of English with a
special interest in Shakespeare and the drama of Shakespeare’s period.
Before retirement, he had a distinguished career as a highly respected
teacher, editor, and scholar who wrote critical prose with clarity,
elegance, and a decidedly dry wit. In 1999, he published his first
volume of poems, The Asparagus Feast, in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry
Series, and Before We Had Words follows now in the same series.

Zitner is on the one hand a traditional poet in the Romantic tradition,
writing out of his own intimate experiences; there are moving and often
anguished poems drawn from the memory of past love and past sufferings,
and others equally moving and anguished about old age (plus occasional
more sombre poems sparked by his American/Jewish origins). On the other
hand, however, he is technically a modernist. He can, when appropriate,
produce a deft poem in traditional metre, though for the most part he
writes so-called “free verse”—but in the rare, proper way, each
line beautifully cadenced and polished. Many poems are teasingly
understated, with the endings at a first reading startlingly abrupt but
on further consideration oddly compelling. A poem about a Chinese
painting strengthens the impression that he harks back to the ancient
but timeless tradition of poets like Li Po and Tu Fu, whose verse drew
on immediate personal experience yet remained readily accessible.

Here, for instance, are the opening lines of a poem called “Sketches
/ for Peter Kahn”: “Night riders on the Bloor Street subway, / all
shapes, all sizes, every class and color—how your fingers would have
eyed / such opulence ...” You do not need to know the work of the
artist in question to respond to that. If you admire the unostentatious
clarity, precision, and control of rhythm in these lines (and the
wonderful rightness of “opulence”), you will be impressed by the
whole book.