Out of the Storm
Out of the Storm
Michael Thorpe
6 X 9 inches, 66 pages
Penumbra Press Poetry Series, No. 10'THE RANGE IS REMARKABLE, and the tone—that inner speaking voice—as confident and touching as the handling of words.'
It has burst again, the perennial mattress,
We fumble beneath its stifling down;
But is there no relief in this suppression
From the sharp light shafts of summer?
We become again one in padded complaint,
Back into glowing caves; all our terrors
Spy out of comfort—cut power, black ice
Betraying eye and wheel into a mauled ditch—
Those few at sea, dear to none we know,
Receive remote alerts, bear our wordy
Frisson of peril; but here we slip
Among chances mostly minute. An event
Is a cracked toe—implicit in the first soft fall
And the old sure contract with darkness
Our sleeping life will persist to bless.
—Perennial Mattress
Michael Thorpe
Author
Michael Thorpe is a widely published poet, critic and editor. Born and educated in England, he left there in 1957. He taught English in colleges and universities in Turkey, Nigeria, Singapore and Holland, finally coming to Canada in 1970, to the University of Calgary. Since 1974 he has been Professor of English at Mount Allison University. His critical books include Siegfried Sassoon: a Critical Study and The Poetry of Edmund Blunden—praised in the TLS for their "delicate precision of style and balanced independence of judgement." More recently, he has published Doris Lessing's Africa and the "Writers and Their Work" booklets on Lessing, Naipaul and Fowles. Previous poetry collections, in England, are Morning in Ankara, By the Niger and 20 Dorset Poems. But Out of the Storm is his first collection published in Canada,
