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Oskana Poetry & Poetics #20
Something for the Dark
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 25, 2025
Randy Lundy is a Cree, Irish, Norwegian member of the Barren Lands First Nation who has mastered the art of the Chinese poem – rely on life, observe, remark and turn. He has made that art his own.
Something for the Dark is the last of a trilogy: Blackbird Song, Field Notes for the Self and Something for the Dark. The poems in these books spring from Lundy’s time in Saskatchewan. A challenging time. They are written in the same key and they each demonstrate his mastery of his art. All three books are worth reading: slowly, repeatedly.
In the opening “Prelude” to Something for the Dark, Lundy sits down with the reader and says, in a calm intimate voice: Hello, my friend, I have something to tell you and it isn’t always pretty, but you need to know about it. And he is correct. What he says is true.
Throughout this extraordinary collection, Lundy speaks in a steady voice pointing out the tensions in the landscape and the lifescape of his world. It is a world that anyone with a heart can relate to. Lundy shows us the moment as it turns and reveals what it is – and something more.
Almost-full-now moon,
intestine of jet trail dragging
from its side, twisting
behind.
Like a gun-shot animal.
Like a childhood.
This collection is filled with powerful imagery and insight – often aching but always solid and true. And yet, amid the pain and sadness, Lundy also knows how to spell humour.
Down on my hands and knees
as if praying but really cleaning
the toilet for the first time in weeks.
…
This is why you could never love me.
On and on. One fine poem after another, showing you how to look and listen a little more carefully, with a little more insight.
The absence of “god” is a theme Lundy returns to repeatedly. He will have nothing to do with conventional religion. And yet, he embraces the mystical by resisting it. He shows us “God” in God’s display: this world. Lundy might gag at this thought: but it is true. He leans close and tells you: see here, that pain, this pleasure: we have here the essence of things. What is that but God?
Lundy never pulls his punches. But neither does he over-dramatize. He is always willing and able to look you in the eye as he shows you the other side of the everyday, the glimmer in the dark. The bio in the book indicates Lundy is now teaching at the University of Toronto Scarborough. We can only hope he is able to bring his full talent and insight to this new setting. If so, the results are bound to be a gift.
No one would make a mistake if they bought this book – and its two predecessors – and spent many hours in the company of Randy Lundy. They would be enriched. A reader can ask for nothing more.
Something for the Dark is the last of a trilogy: Blackbird Song, Field Notes for the Self and Something for the Dark. The poems in these books spring from Lundy’s time in Saskatchewan. A challenging time. They are written in the same key and they each demonstrate his mastery of his art. All three books are worth reading: slowly, repeatedly.
In the opening “Prelude” to Something for the Dark, Lundy sits down with the reader and says, in a calm intimate voice: Hello, my friend, I have something to tell you and it isn’t always pretty, but you need to know about it. And he is correct. What he says is true.
Throughout this extraordinary collection, Lundy speaks in a steady voice pointing out the tensions in the landscape and the lifescape of his world. It is a world that anyone with a heart can relate to. Lundy shows us the moment as it turns and reveals what it is – and something more.
Almost-full-now moon,
intestine of jet trail dragging
from its side, twisting
behind.
Like a gun-shot animal.
Like a childhood.
This collection is filled with powerful imagery and insight – often aching but always solid and true. And yet, amid the pain and sadness, Lundy also knows how to spell humour.
Down on my hands and knees
as if praying but really cleaning
the toilet for the first time in weeks.
…
This is why you could never love me.
On and on. One fine poem after another, showing you how to look and listen a little more carefully, with a little more insight.
The absence of “god” is a theme Lundy returns to repeatedly. He will have nothing to do with conventional religion. And yet, he embraces the mystical by resisting it. He shows us “God” in God’s display: this world. Lundy might gag at this thought: but it is true. He leans close and tells you: see here, that pain, this pleasure: we have here the essence of things. What is that but God?
Lundy never pulls his punches. But neither does he over-dramatize. He is always willing and able to look you in the eye as he shows you the other side of the everyday, the glimmer in the dark. The bio in the book indicates Lundy is now teaching at the University of Toronto Scarborough. We can only hope he is able to bring his full talent and insight to this new setting. If so, the results are bound to be a gift.
No one would make a mistake if they bought this book – and its two predecessors – and spent many hours in the company of Randy Lundy. They would be enriched. A reader can ask for nothing more.
January 26, 2026
My favourite poems:
1 - Hunger
9 - Chickadee
13 - After Reading Susan Glickman’s “The Daytime Moon”
14 - Ars Poetica
20 - On Forgiveness
22 - Autumn Awakening *
26 - Thinking of The Botticelli Girl, Ten Years Later
34 - An Act of Grace *
36 - A Not On the Use of The Term Genocide *
40 - Bach and My Father
44 - My Grandfather As Myth
47 - Directions, Driving Back to Saskatchewan
51 - Land Claim
52 - Poem for a Friend Travelling
57 - The Ritual Is Dangerous
64 - Ceremony to Summon Dreams
66 - Pelicans
67 - Tâpwê
My favourite quotes:
Do you envy the suffering of others?
Today, you are a bronze bell without a tongue— defined by an absence. You will never be rung.
What calls you back is always outside.
If you thought that the cosmic stupidity of childhood, the lying and the greed, would end, you’ve had fifty years now to learn otherwise. The mistakes continue to pile up, to accrete. Adulthood, for our species, never seems to arrive. The question of whether or not the ignorance is forgiven is not in you can answer, and what would it mean, in any case, for you to forgive your self: for all the betrayals, of others, yes, but betrayals that were ultimately enacted against everything in you that might have been best?
You’re in a rush to get to where you’re going, that’s why you’re lost.
1 - Hunger
9 - Chickadee
13 - After Reading Susan Glickman’s “The Daytime Moon”
14 - Ars Poetica
20 - On Forgiveness
22 - Autumn Awakening *
26 - Thinking of The Botticelli Girl, Ten Years Later
34 - An Act of Grace *
36 - A Not On the Use of The Term Genocide *
40 - Bach and My Father
44 - My Grandfather As Myth
47 - Directions, Driving Back to Saskatchewan
51 - Land Claim
52 - Poem for a Friend Travelling
57 - The Ritual Is Dangerous
64 - Ceremony to Summon Dreams
66 - Pelicans
67 - Tâpwê
My favourite quotes:
Do you envy the suffering of others?
Today, you are a bronze bell without a tongue— defined by an absence. You will never be rung.
What calls you back is always outside.
If you thought that the cosmic stupidity of childhood, the lying and the greed, would end, you’ve had fifty years now to learn otherwise. The mistakes continue to pile up, to accrete. Adulthood, for our species, never seems to arrive. The question of whether or not the ignorance is forgiven is not in you can answer, and what would it mean, in any case, for you to forgive your self: for all the betrayals, of others, yes, but betrayals that were ultimately enacted against everything in you that might have been best?
You’re in a rush to get to where you’re going, that’s why you’re lost.
June 8, 2025
This collection is a fascinating attempt to show the failure of language to mean. And in so doing, itself fails to show that as readers are ushered into a rich immanence that strives to be starker than it can deliver upon.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews