Seniority (1)
Forty years ago, after reading a lot of Canadian poets my age, it dawned on me that the poems of those considerably older might be substantively different. What I loved was a poem about the birth of his first grandchild written by a sophisticated gentleman who had travelled the world and served for many years as a Canadian diplomat abroad. A quiet wisdom underscored his joy as he looked on a new life beginning, the perspective honed by six decades beyond.
Now that I approach eighty, I am curious what poets my age are thinking and feeling, and how it has affected their subjects and style of writing. I was thrilled to learn of Allan Briesmaster’s new book with the promising title Later Findings1 and immediately ordered a copy.
The second poem “Gone Astray” made my head spin. It confirmed an opening out in awareness as the years tick by and the remaining hours are acknowledged as limited, with their end uncertain. Let me quote:
Astounded at this sudden sense of being lost ̶
having wandered off the rectilinear
into disorientation. Such a strange
deep-breath relief, unknowing my location now,
re-placed in a curved Elsewhere from the straight-
track, the old railroad. And yet not without a path:2
That’s a lot to take in, but also awards a new and strange sense of freedom, as Briesmaster writes in “Mind of November”:
But then it comes, like breath: this under-sense,
how, for all creatures, to be is to do,
while the obverse command is a credence, too:3
While it ranges across other subjects of concern whatever the age, this is a collection I am reading—and rereading—slowly, for the unique slant of advanced years: its spiritual honesty, its coming to acceptance, its gratitude. I also hold in mind the thought-provoking caveat in “The later life”:
You don’t explain this to younger people ̶
Or shouldn’t try.4
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1. Allan Briesmaster, Later Findings (Victoria, B.C.: Ekstasis Editions, 2024).
2. Ibid., p, 12.
3. Ibid,, p. 39.
4. Ibid., p. 51.