On Glen Sorestad's Poetry

Glen Sorestad, League of Canadian Poets AGM in Edmonton, 2007

Ten years ago, I invited Glen Sorestad to give a reading of his poems at the college where I teach. It was a large audience, well over a hundred students, and I remember that the students loved the poems that Glen read that afternoon. Later that day, Glen and I drove into Montreal and had lunch at an Irish bar-resto on McKay or Crescent below Ste. Catherine Street. I remember introducing Glen to our waiter and saying that Glen was a well-known poet, that he was also the Poet Laureate of the Province of Saskatchewan. A few minutes later the waiter returned with a guest book for Glen to sign, I had no idea restaurants had guest books.

Once, someone wrote in a review of a reading I gave that I came across as “everyone’s favourite uncle,” not necessarily what I would like to have heard but perhaps accurate. The only other poet I’ve met who could also be described in a similar way is Glen Sorestad. I remember Margaret Laurence being described by the critic Robert Fulford as nondescript, perhaps looking like a housewife. Appearances are deceiving!

Over the years I’ve read many of Glen’s books as they’ve been published; two of his newer books are Road Apples, an autumn journey into America (Rubicon Press, 2009) and What We Miss (Thistledown Press, 2010). Unless I am mistaken, What We Miss is Glen’s first major publication since Blood & bone, ice & stone (Thistledown Press, 2005). In fact, as online-chapbook editor at Coracle Press, I published Glen’s Language of Horse in 2007 and some of the poems in this chapbook are republished in What We Miss.

Road Apples, an autumn journey into America is an impressive chapbook. It is part of a body of literature—the iconic and archetypal journey or road trip across a part of America—that moves from particular observations to general comments about American society. The archetype of the journey is present in many American writers, from Walt Whitman to John Steinbeck to Jack Kerouac. Sorestad’s American journey is across a landscape of ranches, highways, RV parks, and tourist attractions. Sorestad is the outsider, the observer, the bystander. This is America seen through Canadian eyes, that is, it is the perception of someone who is easily assumed to be a fellow American but whose perceptions are always informed by a consciousness that is uniquely Canadian. You could call us “Americanadians”! Americans, unlike Canadians, seem to know very little about the outside world. When telling a waitress in Sioux City, Iowa that he and his wife have just driven from southern Nebraska, she comments that this is lovely and where are they from? They reply they are from Saskatchewan… “And what part of southern Nebrasaka/ would that be in?” she asks. There’s no guest book to sign in this American restaurant, and I doubt the waitress would know what a Poet Laureate is…

………

        Glen Sorestad’s What We Miss is a truly inspired book of poems. These poems are deceptively simple, they return us to the basic experience of being a poet and writing poetry. This experience lies in the ability to see in the quotidian, the everyday, that which is marvelous and meaningful. In the first section, “Moving Towards the Light,” we read poems of everyday experiences, of going for daily walks and recording what is significant on these walks: it is seeing the first robin in spring; the presence of a red-winged blackbird; the warmth of the sun on one’s face; rain; geese; an old man and his dog; the sun coming through some clouds; a woman walking two dogs; a decapitated field mouse… All poets have had this experience: we place importance on observations that other people either ignore or aren’t aware of or think are too trivial to comment on. The poet gives these experiences significance and importance, he gives people a different way to perceive reality. As well, informing Sorestad’s poems is the recognition of our mortality. We know that when he writes of “walking towards the light” it is not only a kind of awakening, but it is also the light that lies beyond death. “Towards the Long Night,” the last poem in this section of What We Miss, finds us in November, the decline to winter has begun, and we note “The sharp sting of wind in our faces, /we bear reluctant light through the park.”

Sorestad’s love of language began when he was a child; he writes of this experience in “The Language of Horse”:

It was words like halter and hames,
bits and bridle, collar and reins,
words his uncle threw at him
as if they were self-evident—
this language so foreign to him.
It was a childhood epiphany:
each new landscape he encountered
from that point on would come with
its own language, its own lexicon
to be snapped or buckled into place,
for him to become a part of and in turn
for it to become a part of him.

Glen Sorestad is a poet who celebrates his early life, his family, moving between the city and the country, but it is in the country where he seems happiest, a happiness of being in a loving family and in close contact with nature. For instance, “Snow Tunnels” and “Christmas Oranges” are both poems of a happy childhood and of innocence. His poem, “Map of Canada,” returns us to an earlier time in Canadian history, he writes of a large map of the country on the classroom wall, but this map had a different quality to it, it also advertised the products of a chocolate company, and now, many years later, the names of different chocolate bars are forever associated to places in Canada, at least in Glen Sorestad’s consciousness! The final poem in the book, “Winter Walk,” has at least two layers of meaning; it is winter, but this is also a walk in the cemetery, and Sorestad is one of several pall bearers of a child’s coffin. This is a very moving poem, it reminds us of life’s transience and the fragility of human life. He writes movingly,

At last they set their box down at the site,
consigned the child to cold and dimming light.

The beauty of Glen Sorestad’s poetry lies, in part, in finely crafted epiphanous perceptions of nature, a love for family, and memories of the past; in these two books we see things through his eyes and know something of the way poets perceive reality.

I consider Glen Sorestad one of our finest Canadian poets. 

(The Language of Horse by Glen Sorestad can be found at http://www.coraclepress.com/the-chapbooks/language-of-horse-glen-sorestad/.)