Before We Had Words [Paperback]

The idea of poets having "careers" is a very strange one. A poet with seven volumes out, for example, is thought by the Canada Council to be in "mid-career". By that standard, a good many of the poets we most value (Eugenio Montale, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, to name three) were less than novices. Sheldon Zitner has passed through a lifetime of reading and writing having punched the clock at none of the required moments. In his seventies, Zitner published a first book, The Asparagus Feast (1999) that was instantly received as a Canadian classic. (At the time, he remarked with tart modesty, "I'd like to live to see the publication, but not the reviews.")
Sheldon Zitner's second collection, Before We Had Words, is founded on the personal and the particular, or, as he addresses an artist friend: "You trusted bit by bit in one by one." And yet he is so at ease among histories, cultures, art-forms, and literatures, that Zitner's idea of "personal" becomes a category of enormous range and inclusion. Consider how in "A Window Seat" the private sorrow measures itself humbly against the grief of millions:

"Flying to Prague, I look down at central Europe.
A cloud-rimmed radiance has spread
over the wrinkled fields and gray-haired cities
toward the horizons that foiled escape by sea.

What are the secrets buried in that forest
or floating in chimney smoke above that village?
We ride the turbulence of murdered spirits;
this is the graveyard of my people.

Ich habe tote. I too have my dead,
though the proprietary tone of Rilke's phrase,
suggests – if not intends – a restorative power
in eloquence. I am not of a time that thinks so,

nor would I diminish the Great Death with such a
claim.
Of them I am, but also other – as this sky, that earth;
between us an irredeemable history:
their shoah – my cosseted reflections."

This short poem considers identity, genocide, memory, selfhood, and the function of literature, with a grace and economy few poets ever achieve.
The title of the volume refers, in part, to a world before quarrels, when words divided the poet from his father and then from his wife.

"Before we had words
for thoughts and feelings
we had looks and gestures,
immediate, unclouded
by context or connotation.
Almost lost in words,
that immediacy remains;
too deep a glance,
or a glance averted,
can leave us speechless,
coveting that unlanguaged clarity."

The longed-for purity of the world before words is matched, however, by a vigilance over the written word, and especially over books, as the culture values such objects less and less. In "Epilogue: At David Mason's" he imagines, amusingly, the apocalyptic demise of an antiquarian bookshop:

"The overburdened floorboards groan,
splinter and give way; the plumbing bursts;
the bookshelves topple, spilling out a maelstrom
of –ologies and –ana, classics out of print,
the famously illustrated, the fatuously signed,
early drafts with author's blot-and-jot,
rare firsts to tempt commissioned break-and-enter—
all now a soggy ruin, ISBN has-beens for the dustbin."

Beyond the mirth (his poems are often funny), he fears that the sudden triumph of computers is unlike the earlier shifts from scroll to codex to printed book: "is this change worse, / an abandoning of instruments of discourse, / a retreat in the struggle for a written language / to before the scrolls themselves?" Indeed, although writers "welcome the challenge of a lidless / Cyclops, always demanding excitation," the proper destination of words is not the hard-drive, but ‘a stillness in the hand that holds it, / a tremor in the mind that reads it.'
Of course, this collection is, at times, sorrowful—the unconsoled meditations of a man of advancing years. Many friends are remembered, many losses recorded, in poems that are spare, dignified and compassionate. A notable example is "By His Own Hand" in which a forbidding professor of Greek commits suicide:

"He had meant this act to atone
for vows unfulfilled or broken,
death as the wages of weakness,
but he set too high a price
on the life he had not led,
and too low on the one he did."

Even though Zitner doubts the restorative power of eloquence, it is hard not to see in a poem so precisely executed the filling up of deficiencies in the life. The beauty of the words enacts a clemency that this man could not find for himself. His sorrow and poetic atonement are taken into the reader's consciousness as a gift.
The emergence of Sheldon Zitner as a major figure in Canadian poetry is itself a matter for rejoicing. Before We Had Words is a work of wit, passion, and discipline. He deserves all the honour we can give him, but I do not think his "career" is finished yet.
Richard Greene (Books in Canada)