Untying the Tongue

Untying the Tongue begins as a "diary of dreams" -- dreams of displaced settlers whose "present remains" are etched in place: botany, stonewalled wells, and memorials. This tribute to blood and consciousness evolves as landscape-portraiture - views of the universe assembling itself in the miracle of everyday objects and characters as familiar as family. The poet becomes a hunter-gatherer, in a realm where poems pre-exist language. An exploration of romantic love never lost, but sighted in landscape, displaces fear of the world of naked stardust.

Visions outside the window of experience are natural phenomena. The environment is non-anthropomorphic. The viewer becomes the landscape, watching another take passage -- being absorbed in place. The poem is fare for a man becoming a branch, his knuckles disappearing into a cleft of moss and lichen-covered bark, until the moment of wind he leans against passes. And he is never seen again. One day a symphony of deciduous buds casting their husks hushes the city. The power of desire trembles its aroma in the breath of the inhabitants. Discovery of the hazards of trying to mold the world in the image of the human condition of loneliness, instead of community, is the process. The poet is a temporary custodian of the poem -- an organic structure, dependent on the energy of desire.

Greg Cook was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and has worked as a news reporter, lecturer, dramatist, freelance writer and executive director of the Writer's Federation of Nova Scotia. Recently he has resided in Toronto, Fredericton, and Saint John, New Brunswick, where he is writing a biography of poet Alden Nowlan (1933-83).

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