Learning to Dance with a Peg Leg: three dozen tunes for a third mate
by Wayne Clifford
Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2009, 80 pp., paper.

Wayne Clifford has led a long and varied life as a writer, beginning at age twelve and continuing halfway through his sixties. He began by modelling hymns and ballads, segued into modern forms, and returned to older forms late into the last century. For Clifford, words are not cheap. I like to think he sculpts his poems into existence. Function follows form. From his grinning self-deprecating title the reader can be certain Clifford has learned to dance. Life is the dance. FR Scott made that clear, and with these 36 beauties I would not argue the point with Clifford. His poetry sparkles with light and lyricism. He writes as only an older poet is able--with deliberation, hawk-eyed, and open to wonder. In "Minuet" the poet passes the dead bodies of a dove and hawk lying on the highway, and speculates on how they got there. He parallels this with his drive down the highway, bringing the poem around delicately and with grace to its conclusion. He writes with a sense of knowing that we can not know, yet he is at peace with this knowledge. His way of saying is exquisitely nuanced. Hear his manner in "Essential Chaconne," writing about the first spring violet he discovers (and eats!):

. . . A smallish, wild
variety I planted in the lawn

is what, these last three springs,
where melt bares, before the most
of rest of garden, the path that dries
from muddish out to green between
the porch hedge and the rock I piled
up dry-fit wall for pit and composted
for phlox and columbine. I love dirt. (67)

"I planted...is what...where...before...that dries...I piled...composted"--in an almost staccato delivery he walks us on a Frostian garden tour, punctuated so matter-of-factly with that declaration, "I love dirt." Who would ever doubt his sincerity? "Bring whatever grief/ you cherish beside/ a sapling. Return, return...//...Find leaves'/ sun-long exhalations." (29) That is sobriety in the very instant, the momentary experience handled as non-aggressively as birds' nest building. He says, and says again, minutely and differently: blink, sniff, feel the vibrations underfoot. The first thought in "Old Fox and Goose Trot"

At pillow seam, this
feather, measuring
factual exhalations,

eyes so deft awaking,
rain traces some of its
many fingers down
the glass, its flesh
of mortal lenses thicken
the early light. (43)

sounds obsessed with minutiae, or it is simply the trace of the poet's awakening eye from pillow to rain on the window, to the distorted morning light. As the poem nudges to a miracle, three more thoughts usher this first thought to fulfillment. The book--another so gorgeously fabricated by Frog Hollow Press--is filled with these poetic moments that hurt like life hurts when we realize we cherish most what is ephemeral, "all that has been, and will be, good,/ is here, afloat on moment,/ and soon to be asleep." (73) Did the 65-year-old man recall the 12-year-old boy as he wrote the poems in this book? I am certain of it. The poems display a maturity that comes of a full life remembered in full force. What a gift is Wayne Clifford's writing.

Andrew Vaisius is a writer and childcare worker living in Morden, Manitoba.


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