Expatriation

Poets' first books all but invite a cliche response. "Brilliant," "tough," "immediate," "ironic," even the übiquitous "moving": Liman's blurb writers fell for most of the stock adjectives. The temptation is to add yet another old chestnut: "uneven but promising."

But none of this will do. To be sure, Liman's first poems are promising — and a bit uneven to boot — but their future promise is predicated on an already solid present achievement. His subjects are admirably precise, unabstract, his images firmly rooted in the particular, but by skillful manipulation of the skein of metaphor he also often succeeds in weaving a perceptible over-plaid of the universal into the fabric of his particularity.

Liman uses few personae in his poems, preferring to speak as the unmediated "I," for himself and of himself. Taken as a whole, the poems therefore not only exhibit some lack of variety but also give the impression of a somewhat too intense preoccupation with self. Perhaps a bit more aesthetic distance is too much to ask for, however, for this book deals with a profoundly felt, almost private theme: exile.

An American, Liman moved north a few years ago to teach English in a Canadian university. The early poems in the, book record his initial frustrations, his bewilderment, even bitterness, at his alien surroundings. Gradually the bitterness is muted, replaced by a sentimentalized nostalgia, an over-idealized image of times past in another country. At the end the poet comes to terms with his self-chosen exile. His spiritual journey is concluded, his tensions resolved. He has "landed." Swinging with his small daughter in a backyard in Ontario, saying this love in our backyard swingand hearing your laughtersay yes to the sunwas the very best swingingthat's ever been swung.

LANDINGBy Claude Liman '65Sesame, 1976. 75 pp. $3.00