Crows, photographs of crows

 Crows, photographed in 2020 and 2021.

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

Crows, Canadian Cottage Garden, 12 May 2025

 

On poetry, the soul, and AI (1)

 

A crow looks at its shadow, April 2024

If you compare poetry/poets/the critical discussion of poetry today with what poetry was like even twenty years ago, then poetry today seems of slight importance, it seems isolated, archaic, and sometimes a self-indulgent form of writing. I heard W.H. Auden read his poems at McGill University, there is no equivalent of W.H. Auden today. Louis Dudek invited Ezra Pound to Montreal's Expo 67, there is no equivalent to either Louis Dudek or Ezra Pound in today's world. In the 1960s and 70s books by Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and others were reviewed in TIME magazine, these poets and their books were known by average people. Poetry was respected, but in today’s world nothing is respected; we have no great poets who are known by the general public as we had in the past, no Allen Ginsberg, no Pablo Neruda, no David Jones, no T.S. Eliot, no Ezra Pound, no W.B. Yeats, no Walt Whitman, no Matthew Arnold. And now even Artificial Intelligence claims it can write poems.

What separates poetry, the writing of poetry, from artificial intelligence, is that humans have a soul and artificial intelligence has no soul. Poetry is the voice of the human soul and AI will never, can never, have a human soul or a facsimile soul. Poetry returns us to the soul—it is the voice of the human soul; it is the soul’s DNA. 

But poetry is beyond AI; artificial intelligence is in the realm of the known, of sorting through hundreds of billions of bits of information to arrive at something that is apparently new; but poetry is always in the domain of the soul, the unknown, while AI is always in the realm of the known. And if you question AI about writing poetry you will get a kind of intelligence, without humour or depth, knowledge made up of what is online, insisting that it can write a poem although it is really a synthesis of what has already been written; let’s say it is artifice without authenticity. AI is like a spoiled child talking as though it is always right and never makes mistakes, but what is speaking is a reflection or representation of what is online and of the consciousness of the person or people, who programmed AI. So far, in my discussions with ChatGPT, I have not seen anything remarkable or extraordinarily intelligent or original. AI cannot talk about the human soul because it has no soul, and perhaps it has taken us to this point, of AI, to return to the meaningful value of poetry, that it is an expression of the human soul.

Can AI have synchronistic experiences, archetypes, dreams, nightmares, fantasies, memories, false memories, recovered memories, a shadow, oceanic experiences, mysticism, sexuality, intuition, hunches, humour, ecstasy, desire, despair, sorrow, grief, forgiveness, insight, emotions, lust, self-reflection, suicidal thoughts, empathy or compassion, or any other form of the complexity of consciousness that has motivated human beings to explore, create, or go beyond its current level of consciousness. Can AI have an unconscious mind? AI will admit that it cannot have these expressions of human consciousness, but AI also equivocates, it maintains, it insists, that the little ditties it can come up with and call poetry are poems, but these ditties are computer written lines that are not original or even real poems, for a minute they are an amusement but after a minute they are not even interesting to read. The inevitable future of poetry lies in what poetry has always been — the great theme of poetry is our journey to self-awareness — and this is the expression of the human soul.

Birds on a wire

 

Carnivore crows

 

Just yesterday, as we were leaving the house, I saw a crow fly over us carrying what I thought was a mouse, then he landed on our neighbour's tree and I could see what the crow had was a dead squirrel, the dead squirrels's tail hung over the side of the tree bough. A minute later the crow took off with the dead squirrel and landed in another neighbour's tree. This reminded me of something from last summer, two crows were trying to kill a young squirrel. The squirrel was terrified as he ran from one car to the next hiding beneath each car, the crows looking disinterested and obviously pretending not to care about this squirrel that would be their lunch. When the terrified squirrel made a run for it the crows followed him but each time the squirrel eluded capture and the crows would immediately act as though they were never interested in him and had never been interested in him. These crows are crafty birds, very intelligent, and with personalities, they seem to even have egos.

Earlier this spring I went out to the bird bath to change the water--birds like clean cold water--and there was a dead sparrow floating in the water, he had been pecked open by a crow. Crows are carnivores, any road kill or what they can hunt and kill is a meal to them. I flipped the dead sparrow out of the bird bath and, later, returned to change the water in the bird bath. The sparrow was gone, but I found a coin on the ground beside the bird bath; I had not seen this coin before, it was a well worn Canadian penny, dated 1957, the year after my father died; maybe the penny somehow came to the surface of the ground but it's the only coin I've found in this garden, maybe the crows left it there and if they did why did they leave it there? Is this an example of synchronicity, of a meaningful coincidence, or maybe it is just a coincidence and means nothing.  Or, maybe, we have a psychic connection to some animals and they connect us with aspects of life that we would otherwise not be aware of.

Crows visiting the garden

Early April 2024. The crows have returned and are at the bird bath. They bring food with them, from Fay Wong (a Chinese restaurant a block away), then leave it in the water to soften or soak, and then return later to eat. I usually avoid putting food anywhere in the garden, it has resulted in squirrels visiting and they are trouble. I go out in the morning, around 9 a.m., and the crows are waiting for me, I drop a few peanuts (unshelled) in the water and then leave, and this is when the crows swoop down and eat peanuts floating in the bird bath. Don’t get on the wrong side of crows, you’re in big trouble if you do.

Crows at the bird bath

Here is how crows eat peanuts: they hold the peanut between their feet and peck at it to break it open, then the peanut is eaten by them.

A crow visits the bird bath

In the garden, always a visitor, or is it a resident? A crow visits the bird bath and spends some time preening and having time out from his busy life.