Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems

Here is the review of Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems that I wrote in 1990. The original article also included reviews of five other poets; they are Cathy Ford, R.A.D. Ford, Lee, Singleton, and Wayman.
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Review by Stephen Morrissey
The Antigonish Review, no. 81-82
spring-summer 1990


While our society has become increasingly transient, some poets remind us of how important geography is to the individual's spiritual well-being. Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems celebrate the Tantramar marsh region between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; they show how familiarity with a geographical region need not lead to boredom with that area, but possibly to a greater awareness of life's diversity and the individual's inner life. Lochhead's poems are simple, direct, and extremely concise; his language has a definite rhythm that is never dull. There is no inflated ego in this work; indeed, there is an attractive understatement of both theme and emotion. In one poem he writes:

For months
leading to years
I counted you
my love
not saying much
because quite frankly
I am not much
good at it.

Once I did
say something
the white wine
was part of it,
you said it was mutual.

Now your silence
from this distance
deafens my days
I find the only way
to forget is to douse
myself in the shower
and curse.

Oh yes,
I blast myself
more often than you.

Unlike many poets, Lochhead is capable of changing the rhythm of his language. He is not a one-dimensional poet with only one song in her repertoire. "Tantramar, again, again" ends with these lines that give a feeling of actually being at the marsh:

gone great wind gone down
now to stillness and full July grasses
where they stood scything
stifling the wood never left them
gone though gone and great it was.

These poems bear repeated readings; this is only one indication that his work demands our attention. In "The woods" Lochhead writes:

I walked into the woods
all nearby to be seen
from the kitchen window
wild raspberry canes
brought blood to my arms
the brook was deceptive
leaving my feet mud brown

where there were birds
they vanished in alarm
the birds I had named
given my time

and the woods filled
with a new silence
the maples shading red
as the blood on my arm

it was the going in
to the woods
the neat place
I had thought tamed

but it brought blood
and a new kind of life

Lochhead's poems demand an aesthetic response, not only an intellectual analysis of his themes and ideas. A few of the poems in this book are transparent, their absence would not have detracted from the overall effectiveness of Upper Cape Poems. Lochhead's poems are a psychic map of one man's journey through life, always paying strict attention to the detail of his place and time. In Lochhead's faithfulness to detail we discover the human poet behind his words, but we also make a second, equally important discovery: it is our own self grown more human as we see life and experience compassionately revealed in these poems.