To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

out to explore foreign destinations and discovers
silence and absence in the Poland of
his ancestors, perplexity and lepers among
the Dravidian Ruins of Mahabalipuram, he
remains open to currents and ends with
twenty sonnets, each dedicated to a different
city. The sonnets test the vision against
the reality, always balancing the two. Only
in the ninth sonnet, "Hiroshima," can there
be no affirming vision, but this is followed
by "Kyoto," which concludes, "I am infinitesimal
but also reaching the furthest shore
/ as I muse upon the rock garden's concentric
circles." Thus Sherman's poems affirm
the joys of both the vision and the reality,
the currents and, in the final sonnet,
"Toronto," his "[s]taid and sure" home: "A
good place for departures and returns."
From effluence to currents, we now dip
from the still, deep well of Kenneth Radu's
Treading Water. The opening poem, "Treading
Water," poses a conundrum that teases
throughout. Treading water is conducive to
"middling ruminations" but is also "a kind
of dying": "If the distance is too great /1
will deepen into inertia, / not great enough,
/ Why bother?" Satirical poems, such as
"Vermeer" and "Auto-Da-Fe," offer bitter
drams of a world tainted by mercantile and
patriarchal values. Descriptive poems, such
as "Myth," offer a pristine dipperful of pagan
delight. Best are the narrative poems, such
as "Shadows" and "Jocasta," more murky as
through the ritual acts of remembering the
poet tries to squeeze some significance
from memory. In both, significance rests
not only with the remembered joy but also
with the present poignancy of suffering
conveyed through silences and spaces.
The poems in Treading Water are skilfully
arranged to build to the longest of the narrative
poems, "A Day at the Beach." Satire,
spoofing the self-conscious masculinity of
father and the escapism mother immersed
in an Iris Murdoch novel, moves into a
pagan exuberance as mother, "tired of print
and peccadilloes, / rushes to the water,
where she swims straight out / on the
ocean's curve, the salt on her lips, / undercurrents
pushing against her thighs."
Reality insists on intruding as "undertows
of fact and fear drag her / back to the hard
embrace of nuclear arms." Monstrous
thoughts almost overwhelm her, but
instead she emerges from the foam and
becomes a net to catch sparks of light
and reason;...
Her feet touch the golden sand, the wind
picks up
and the shapes of seeds are planted
firmly
in the wind as the children run to her
laughing, voices loud with jubilation.
The five poems after "A Day at the Beach"
detail imperfections that prevent these
seeds establishing roots in an idyllic garden,
and then the poet works through four sonnets
in which art appears to have lost the
vigour to sustain in a frenzied, wearied
world. Solitude and reflection bring the
seemingly inert words to life so that by the
end of the sonnet sequence, the poet
affirms: "The action of film stiffens, falls to
lead; / reading quickens, raises to gold."
Treading Water closes with two celebratory
poems: "Bird-Watcher," dedicated to Janusz
Korczak whose "mind opened windows"
because he understood and protected sixyear-olds
crying in the night; and "Keeping
the Faith," in which feeding the birds, like
writing poems, seems merely "an act of
courtesy / in a world impoverished by
extinctions." Yet at the end of the journey,
in the ruined garden, the poet still has a role:
I have to live up
to my reputation in the skies,
to the pattern my arm makes
when it sweeps over the unsmiling
face of the snow in benediction
and fidelity.
In his sixteenth collection of poems, The
Walled Garden: A Fantasia, Michael Bullock
balances the vision with the reality by inte-
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