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

What William Blake thought

According to Peter Ackroyd`s biography of William Blake, the first morning Blake was in Felpham, his home for two years on the coast south of London, “Blake came out of his cottage and found a ploughman in a neighbouring field. At this moment the ploughboy working with him called out ‘Father, the gate is open.’ For Blake, this was an emblem of his new life, and the work he was about to begin.” Blake perceived this experience as an auspicious sign from the universe, one indicating a future of openness, creativity, and the presence of the divine intervening in his life. At that moment Blake knew that he had made the right choice in moving to Felpham; the universe told him as much. 

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.

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.

On Dreams, Poetry, and the Soul

I always assumed that everyone had “big dreams” at some time in their life. Everyone dreams but most people don’t listen to their dreams, they forget them as soon as they wake, or if the dream is remembered it is either ignored or sloughed off. They don’t want to be disturbed by dreams, or by re-visioning their life, or by becoming more conscious, or by the discomfort of psychological insight. This is how poets think: they allow for the presence of dreams as a form of communication from the unconscious, and the dream is then listened to.

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God communicates to people in two ways: through angels and through our dreams. If you want to communicate with God, or receive a message from God, then be open to your dreams. Dreams coming from God are the “big dreams”, and we may have only a few of these during our whole life. Dreams have some interest for poets and artists, dreams are psychic collages juxtaposing images that one would probably never put together. They are of interest in an aesthetic sense, as a curiosity, and importantly for therapists as a door into the psyche of their client. Discussing a dream is a way—an entrance, a door—into the psyche, it is a catalyst for discussion. Surrealism as a movement grew out of Freud’s positioning of dream interpretation as an important part of therapeutic work. The Surrealists were more fascinated by the dream as an aesthetic event than by its therapeutic value. Dreams, then, as life changing events, can be an important aspect of how poets think; as well, dream imagery can be transformed into a poem.
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Two other minor examples of poetic thinking: when I returned to live in the neighbourhood where I grew up, I would regularly see people who I used to see in the streets when I was young. They were not older versions of themselves, they were the same people that I used to see, as though, over the intervening years, they had never changed. I no longer see these people, they seem to have departed, where they have gone to I don’t know, but I would often see them, just as they were so many years ago. A second example: I have always believed that when we think of someone we used to know, but have lost contact with them, and they suddenly come to mind, for no reason at all, at that same moment they are thinking of us. For example, sometimes we think of an old friend with whom we have lost contact and then, only a few seconds later, the phone rings and it is the person we have been thinking of. Synchronicity reminds us that there is some kind of cohesion and meaning in life if we can see it.
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It is the essence of the shamanic journey that what is perceived is not a product of the imagination but is “real”. The important thing is the experience in which our awareness and consciousness is not always subject to cause and effect. Dreams juxtapose images that are usually not associated with each other. In essence, the dream is a collage or a "cut-up" (see Brion Gysin). Dreams fascinate us when they open the door of archetypal association. A door, for instance, allows us to enter a room, but a "door" for William Blake is an image opening our awareness and our perception of the symbolical world of the psyche. Almost two hundred years later Jim Morrison resonated to Blake's perception and the music of The Doors followed, music that is shamanic and archetypal.
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Dreams, Tarot cards, Sabian Symbols, the Aquarian Symbols, archetypal images, paintings by Odilon Redon, Magritte, and others, photographs by Man Ray, all help open an entrance into the deeper levels of the psyche. At this deeper level we become conscious of people, we can explore events that were formerly left unconscious, and a narrative becomes available to the conscious mind. I would include fairy tales and mythology as ways to access the unconscious mind.

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Poetry deals with the soul and soul making. Just about any subject can be transformed into poetry, but a poet’s soul is needed for this transformation of the everyday into poetry. The poet is the soul's alchemist. Poetry is transformation. Dreams are another form of alchemy; they transform everyday reality into an expression of the psyche or the soul, and these dreams can sometimes give us access into our own souls.

                                                                                                     

A New Hope, Graffiti

Most graffiti in NDG is fairly ugly, it's tagging. There are also some ridiculous laws about graffiti, they make landlords responsible for removing graffiti, at their own expense or they face hefty fines. Meanwhile, the borough does little to prevent graffiti... Some graffiti seems a synchronistic message from the Universe,  it seems to be speaking to one's inner needs, it is a voice telling you what you need to hear. "A New Hope" is one of those voices. Whoever maintains the building on which this is written keeps painting over the message but it keeps reappearing.

"Holy Wells" in Ireland and Montreal

Recently, on Ireland's RTĒ television, there was a presentation on "holy wells" in that country. A "holy well" is not only a place where you can get water, it is also a sacred place. Many holy wells were originally sacred among pagans and then, when Ireland became Christian, the population assimilated the wells into their Christian faith; this is a fairly common occurrence, churches were built on the remains of pagan temples, and pagan or Celtic holidays were reconfigured into similar Christian holy days.

The history of holy wells reaches back to pagan time, perhaps 5,000 years, a time long before Christianity reached Ireland. There are approximately three thousand holy wells in Ireland where they are known as places of healing; one might visit a holy well to ask for help with a specific problem, or to give thanks that a problem, whether physical or spiritual, has already been resolved.

The holy well is a visible and physical manifestation of mythological, or archetypal and spiritual thinking; it a place where nature presents evidence of the existence of the divine in our lives.

I have been interested in holy wells for many years. The discussion that follows on holy wells also gives some background to the Prologue to Girouard Avenue as well present information on holy wells in our environment. Here is the Prologue in its entirety:

1. The Ancient Well of Ara

There is a well in Tipperary
visited by my ancestors
before they left for Canada.
They said, “This is a place
of sleep and dreams—
drink from the well
and know the mystery
of life.”

Looking down to the water
at the well’s bottom,
they saw the reflected sky
the size and roundness
of a coin with the emblem
of a bird.

On Main Street
where the well
is located, not long
after ships left harbour
and famine crossed the land
a wooden top was fitted
to the ancient well,
the water cold and still
beneath the earth’s surface.

2. The Forgotten Spring

In the big city, at the beginning
of a new millennium, in a park,
the corner of Doherty and Fielding,
where water gathers on the path,
asphalt lifted, broken,
a place always wet
as though it rained last night
although it didn’t, with a seven story
apartment building on one corner
and low-cost apartments across the street,
where six young men stand and talk
on a Sunday morning in summer—
these are not the ancient fields
but a city park where water
rises on either side of a path
from an underground spring,
reminding us of what we used to know,
but have forgotten—the water
insistent, forceful, always desiring wholeness.

Before writing this poem I read very briefly about the ancient well Ara, located in Tipperary. That a wooden top had been placed on it, sealing the well, seemed a good metaphor for the ending of one age, the age of shamanic and visionary consciousness, the age of Bardic poetry and an apprehension of reality that includes that which might not be visible to the naked eye but still exists on some other level of awareness. That age, when the Other World could be more easily penetrated to, ended for most people and emblematic of this ending is placing a top on the well.

Having said all of this, it was interesting to hear on this RTĒ programme that some Irish who were leaving for North America visited, before they left, a holy well. I don’t know, in fact, if this is what my own family members did before coming to Canada in 1837, but I envisioned them doing just that. Creativity, imagination, this might explain my having written this about them, but there is also ancestral memory, whether it is in our physical makeup or in our personality, our genetic makeup, or what have you. I place this “coincidence,” this synchronicity, to ancestral memory.

The next section of the prologue moves us from 1837 to present times. It is over 150 years later, now we are in Montreal, and street names in this area of Nôtre Dame de Grace (NDG), a predominantly English-speaking neighbourhood in westend Montreal, reflect the Irish presence that once existed here. Nearby is Loyola College, founded by Irish Catholics, but since 1973 Loyola has been a part of Concordia University. Many Irish moved to this part of the city so their children could attend Loyola High School and then Loyola College. However, most of the Irish who lived here in the 1940and 1950s have moved away. This neighbourhood was their destination back then, from working class Pointe St. Charles, Verdun, and Griffintown, to Nôtre Dame de Grace, and now the children and grandchildren of these people are scattered across Montreal, Canada, the United States, and beyond.

I used to walk up Belmore to Chester and then continue to Fielding, and walk along the grassy meridian at this part of Fielding. Across the street is Ignatius Loyola Park that covers two city blocks, so it is a huge expanse. Then I would walk by the corner of Fielding and Doherty and one spring day I noticed water running from the park, it ran down an asphalt path from where the baseball diamond was located and into a sewer on Fielding. The asphalt was lifting as water would run along it, and I wondered about this water and where it came from. I remember seeing this water, and there was a lot of it, and noticing how the asphalt bulged and cracked due to the water running under it, freezing, then lifting up the asphalt as it thawed. Every spring there was water there, and it wasn’t from snow melting, it wasn’t run-off from snow melting in the park. Eventually I found the source of the water, it came from a spring locatged behind the baseball diamond on the Doherty side of the park. I intuitively understood what I had found and the significance of this water, this spring. As I walked passed it I knew I was in the presence of more than just water, I was in the presence of something holy.

(You can see this area: go to Google Maps, search “Doherty and Fielding, Montreal,” and then do a “street view” and you’ll see the repair work to the sidewalk due to the run-off from the well.)

There are many underground streams in NDG--they have all been paved over--and the foundations of many homes are being repaired due to damage caused by water from underground streams. NDG was once a place of farms, for instance Benny Farm which became a housing development in the late 1940s for soldiers returning from World War Two. Where we lived on Montclair Avenue had been apple orchards until the house where we lived was built in the late 1940s. Family members used to go for walks along the old Western Avenue (now Boulevard de Maisonneuve West) which was a dirt road, that was back in the early 1940s; they’d walk from Girouard to Hampton. Near where I grew up on Oxford Avenue, along Côte St. Luc Road, we used to play in the fields where apartment buildings were later constructed; until a few years ago there was an old farm house on the corner of Dufferin and Cote St. Luc Road. When I was growing up we were always looking for some nature, some fields, to play in; there were lanes to walk in, behind people's homes, and it seems there was still quite a bit of undeveloped property back then, but you had to work to find it.

I was aware of underground streams in this area of Montreal, all of them paved over or buildings constructed over them. This particular well in Loyola Park, what I have called a holy well, had managed to penetrate the earth covering it and for some years, at specific times of the year, water would run down the asphalt path. You could see the water coming from the earth and others knew of this well. Indeed, a few years ago, when walking through Loyola Park, and passing where the well was located, I noticed that the City of Montreal had made this specific area, where the well existed, into an ecological reserve, they had put a fence around it, planted flowers and some other plants that thrive in wet areas, and encouraged the return of nature. Not much came of this as water was abundant in spring but by the middle of summer it would dry up. It also upset local residents who were concerned that mosquitoes would lay eggs in standing water, they were concerned with West Nile disease. Apparently, some of these people went with buckets and removed the water that was present. I don’t know if there is much left of this well-meaning, but failed, experiment by the City.

What constitutes a "holy well"? We used to drive some distance to an artesian well by a roadside, there were usually several other cars parked there and people filling large containers of water from this well. At first glance, I don't think of that well as being "holy." I think two things can make a well "holy," either found together or separately. First, there is some agreement, some consensus among people, that a certain place is holy. Perhaps miracles can be attributed to the place, or some other supernatural occurences that help form an idea among people that the well has extraordinary powers. Second, a place, a well for example, may be located on a ley line, a place where earth energy may be more abundant than at other places; this example doesn't rely on any consensus of opinion. Perhaps you have walked in nature and suddently felt that you were in a place that was different, more serene or imbued with a quality of silence, or that created a quality of silence in your own mind, and that this space was somehow sacred. I have encountered these places, for instance St. Patrick's Basilica in Montreal is one such place; another, more remote, is an abandoned farm on a slight hill near where we used to live. When I would visit this place I knew that there was something different--spiritual, sacred, holy--that wasn't present elsewhere.