I believe I've alluded to the fact that Raymond Souster was incredibly prolific, publishing 50+ books, most of them poetry collections. Even his Collected Poems runs to 10 volumes, still only covering his work up to 2000! While I probably should have started with the The Colour of the Times (an early selected volume, which is often paired with Ten Elephants on Yonge Street) I'll have to get to that another time. I'm actually working from his very late, post-2000 poems, working backwards in a sense. This will be a double review of Uptown Downtown: New Poems of the GTA and Come Rain, Come Shine: The Last Poems of Raymond Souster. Come Rain, Come Shine truly are Souster's last poems, with some written only two weeks before his death at 91. As this review indicates, in his final years, Souster was blind and had to dictate his poems to an assistant. In many of the final poems, he clearly is working from his hospital bed.
Souster's late style doesn't vary much across the collections, though thematically there is a large difference. In Uptown Downtown, his vision is fading but he can still get around (perhaps taking taxis more than the TTC as he used to) but he still is observing and interacting with the world, even if it is seen through a darkening pane. In contrast, the poems of Come Rain, Come Shine are far more memory pieces about his childhood and early adulthood in Toronto. When he writes about the present, he usually talks about his confinement and how his world has shrunk. Souster typically wrote short poems with a few major exceptions, such as book-length poems about the war: Jubilee of Death and What Men Will Die For. Mostly he put his very straight-forward and unadorned reactions to what he sees in Toronto down without a lot of flourishes. While he is sometimes compared to Whitman or W.C. Williams, I personally think his closest analogue is Charles Reznikoff, though I find Reznikoff a bit more musical and perhaps a bit more steeped in the Old Testament.
I'll pick out and discuss a few poems of interest, starting with Uptown Downtown.
"Taking Out the Garbage": "My blue box holds empty can, / which once held pineapple, peaches, / humble and filling baked beans, / hot soup, sliced beets, chicken stew."
"Coaxing Up the Dawn": "so first we have a show-off dawn, / then the still loudly yawning sun / starts to grind together into gear / one more day's uninspired routines...".
"Last Day": "Suppose this turned out to be / my last day on earth / ... / I've sat at this desk / where my heart revels in / the golden-yellow light outside, / reflected mostly from a backyard tree, whose leaves must surely know / it could be the last day."
Just like Stymeist, Souster shows the 401 no love. In "401 Revisited," he calls it "a hell-ride to nowhere and back, / this necklace of yellow smog / hung around the city's / already reluctant, choking throat."
The first group of poems in Come Rain, Come Shine are fairly similar to those in Uptown Downtown with their slightly cynical take on the foibles of city dwellers. Here's "Revision": "The best laid plans / of mice and men / are usually screwed up / by the wise guy planners." He includes a few poems celebrating Nuit Blanche, which is an all-night art party in Toronto (initially imported from the more cultured Montreal...).
The poems seem to turn more inwards at about the halfway mark of Come Rain, Come Shine, probably reflecting Souster's shrinking world. At about the two-third's mark, Souster begins a series called "Simon Says" where the first poems are mostly reflections of his school days, followed by various moments (not typically "key moments" but just random memory flashes) as the poet traces his life until finally arriving at the hospital bed.
Here are a few examples "Simon Says (29)": "the poet now recalls / that in his second year / at Humberside High / ... / he carried home the books / of a girl in his classroom, / and saw as she walked beside him / the wide swaying movement / of her schoolgirl hips."
"Simon Says (40)": "that time can often end up / with bloodied, torn hands, / but always it ends up / ticking solidly away."
Note that Souster refers to cancer as the "Big C," and indeed it was cancer that killed him.
"Simon Says (112)": "that Big C / is something of a hustler /working round the clock / ... / he may approach your hospital bed / and leaning over / whisper in your ear / it's time now to go, / ... / and soon the two of you / are walking off into the jet-black night."
The two collections are generally pretty similar in tone, though I suppose I would give the nod to his final collection, Come Rain, Come Shine, primarily because they represent his last thoughts on Toronto life and because I thought the Simon Says series was pretty interesting. I'll return with a review of some earlier collections by Souster in the next Challenge.
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