2023-10-05
Glassford offers a collection of poems styled like works of the Romantic era.
The works here stick to metered iambs and end-rhymes, and they’re accompanied by photos by the poet’s wife, Lynn Glassford. The poems are predominantly about the natural world, as in “The killer of the Reef”: “The great white shark never sensed, smelled or heard / Approaching death seemed so absurd / So he sojourned on in a lazy quest / Deciding which meal would taste the best.”Sometimes a playful tone disrupts the more dramatic moments, as in “The Eagles Dance”: “Silently sailing and soaring free / Not tethered tightly to the earth like me.” There are frequent references to classical music as metaphor in the natural world, as in “A Winter Storm”: “The symphonic storm of winter had come to its sonata end.”Finally, in “Solitude,” the poet introduces stanzas, which provide a little space to breathe in a description of a placid lake; the quatrains are also italicized, centered, and lean on ABCB end rhyme. For the most part, each poem attempts to tell a complete story about its subject, rather than homing in on specific observations; indeed, the subjects’ qualities seem molded to fit the collection’s rigid formal elements. As a result, the works consistently have a detached, observational poetic that’s only enhanced by its repetitive meters and scarcely varying rhyme schemes. Indeed, 13 consecutive poems in the collection, from “Loves Lost” and “Rich Man, Poor Man”—both inspired by the few photographs featuring human subjects—to “The Old Farm” employ rhyming quatrains. An outlier is “Adrift on the Salish Sea,” which is based on a photograph of a wood carving by Haida artist Mike Bellis and attempts to evoke the oral tradition of the Haida nation.
A meticulous and focused volume of formally crafted nature poetry.
