So far, so good;: Poems 1938/1968

by Raymond Souster

96 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1969

About the author

Raymond Holmes Souster, OC was a Canadian poet whose writing career spanned over 70 years. More than 50 volumes of his own poetry were published during his lifetime, and he edited or co-edited a dozen volumes of poetry by others. A resident of Toronto all of his life, he has been called that city's "most loved poet"

Reviews

[Brian Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book spans 30 years of poetry, it is not a selected in the conventional sense: the first part is called "Uncollected Poems", the second "New Poems": a few of the poems are selected from previous collections but most were either previously published in magazines or not at all. In the early going Souster's poems engage us with their clarity, wit, sensuality and poignancy : the poems are uneven but none are terrible, and there are a few true gems. Like my late friend and perhaps the best unknown Canadian poet I've ever known, Imre Nemeth, said of his poems (in a poem), "In my previous incarnation I must have been an oyster: the pearls are of uneven quality, but the suffering is genuine."

Unfortunately the book sags in the middle and truly slumps toward the end (particularly the latter section entitled New Poems): a lot of half-baked filler, some of it quite bad. In the whole collection I found 3 or 4 excellent and 5 or 6 quite good poems. This book was published during the glory days of Canada Council spending, when some of the best poets (not to mention quite a few mediocre ones) churned out all kinds of dross and got it published immediately in nice-looking collections because it fell under the rubric of "Canadian Culture." (Irving Layton, Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy are other cases in point.) I'm reminded of something Randall Jarrell said about a poet being a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. Better though not to publish all that standing-in-the-rain stuff if you can help it.

Here's a poem that I quite enjoyed, one of the few that made the collection well worth reading.

THE PARTY

The food is wonderful
the whisky goes down smooth
the radio has fifteen tubes,

but you sit over there
and I sit over here
while the conversation eddies, ebbs,
with only the dance-bands
constant in their beat.

And we wait for the time
when it’s proper and polite to leave

because it’s agony
to sit apart, to talk,

when we are young
and have arms and have lips.