Safarik is an accomplished poet who employs heightened and figurative language to great effect.  He makes use of  implied and mixed metaphor; metaphysical conceit; simile; and personification, or prosopopeia, in which an inanimate object or abstract concept is endowed with human feelings or attributes.

Two approaches to metaphor are the similarity view and the interaction view, as in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), by I.A. Richards and “Metaphor” (1954-55), by Max Black.  Throughout the poetry is infused by metaphor which creates similarity. A worthwhile study of Safarik’s opus to date would also involve a pragmatic view of What Metaphors Mean (1978), by Donald Davidson and “Metaphor” in Expression and Meaning (1979) by John Searle.  The cognitive or conceptual view can be found in More than Cool Reason (1979), by George Lakoff and Mark Turner.  (I am indebted to A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams, seventh edition for these sources on “Theories of Metaphor”)

With cover art “With Love and Disregard: Enchantment at Dawn” (2002), by Jules Olitski and text edited by Paul Wilson, this is a collection of 83 lyric poems, divided into two sections, “Illustrated Lives”, with 42 poems, and “Portrait In Grassy Dress”, with 41 poems.

Beginning with the first section, we discover a garden of circus icons, lion, firewalker, and horse, associated with thievery. (“Whisky Man”)  In “Desert”, a god-like poet, only glimpsed in his handiwork through nature, possesses a “wide open eye”, which reminds the reader of the doctor wrought omnipresent on a billboard in F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.

There are abstract images of “nothingness”, “absence”, “emptiness”, “devoid”, all because the beloved has left. (“Temptation”, p. 15)  Some poets repeat “the common themes”, so you are threatened. (“Treachery”, p. 16)  In “Telling”, an inventory of emotion, each line beginning with an evocative verb, “Worship”, “Admire”, “Regret”, “Fear”, “Celebrate”, “Praise”, and so on, not the least of which is regard for “the soft pencil”. (p. 17)

The editorial voice is overcome by anxiety, until the poet enumerates the identities, and, by doing so, is released from their power. (“Voices”)  The stock “Advice To Young Poets” (about a non-heroic world) puts him in the same camp as Sir Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry (1595), that a poet affirms nothing, therefore he never lies.

The death of an old woman interrupts the poet’s day, while “I was writing another epic poem.”  His former friend is the embalmer. (“All About Dying In Bed”, p. 20)  The death of a sparrow appears in “The Natural History Cricket” (ostensibly “found in Wordsmith, May 13, 2007, p. 21, but I found it on the Internet.)    The sparrow was famously killed during the MCC Versus Cambridge University fixture of 1936.  The bird was subsequently stuffed and mounted.  The Grand House Sparrow, in the Netherlands, is the museum to which it was sent.  Ironically, a sparrow was spared at Worster, “:Humble House Sparrow Earns Stay Of Execution For Historic Cricket Pavilion.”

In “Unknown Details”, the poet experiences the breakup of his neighbours, while he is suffering from past conflicts, such that he compares them with Byzantine, Napoleonic, or Roman wars.  In “Birth Of Death”, he memorializes the nuclear explosion at Chernobyl, April 16, 1986, and its aftermath.  The afterlife is compared with a barbecue (“Rumours From Heaven”)  

There is the ambiguity of “shrunken heads/picked up by tourists from past centuries”, if the heads are from the past or the tourists could be time-traveling. (“The Economy In The New Century”, p. 26.)  The title poem depicts Jesus weeping tears of blood, due to knowing the stories behind tattoos. (“Illustrated Lives”)  The poet observes a fly at a business luncheon because he too is insignificant.  (“The Comparison”)

The poet uses incremental repetition to expose civilization (“Essay Pictures”) He awakes from a dream while he is in a dentist’s chair (“Dream Cocktail”) The function of science is the study of animals, Einstein’s brain, and prominent political figures. (“Mating Rites”)   The poverty of Russians is apparent. (“Postcard From Moscow”)  Interplanetary tourism is satirized. (“Poem For Plant Earth”) Strangers arrive to surprise him. (“Visitors”)

A rat lives well because we treat him like royalty. (“Nothing Defines Humanity Like The Essential Rat”, “Two Variations”, I.)  He accompanies us everywhere (II).

A catalogue explores twenty-one “Abstract Concepts Of Penury”.  In “House Fly”, the insect is female, able “to gorge on human saliva.” (p. 40)  The coffee room at work becomes useful as a parable. (“The State Of The Insect Economy”)   He embraces a haiku  or haiku-like form. (“Impersonation”)  Porn is introduced to pandas. (“Beauty Parlour Tips”)   Zoo animals take over the economy. (“The Bungled Investment”)  The poet engages a street person in conversation. (“The Whole Truth And Nothing But...”) A woman comes on to him.

In “Simile”, he compares men with castrated dogs.  A river is “passing like vodka”. (“Saskatoon”, p. 48)  He fears strange diseases. (“Travelogue”).  A humourous poem depicts discrimination against pachyderms. (“Elephant News”)  Boredom results in mass murder and the murderer tries to commit suicide by self-immolation. (“The Accidental Patient”) A view of planet earth and its environs from Mars proves we are multi-coloured. (“white”, “crimson”, “yellow”, “copper”, “turquoise”, pp. 53-4) Another interplanetary view reveals twenty-four references to “blood” and “bloody”. (“Dead Men Walk On The Rim Of The Sun”, pp. 55-6)  A war zone causes “bird wings...minus the bird”, a symbol for madness. (“April In Baghdad”, p. 57) There is an homage to the magic realism in a Kafka-esque poem about a cockroach. (“Truth And Reconciliation”)  A dweller in a fall-out shelter hopes to avoid danger but encounters some buried intruders. (“Neighbour”) An address to “You dear friend” outlines the speaker’s alienation. (“Homeless)” Of this section, the concluding poetic muse speaks in tongues. (“Salvation”)

With the second section, we begin with the fact that there are “fingers” of brush in the tightly-crafted fourteen lines. (“Brushwood Mockery”) and the speaker compares the poet’s mood with the remains of an old horse. (p. 67).  We find the alliteration of “wheels”, “waist”, and “wheat”. (“Worse Than Bad Karma”); the irony of the metaphor “crimson regret” (p. 68) Then we follow the epic struggle of bus passengers, along the lines of the Canterbury Tales, (“Bus Travelling Blues”), with Biblical feeding of the masses with manna; the New Testament miracle of the loaves and the fishes (The Sermon on the Mount); and the west being the bread  basket of the world for those “assembled on the frontier”; depicting the sustenance offered by breast feeding of an infant. (p. 69)

The speaker asks for directions about a “nameless road”, but finds himself lost (“Map Of The Road”), in a poem using half-rhyme of “map/half/back/flat” (p. 70)  The poem is as an opportunity “for another short story”, with onomatopoeia (“Bad News Café”; as well as the hyperbole of “a million miles of wire”, combined with “the horizon stapled”, because it is a “developed” frontier (“Mule Deer On The Hanley Road”)

There is the confusion of a hook caught in the speaker’s shirt, when it was intended for fishing, but the sub-lunar world is exchanged for the constellation, since stars appear in the water. (“Jig Time”) He has a vision through a window of a man like an “ancient rooster”. (“Influenza”) There is the irony of a double image in the blind man’s glasses, the macrocosm of war. (“Perfect Sense”)

There are the wide-angled lens, the vision and voice of God (“Portrait In Grassy Dress”); the metaphor of “earth/body/skin”, with  the epithet of “yellow taste of lightning” (p. 78) We find the ribbon of time, real and imagined (“Green River”) and have questions which go unasked or unanswered. (“Birthright”)

There are dawn’s blinding light (“Nocturne”), in addition to the multiple realities in duplicate photographs. (“Photograph In Small Hands”)  We find a fisherman’s bible (“Prairie Jackfish Recipe”); the sublime, such as the Holy Spirit’s appearance and the sanctity of the second coming ; and bathos, the effects of dampness. (“Martyrs”)

There is a strange encounter with a giant (“Stoned On Conversation”);  geese engage the neighbours and a bull moose plays with children. (“Where The Black Dog Bites”)  The garden vegetables represent the body for mourners. (“Victory Garden”) There will be punishment for garden destroyers. (“Jungle Notes”)  Flies resemble punctuation marks while still-life is mourned. (“Black Window In The Sun”)

A fish-like sun rises with “red flesh”. (“Incendiary”)  There are an undertaker and a butcher who attend a family picnic. (“The Big Laff”) “God communicates with his omnipotent universe”. (“Sunday In July”, p. 96)  Time is measured “before the coming of the second wife” (“Twice Around The Block”) and apples heal themselves. (“Spartan”)

There is the onomatopoeia of “sizzling” (“Gift Of Onions”), when what matters are “the open eye”, which acts as a window, and “planets shine through pinholes in the universe”. (p. 99)  We encounter interplanetary visitors (“Root Crops”) and conspiracy theories, which involve the comparison of using less language for an economically-deprived farmer. (“Foreclosure”)  One may choose artificial insemination or hamburger heaven for bulls. (“White Rabbit”)  The imagist poems “Draft Horses” and “Tears” are sparse, but heightened in meaning, like “In a Station of the Metro”, by Ezra Pound and the free verse of William Carlos Williams.  However, Safarik owes much to the Black Mountain Poets, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan.

There is a classic poem (“Prairie Gothic”) much like a famous artwork.   “Words remain unsaid”, which he regrets (“The Long Day”), after listening, because the rural life is hard.

In “Midnight Dogs”, wily coyotes devour domesticated dogs.  In “Graveyard Drifts”, the speaker tends to a grave, when time is “cold as death”. (p. 113).  There is the contrast between “the Groucho Marx eyebrows” and “white hellfire, damnation”, in a single man. (“Late Winter Cigar”, p. 114)

We witnesses the death of an eighty-seven year old man, “Alice waiting for him in the afterlife” (“Old Art Quick Frozen Like A Bag Of Peas”, p. 115);  as a career dog-catcher, and there appear: “All the euthanized cats and dogs”, calling out for “Deputy Dog”.

Some sober meditations are on unemployment and cash flow problems (“Winter Road”); the stark winter landscape (“Blue Dream”); as well as  meditations on John Newlove, with simile of “clouds” and “laundry”; half-rhyme of “long gone”; alliteration of “bad”, “blood”, and   “bitter”. (“Yellowgrass”). He uses punctuation like chess pieces; he moves life, as if it were on a game board. (p. 84)

Since the collection as a whole is dedicated to poet John Newlove (1938-2003), it is fitting that another poem “Grace Street”, for Newlove, depicts a man “dangling,” as if by a “chicken-neck cord” of the light bulb, and a “bag of chicken feathers” represents souls (p. 63).

Safarik has other works: How I Know The Sky Is A River: Selected and New Shorter Poems (1978-1998) (Haigos, 1999); Bird Writer’s Handbook (2003), and Blood of Angels (2004).  He edited the anthology Vancouver Poetry (1986) and won the John V. Hicks Manuscript Award for Literary Nonfiction, in 2003, for a manuscript which was subsequently published by Hagios Press as Notes from the Outside.  The collection When Light Falls From the Sun (Hagios) won the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award for 2005.

We were pleased to review Blood Angels and When Light Falls From the Sun and, in issue 43 (2004-5) pp.3-8, to publish “God Sucker”, a short story by Safarik which we nominated for the Writers’ Trust/ McClelland and Stewart Journey Prize Anthology.

Anne Burke