Fischbach Etc.
Basil Mogridge
Editions du Centre cultural de Differdange (Luxembourg)
Available through Prospero Book Stores
Basil Mogridge teaches at the German Department of Carleton University. This is his first collection. Mr. Mogridge is the editor of an impressive new poetry magazine distributed throughout Canada and Europe. Reenbou is a plurilingual magazine publishing the work of international poets. Mr. Mogridge carries his passion for poetry and for languages over into his own work.
Some of the poems in his collection, Fischbach Etc., are written in French, German and Portuguese. A frustrating exercise for the interested, unilingual reader and one that Mr. Mogridge need not really subject his audience to, for the foreign-language poems in this collection could also have been translated into English as they are not that numerous and place could have been found for them on the scattered blank pages that intersperse the English-language work.
There is a quote on the frontispiece of this collection by Jack Spicer which says in part, "Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances." Nice, very well put. Basil Mogridge seems to have an ear for resonance and an eye for the beauty in nature and the nature of man's monuments. At times, however, his observations are so subtle as to become almost trite. While many poems on this collection are imbued with an elegant simplicity, some appear to be mere observation and as such, banal.
These poems, however, are also exotic, as in "pennine landscape/picture postcard/Dillenburg/The red blood of the copihue flower/Unfolding/remembrance/pippel/Rwanda". And again, instances where the faraway is intermingled with the familiar as in: "La belle province/Caroni at dusk/Cayenne/February, west of Lisbon/February north of Lisbon/Vilnius/Tartu/North Owl"; that kind of wistfulness of the traveller-born.
Yet and again there are too many poems in this collection which are more observation than poetic rendition. They stand as mute reminders that poets are rarely able to view their own work often born of fond memory, with anything approaching the cold objectivity of the critic.
Happily, Mogridge redeems himself with such sharply etched pictures as "Snow, opaque, enveloping/thwarting, threatening/wisps cavorting/in a harsh wind/squeaky protests under boots and tires/the downtown skyline/sharp/a bulbous moon". And he presents us also with an urgent sense of place, an affection that is infectious, of the splendid grandeur of baroque Europe: From "Vilnius":
Crowning the wooded hill, the ancient Gediminas Tower;
below this town "born of the howl of a wolf".
St.Anna's soaring facade,
brick Gothic in miniature splendour
(Napoleon's greedy eye was clear).
St. Peter and Paul, jubilant baroque;
high, within, its ship of light.
The Old Town's pastel colours, courtyards,
studious tranquility.
In Gediminas Square a building gravely monumental:
beyond its classic portals paintings, rustic crosses,
solemn music: white and gold,
cathedral organ and attendant angels,
playing to a land of amber
and of green.
With poems such as these, he gifts us with the vicarious pleasure of his travels. An auspicious collection, in all.
c. 1980 Rita Rosenfeld
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