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review by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer


The Edge of Time:
Poems and Translations
by Robin Skelton
Ronsdale Press (Vancouver, B.C.), 1995
Paperback, 151 pages



Popping Fuchsias:
Poems 1987-1992
by Robin Skelton
Cacanadadada Press Ltd. (Vancouver, B.C.), 1992
Paperback, 161 pages


Robin Skelton died last August at the age of 72. He was the preeminent poet of British Columbia, yet he was little known to readers on this side of the border. (The cultural border between the U.S. and Canada is unfortunately only semipermeable: our books and art flood Canadian society, but Canadian work reaches us only with difficulty.)

Skelton was born in Yorkshire, England in 1925, a place he described as having no customs, just habits and "tricks of the slow tongue." He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Leeds University, and fought with the Royal Air Force in India and Ceylon during World War II. After the war he began his teaching career at Manchester University, but followed his uncle's example and emigrated to British Columbia in 1963. There he founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Victoria and influenced over a generation of British Columbian poets. In 1967 Skelton also co-founded The Malahat Review, which has become one of Canada's leading literary journals.

Between 1955 and 1996 Skelton published approximately 40 books of excellent poetry. In the early and middle periods of his writing Skelton's poems were like rain: they were fertile, steady, pure, and looked to the ground. You entered his poems at the mid-point of a rain storm, not at the beginning or the end. There was no rage or lightning, nor were there any miraculous clearings or sunrises.

For example, in "Letter to an Irish Poet," a great poem from his 1962 collection The Dark Window, Skelton sketches portraits of three men from his hometown who in various and ominous ways influenced his boyhood. Skelton's attention is on each man, and he brings each to life:

"George, wordless, knew the weather's way,
taking his beasts to grass
shirt-sleeves or coated before the day
knew its own mind; sun, wind, or rain
assured by how his body was"

In his poems Skelton chose not to draw conclusions. He didn't tell the reader what to think or feel. He did not want to make his meaning clear:

"because no meaning
ever is. I'd rather
have at least a
part of it obscure
and put an ambiguity
here or there--"
- from "Making it Difficult" in Popping Fuchsias

Skelton's palate was like the painter Georges Braque's: brown, gray, and black. The old poetic certainties of beauty and truth did not hold for him. He felt that those certainties could only be mouthed now by hungry ghosts. Instead he sought to describe in detail the unsympathetic, the average, and that which was not beautiful. His were dry oracles and a chilling wisdom. He was antiromantic, as were many English poets of his generation, such as Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. He acknowledged the necessity of pretense in life, especially in matters of love. And he was ruthlessly observant and ready to laugh at himself in his regular self-portraits. As a poet he saw himself as a toad, a "mud nightingale," and "the loudest frog in a swamp / where there are no rains."

But in 1992, with the publication of Popping Fuchsias, Skelton began to reinvent himself through an extended exploration of formal verse forms. He had always been ready to use rhyme and meter, and had created many excellent ballads, especially his sexy tributes to the muse. However now he began concentrating on writing in traditional forms that he had regularly taught to his students but not yet used in his own verse. Popping Fuchsias and The Edge of Time are filled with sestinas, madrigals, curtal quatrains, sonnets, villanelles, as well as ancient Welsh, Greek, and Indian poetic forms. Skelton even created and named some of his own new forms, such as the "viator" in which the first line of the poem moves through the stanzas to serve as the last line of the last stanza.

As Skelton expected, the traditional forms paradoxically gave his late poems brand new tones and feelings. He ventured into lyrical modes as in the lovely "Apple Tree" written according to the rules of an ancient Welsh form:

"five seeds in a star
that announces we are
beyond near and far
yet of the tree
blessing time's garden
with dropping blossom
teaching the children
eternity."

The music-like forms of the rondeau and madrigal also helped Skelton create the masterpiece "Meditation at Samhain," the concluding poem in Popping Fuchsias. Reminiscent of Matthew Arnold's famous meditation "Dover Beach," "Meditation at Samhain" also takes place at the shore where the speaker listens to the wash of the sea and asks himself about the future of the world. Looking towards Europe in 1853, Arnold premonitionally foresaw:

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Skelton had served in one of those armies, but in his old age, looking out on the Pacific, he had a more hopeful vision:

"Mortality is good,
for in that warm disguise
we learn what we must learn
of reverence and love
to keep horizons true
and stand at last upon
the one particular shore
that is where we must go
to put our lendings by
as time outfaces time,
and, as horizon nears,
know that we live to live
and that horizons die."



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