First Light, Last Light by Glen Sorestad

 

First Light, Last Light by Glen Sorestad

by Stephen Morrissey

 

First Light, Last Light

Glen Sorestad, 2025

Shadowpaw Press

Regina, Saskatchewan,

ISBN 978-1-998273-46-1

 

            In his eighty-eighth year Glen Sorestad continues to write new poems and has just published a new book of poetry, First Light, Last Light. The first section of the book, "The Human Touch", is comprised of poems in which Sorestad remembers people who were important to him; the second section, "Sunbeams and Shadows", is less defined by the past, it has an awareness of the natural world, mostly referring to birds. The whole book emphasizes the importance of the past as well as the importance of the natural world. It is a book of endings, fall to winter, day to night, and the people we've known and loved and who are now deceased; it is a book of the transience of life.

 

The first section of First Light, Last Light has many references to Sorestad's father, someone Sorestad often remembers; Sorestad recalls that his father drove a "1935 Ford", and that his father had a beautiful singing voice, a talent that Sorestad also shares; "My father had a great singing voice./ I have no memories of this of my own" but an elderly aunt has "conveyed/ this genealogical tidbit to me", and this reminds Sorestad that his memories of his father are of an older man, one "who grew/ increasingly taciturn and introspective/ as he neared the end of a life cut short...".

 

It is in the details that the past comes to life; in "The Whistler", Sorestad remembers that his father "loved to whistle." In "Honouring Our Fathers", Sorestad writes that he and his wife, Sonia, compared "notes about/ our long-departed fathers" and reflect on the similarities between the two men. Both of these fathers are remembered as men who valued their families, they were hard workers, they were good men. In another poem Sorestad writes, "I have always been aware of this:/ the missing are always missed." As time passes we may not miss these people as often as we once did, but missing someone, or feeling grief at losing them, does not end, it stays with us as long as we live. The word "missing" is poignant; "missing" suggests the hopeful possibility they might one day be found; of course, where they truly are is in our hearts. Sorestad writes,

 

                        Why do I keep writing these memories,

                        real or imagined, of my father, now gone

                        over six decades from my life?

                        .  .  .  .  . 

                        Is there anyone left alive with reason

                        to doubt whether my own recollections

                        bear even slight resemblance to the man?

                                                            "Gene Gifts", p. 27

 

In "Bulldozers" Sorestad reflects on the illusion of progress, "We inter our own history/ under the sham mound of progress". What is left of the past is ploughed under—"Every fallen log, every hillock—/ abandoned beaver dam,/ or forgotten Indigenous grave—/ levelled". Sorestad's feelings about the bulldozing of old homes, fields, nature despoiled, is also the destruction of our collective and individual memories, and poets are memory carriers, they remember the past and they keep the past alive in the stories, anecdotes, and details of what the past was like.

 

It is the second section of First Light, Last Light that really surprised me; these poems have a different quality to them than in the previous section; it is now the natural world that impresses itself on the poet. This section is mostly comprised of poems that refer to birds and there are also a few foxes that have been seen in the part of Saskatoon where Sorestad lives. There is a transformation manifested in nature; this is expressed in the emphasis on birds and the symbolism of birds. In Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant's A Dictionary of Symbols (1969) we read that birds are "symbols of the links between Heaven and Earth . . . Birds, symbols of the soul, play the role of Intermediaries between Heaven and Earth."

 

As symbols birds are messengers of the divine; birds are symbolic of freedom, spirituality, and a connection between the earth and the heavens. Sorestad's poem, "Red winged Blackbirds" stood out for me (and not only because it mentions my birthday in the first line—"the twenty-seventh of April") and describes walking in nature and seeing a red-winged blackbird, a bird I no longer see here in the east; Sorestad writes,

 

                        There is no avoiding the brazen birds,

 

                        should you be so inclined. They are political

                        poets of the bird world and like Milton Acorn

 

                        they shout love, whether you understand,

                        or appreciate, or agree with it or not.

 

Here are some of the birds referred to by Sorestad in this book:

 

                        Snowy owls

                        Crows

                        Waxwings

                        Blackbirds

                        Cooper's Hawks

                        Canada Geese

                        Catbirds

                        Robins

                        Chickadees

                        Swans

                        Juncos

                        Snow geese

                        Turkey vultures

                        Magpies

                        Catbirds

                        Bohemian Waxwing

                        Blue Jay

 

We are visited daily by these messengers of the divine. Take, for instance, "Crow Meditation"; upon seeing the first crow of the year Sorestad writes,

 

                        Is it confirmation of an expectation?

                        Or the assurance, here and now. Nature

                        has proclaimed again that all is well?

 

The crow is a bird that has a long memory, be careful not to offend a crow or the consequences will be long lasting, you might be subject to the crow aggressively flying at you, not for days or weeks, but for years to come; and they will recognize your face and distinguish between you and other people. Crows have the intelligence of a seven year old child and can be a delight to watch. One's relationship with crows is one in which we can learn something about ourselves; they can be predatory (I have watched a crow land in a neighbour's tree with a small dead squirrel in its claws), but there is much more to crows than this.

 

Sorestad writes that it is "Hard to Love a Crow", especially when the crow hunts younger birds; looking out at their new bird bath he writes, "I expect we both shared the same vision:// robins and sparrows, warbler and finches,/ chickadees and other songsters would arrive/ at our burbling flow to drink and to splash." But crows are clever and intelligent animals, crows are carnivores and cagey in their approach to finding the next meal. In "Corvid Hygiene" he writes,

 

                        Crow turns to the window,

                                    cocks its head at me

                                    and those dark eyes

                        seize mine for a moment.

                                    I'm positive Crow

                                    would like to say

                        something to me, something

                                    I'm not at all sure

                                    I want to hear.

 

Personally, I have observed crows and other birds for years and I always enjoy seeing crows soak food found at a nearby Chinese restaurant in our backyard bird bath. Crows are also known for leaving presents after their visits. One day, after visits by crows, I was pouring fresh water into the bird bath when I found an old Canadian penny beside the bird bath; I thought that was nice and then I looked at the penny more closely, it was almost completely rubbed smooth and the date on it was 1957, the year after my father died. It is probably of no great significance, but personally, I like to think that it is a meaningful coincidence—a synchronistic experience—and that it tells me we live in a meaningful universe. I feel that the crows had delivered to me a special gift—a personal gift from them—and it is a penny that I still possess.

 

There is also Sorestad's "Nordic spirit" present in his poems; by this I refer to ancestral qualities of self-reliance, an adherence to truth, love for the natural world, the importance of inner strength, and an unstated assumption of accepting things as they are. Glen Sorestad's heritage is Norwegian and he reminds me of the late Canadian poet George Johnston whose own poetry, including his translations of the Icelandic Sagas and poetry from the Faroe Islands, also had these Nordic qualities. Both poets discover in the everyday, the quotidian, a way to express what is important in life. Glen Sorestad's poems also remind me of the poems of the American poet William Stafford; Sorestad and Stafford have a similar sensibility; they are western poets and, one feels, they are closer to the essentials of poetry than is found in some poets of the big eastern cities.

 

For Glen Sorestad the first light is diminishing and the last light is on the horizon, but it is not a time of sadness; it is a time of love. This is not a sad or unhappy book, every poem affirms life and being alive; the past lives in our hearts but it also lives in memory. This is a book of memories and reflections on the past, they weave in and out of consciousness; it is also a book of the natural world, of a connection with nature. These are fall and winter poems, a time of reflection, a time of solitude. Do we agree with Beowulf, that "grief follows joy", or is it Chaucer that we resonate to when he writes in The Canterbury Tales, "But after wo I rede us to be merye"? I think Sorestad would choose the latter; however, a paradox of life is that you can be on both sides of an issue at the same time; but, overall, Glen Sorestad is on the side of life and creativity and continuing on life's journey no matter if it is the first light or the last light of day.

                                                                                      Stephen Morrissey

                                                                                       25 November 2025

"Intruder" by Glen Sorestad

 

2013

The red fox lolled on the manicured green
of our back condo lawn like any domestic dog –

warm autumn afternoon, newly mown grass
tickling its nose, a fox-nap imminent,

but only if those loud villains looming above
in the shaggy blue spruce would spare their vitriol.

An unruly mob of crows, freshly summoned,
hurled dark invective at the unwanted visitor.

The black gang deemed this their territory,
now under egregious trespass from the sleek sneak,

the protesters alerting all within hearing of their
unmistakable umbrage with the bushy-tailed rogue.

As the clamor reached its acme, the fox rose,
languidly stretched its length, and strolled off

and away in apparent unconcern, from the dark
rancor, now lapsed into sudden, satisfied silence.

Four Crow Poems, A.J.M. Smith, P.K. Page, and Glen Sorestad,

The Crows

A.J.M. Smith

Over the pines the crows
Are crying and calling out
With a hollow brazen throat
In a tongue that no man knows;
Yet it may be that they cry
Their bitter unspeakable tones
To the cold air where they fly
As a man might mock the bones
Of a joy that has come to death,
Railing with ragged shout
And pitiful eager breath
Against the crapulous sky
And all that is beneath.

The Crow

by P.K. Page

By the wave rising, by the wave breaking
high to low;
by the wave riding the air, sweeping the high air low
in a white foam, in a suds,
there
like a churchwarden, like a stiff
turn-the-eye-inward old man
in a cutaway, in the mist
stands
the crow.

Late Summer Crows

by Glen Sorestad

Field upon field of wheat turns
in its cycle of green to gold
as I drive through summer's dying.

Above grain that sends waves
in slow measure shore to shore
a still sky glazed with sun.

Against this duo-toned day
erratic unexpected movement:
black rags on the sky, a shout of crows.

Harbingers of summer's decay, crows
read the season's cryptic message,
muster their numbers in the gathering gold.

Black flakes drift against August sun,
somber and sure as obituaries, sound
grave edicts across the sky.

Moselle Crow

by Glen Sorestad

Dawnlight creeps across vineyards
along the Moselle's chalky slopes
and the heady scent of ripe Riesling grapes
drifts through the window of the hotel
and into my semi-consciousness when
I am yanked to wakefulness
by a familiar raucous cry.

It is Crow--no mistaking
this unmelodic voice, the same here
in this little German village
as anywhere Crow flies. I can't
believe Crow's followed me all this way
just to grate my dreams at German dawn.

Bird of myth and legend. Crow
crosses oceans and mountains,
flies beyond language, through time,
beyond humankind's history of strife.
Like sun, wind and rain Crow is there,
its harsh voice inevitable as death.

Bibiography:

A.J.M. Smith. Poems, New and Collected, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1967.

P.K. Page.The Hidden Room, Collected Poems, Volume One,  The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 1997.

Glen Sorestad. Leaving Holds me Here, Selected Poems,1975-2000, selected by John Newlove. Thistledown Press, Saskatoon, Sask., 2001

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/.)