Raymond Souster's Neglect

Brian Palmu tries to understand it:

"The only theory I can come up with is Souster's timing. His poetry is in line with the times, and (indeed) one of his two best books is entitled The Colour of the Times (1964). His poetic sensibility was formed in the lean thirties, and any poet who didn't get blown away on a shifting wind was—the same as every poet in England—writing about deprivation, human frailty, metaphysical bafflement and/or anger, social injustice, and hidden graces. But Souster's tentative, plainspoken realism was an awkward fit since his best work was hitting the street just as postmodernism was touching down, and would also have little in common with the later Canada-Council-juiced confessional anecdotes of scores of other poets who would, at first glance, appear natural cohorts."

(Portrait of Raymond Souster by Barker Fairley.) 

Sunday Poem

 

TO THE CANADIAN POETS, 1940 

Come, my little eunuchs, my tender virgins,
it's high time you were home and in bed.
The wind's cold and strong in the streets now,
and it's almost ten o'clock.

Soon whores will be obvious at corners,
and I wouldn't want you accosted or given the eye;
soon drunks will be turned out of beverage rooms
and you could be rolled or raped up a dark lane. 

So quickly find your houses, turn the latch-key, set the night-lock,
remember to dress with the blinds down. Then safe in bed you may dream
of Pickthall walking hand in hand with her fairies,
of Lampman turning his back on Ottawa.

From Collected Poems of Raymond Souster, Vol. 1: 1940-55 (1980) by Raymond Souster.