In “My Last Duchess,” the dramatic monologue by Robert Browning, from 1842, the deceased title character exists only as a painting unveiled at the discretion of her narcissistic husband, Duke Alfonso of Ferrara. Her life has been transformed into a historical object, a representation whose meaning is shaped by the surviving narrator rather than by the woman herself. As the Duke boasts, “none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I” (lines 10-11).
With Sightings, Patrick Friesen takes up a similar tension between direct experience and the records through which experience endures. The thoughtful collection—published fifty years after Friesen’s first—asks how human beings might preserve themselves against time when every document, memory, and story offers only a partial account of who they were. Across some eighty poems, Friesen explores that gap and suggests all acts of remembrance are ultimately “sightings”: partial glimpses of lives that can never be fully articulated or recovered.
The collection’s opening poem, “or speak,” establishes this concern immediately. An unnamed speaker addresses the strange intimacy literature creates between people separated by time and circumstance: “I hear you singing / at night your shadow moves / along the wall.” (1) As they come to appreciate how the act of reading allows another consciousness to enter their own experience, they ask a simple but profound question: “how did you get in?” The closing lines, “everything coming to an end / well, not everything” introduce the collection’s central tension. Individual lives end, but the world exceeds any single perspective. A gap persists between what can be known from within a life and what exceeds any single viewpoint. For Friesen, that gap extends to history writ large: between the life as it is lived and the fragments through which it is later remembered.
Indeed, Friesen’s speakers repeatedly confront the fact that they cannot step outside their own perspectives to attain a complete view of themselves or the world. In “attending,” for example, the narrator suggests that existence itself is a form of participation. Since we cannot shut off our powers of perception, we are always “attending” the world around us; we are a “lonely / mad species navigating through sense / and thought.” (5) Accordingly, they declare, “nowhere is timeless.” Because we are always somewhere, we are always within time. Every life enters a historical current already in motion and contributes to its ongoing flow.
The collection’s strongest poem, “river time,” turns that intuition into an evocative metaphor: history as a waterway carrying countless lives and memories within its current. “Born like a belly flop in time,” (50) each human being enters a flow that passes “the mouths of caves,” ritual sacrifice, and the drowned whose hands wave as they sink beneath the water’s surface. The poem ably compresses millennia of human experience into a single image of movement, and at the same time, Friesen ensures that individual lives are not reduced to insignificance. Upon death, the speaker leaves behind a “river within the river,” which suggests that personal identity emerges from larger historical currents while retaining its own distinct shape. Individuals are never isolated from history, but neither are they entirely dissolved within it.
Mortality remains a steady theme throughout the collection, especially in poems concerned with inheritance and remembrance. With “bones, again,” Friesen traces a boy’s passage from birth to death and concludes with the image of him becoming “words, and bones, again.” (17) Notice the rhetorical emphasis: the material remains of a life (“bones”) are subordinated to the “words” through which that life is remembered. In a physical sense, we will all become “annihilated sapien[s],” reduced to bones, but language allows our experiences to circulate beyond our immediate presence.
That said, Friesen is careful not to overstate the power of words. With “questionable evidence,” he acknowledges the limitations of expression itself. Words may ultimately be what we leave behind, but no record, however rigorously constructed, can fully capture the complexity of a human life: “the thinking disappears, as does the man, / and the few laboured words that come, these words leaving / only questionable evidence.” (31)
What remains, then, are traces that must be interpreted by the living. Across the collection, Friesen turns repeatedly to the problem of how we make absence legible through its surviving fragments. That concern comes into sharp focus with “Ghosts Don’t Sing,” one of the collection’s most compelling meditations on memory. “Ghosts don’t pray, they appear,”(62) Friesen writes, shifting attention from the dead themselves to the living who continually recreate them through reminiscence. The dead do not preserve their own legacies; they survive (“appear”) through acts of interpretation. The poem describes that process as “a way of measuring distance[.” To remember someone is simultaneously to acknowledge their presence and their absence, to encounter the past while recognizing the gulf that separates it from the present.
The title of the collection ultimately provides its most fitting metaphor. “Sightings” offer glimpses rather than a complete view; they are encounters shaped by perspective and circumstance. Friesen embraces this limitation rather than attempting—futilely—to transcend it. His poems acknowledge that human beings leave behind only fragments of themselves, fragments that future generations will interpret, reshape, and sometimes misunderstand. Yet they don’t descend into hopelessness or nihilism. Instead, they suggest that finitude is precisely what gives those fragments their weight and urgency. Because our stories are “woven loosely,” (71) they remain open to revision across time, continually reactivated by the interpretive work of others.
In that sense, Friesen’s collection returns to the problem staged in “My Last Duchess.” There too, a life survives only as an image and a narrative controlled by another, its meaning fixed by the terms of its survival. However, where Browning highlights possession and domination in the act of remembrance, Friesen turns to fragility, plurality, and the inevitability of partial seeing. The result? A deliberate and deeply humane collection that reflects on mortality without surrendering to despair. Sightings finds deep meaning in the imperfect but enduring traces that human beings leave behind.
Sightings
By Patrick Friesen
CMU Press, 2026, 120 p.p., $24
ISBN: 9781987986297
Alexander Sallas is a writer and scholar who holds a Ph.D. in English from Western University. His first book is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press. The former Senior Editor of the Literary Review of Canada, he has published extensively and is a recipient of a National Magazine Award. In 2025, he was named one of Canada’s Top Emerging Leaders under 40 by The Peak.