poetry: Good Time

Good Time, by Philip Thatcher (Perceval Books 2022, order at percevalbooks2001@gmail.com); 178 pages; review by Fred Dennehy

This is the work of a lifetime. With very few exceptions, the poems in Philip Thatcher’s masterful collection Good Time were written after its author had turned eighty. Almost immediately after the completion of his previous (and previously reviewed) volume, Fine Matter, Mr. Thatcher entered “a whole new stream” of cognitive feeling. Good Time is the rich deposit of that stream, and its poems speak the gathered heart wisdom of a fully-lived life.

Good Time is in three parts: “Day by Day”; “ Nuances of North”; and “Still, Very Still ” “ Day by Day,” as Mr. Thatcher characterizes it elsewhere, is a personal “journal of the Covid time” in Canada, chronicling its maskings and unmaskings, and showing its edges between solitude and generosity. While the poems are not overtly political, they often trace the reverberations of larger events, including the geographic movement of communities and the unattended destruction of persons and places amid the passage of civilization.

Time is never far from his focus—in the seasonal and liturgical turns of the year, in anniversaries, commemorations, and the reappraisals they provoke. Mr. Thatcher is a contemplative, and happily a slow, writer. The considered second looks he gives to his subjects inspire a confidence and a trust in his readers, and make room for the genial fun that keeps turning up.

The focus is often minute and particular, but what is first met as small can crack open to deeper suggestions— the karmic turnings of lives or the destinies of peoples. And there is no tightly held litany of answers. His voice can speak in a gentle undertone that shifts the reader’s attention to “something far more deeply interfused.”

In other poems the scope is wider, opening up like a vast tundra and sounding low and deep like the friction of tectonic plates. Many of them foreground the planets—the dance of Venus around the sun, and the intricate meetings and partings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn over a two year period. While there is no archetypal unpacking, we see in these grand movements signs both of exigent moral crisis and a near hope of transformation. They urge us, as Mr. Thatcher crafts it, to “let love release your thinking sunward.” Still other poems—“Simon of Cyrene,” “Reading the Gospel of Mark,” “Reading the First Letter of John”—take us back to the New Testament, offering a second look that sharpens our attention and invites us to wonder in a new way.

So much of Mr. Thatcher’s poetry seems to arise from edges and borders, always suggesting the emergence of something new. His own inner place is one of equanimity, able to bear unlimited nuance with the grace of acceptance or play. And his sense for the moment always remains impeccable. Here is “At the Checkout Stand:”

The idea of ‘North,’ so pertinent to Canadian identity, is as elusive as it is alluring. Its images in art, literature, and legend, swirl around solitude, emptiness, and stillness, and it tends to unfold in narratives of clear or subtle dangers, with a radical openness to what is unknown. The second part of Good Time, “ Nuances of North,” consists of five poems tracing episodes from the life of Samuel Hearne, the eighteenth century British explorer of northern Canada, alternating with five invoking musicians and composers of the North: Sami singer/chanter Mari Boine, Norwegian jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen, and composers Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, from Russia, Estonia and Iceland respectively.

Those readers familiar with Mr. Thatcher’s 2020 collection, Fine Matter, may recall “Hudson Bay: July 1, 1767,” which introduced Samuel Hearne at age 22, etching his name into a blue rock slab, determined upon a life of discovery. Hearne is an endlessly intriguing figure of the second scientific revolution, that new age of wonder which looked upon Nature not as a repository of predictive certainty, but as a mysterious being waiting to be coaxed into revealing her living enigmas.

In Good Time we see Hearne, still in his twenties, gazing into the emptiness of the North and impatient to fill his blank map with its revelations. The poems trace his three major exploratory journeys, where he traversed and surveyed more than fifty six hundred kilometers of northern Canada. “Nuances” imagines Hearne gradually beginning to shed his Western presuppositions and habits, and to learn the life of the land from his First Nations guides. It lays bare his fierce intimacies and betrayals, and, movingly, his helplessness as he witnesses the massacre of twenty Inuit settlers at Bloody Falls in Nunavut. Last, it conjures up his meeting, near the end of his life at Christ’s Hospital in London, with a nineteen year old Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who would later take Hearne as the inspiration for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

The inner surfaces of “North” appear through imaginations of music, whose sounds issue out of themselves in contrasts and rhythms that evoke austere and reticent terrain and skies. Spirit and sense come together.

In “Listening to Sofia Gubaidulina,” the bowing of the cello in the composer’s “Canticle of the Sun” echoes the yearly movement of the sun toward and away from the Arctic circle, and the rhythmic recurrences of lasting day and lasting night:

The poems in “Still, Very Still,” the third section of Good Time, seem to have already understood what Simone Weil said that “very few spirits discover”: things and beings exist.* There is something rather than nothing, and that is simply astounding. We can have delight in that realization, and it prompts a kind of glad sharing. Mr. Thatcher often seems to be speaking confidentially to us about this, and it feels good to be his friend.

* Quoted in Michael Lipson, Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment, available at Amazon.com.

One of my favorites is “A Day in New York City,” where an out of town family climbs out of the stink of the stairs of the Port Authority Terminal to face the city on a humid summer morning:

Philip is right about New York. There is no conclusion to “Still, Very Still,” of course, no take away. But if there is a leave-taking, it’s the feeling that the ordinary and the extraordinary can come together so very gracefully:

Frederick Dennehy is associate editor of being human, a retired lawyer and active thespian, and a class holder of the School for Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society.