Danica and I enjoyed a visit with Ray Souster at his place on Bloor Street yesterday. John Robert Colombo had given me a book of Ray’s most recent poems and when I said how much I liked them, John said we should meet the author.
We came away with even more poems and I started to read them as soon as I got home. They are having a strong impact on me. Often very short, the poems are very direct and free of academic allusions. They seem easy to understand at a glance, but they echo around in my mind, I’m finding, and layers of meaning and questions are often packed into a few lines.
Since Ray is 91 years old now, legally blind for the last 10 years and living in a retirement home, many of his poems deal frankly with thoughts of death. They aren’t morbid or self-pitying, though. Many of them are calls to live and act, while we have the chance. If fact, he sets an example. He continues to write poems… sometimes 5 in a day, he says… reading them into the phone to his editor.
I admitted that I read about as much poetry as most people… very, very little… but I mentioned that I once met Earle Birney in Vancouver. “Earle was a good friend of mine”, said Ray.