“Decoys”
Written by William Robertson
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$17.95
ISBN 978-1-77187-150-1
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In Decoys, the new poetry collection by William Robertson, the long-time
Saskatoon scribe plumbs his own history and threads personal anecdotes into a
textured fabric that reflects the prairie from what might be considered a
bird's eye view. In the country, kids push a puck around on ice
"rippled/frozen by the wind," and at Gull Lake we see "the
grass in all its greens,/that bull, sequestered from the rest". Birds
are carefully considered and rendered poetic in myriad unique ways, ie: "Ruffled
grouse leads its perfect/rusty brown and black fan/out of the spruce, through
the ditch," and in "Raven on Frozen River," the poet beautifully
writes "I could spend all day/watching you divide/snowy silence/from
itself". The author's urgency to "hold onto things beautiful"
is apparent, page after page.
There's a reverence for the rural,
here, including lakes, and the Muenster area, with its amicable chickadees at
St. Peter's Abbey, where Robertson penned some of these poems at Saskatchewan
Writers Guild artist retreats, but the city is also carefully considered -
and sometimes found lacking - "Outside the rickety/red fence, unpainted
for years, the weeds/and long grasses try their best/to hide the
garbage". Workmen noisily improve houses, "tapping back into
shape/these failing organisms".
Poems feature both the innocence
and the bravado of the young, and expose a life not measuring up to the
advertisements, ie: a scene from a duck hunter's calendar is contrasted
against an unproductive father-son hunting trip; children sculpting snow into
forts, as shown in schoolbooks and on TV, is measured against the futility of
trying to do the same with "the dry prairie stuff/that crumbled in our
hands;" and the fish in Turtle Lake don't measure up to the flashy
American magazine and TV fishing-show fish a son dreams about.
Small things breathe through these
poems: flies, wasps, mice, wildflowers, and an August dragonfly, whom,
Robertson writes, "gathers its memories/of mid-summer air, rises/on
invisible wings, leaving me/heavy and human on the sidewalk". Again, as
with many of these reflections, there's a hint of melancholy, of not
measuring up, but also a recognition that perfection's found in the ordinary.
Stylistically, as both a poet and
a writing instructor, Robertson clearly knows what he's doing. Several poems
feature rhyming words on the last and third last lines, which adds a musical
lilt. A couple of prose poems are nestled among the free verse poems. Sound
is cleverly used in "Dead Clown," which features a bird in a
"black/and white gown," (magpie, I assume). The cawing bird's
"gaudy yak/yak" is echoed in Robertson's rhyming – or cawing –
words" "call," "all," and "fall". This
collection makes a good case for listening closely to poems to hear the small
songs within them.
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Fish and fishing are other favoured
subjects here, and in reading these thoughtful poems in particular, I'm reminded
of how writing poetry requires a kind of faith not unlike that of an angler:
you sit quietly, you wait, and sometimes, you land a good one. This book is
filled with keepers.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL
BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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