Where We Might have Been, by Don Coles

Don Coles’s prime concern has long been the perplexing passage of time, and in his new collection of poems, Where We Might Have Been, that concern has intensified. Time deepens as we age, and it is a testament to his artistry that Coles, at 83, possesses the curiosity and will to transform experience into poetry.

In a signature Coles poem, the reader enters a maze of seemingly random events culled from the past, a series of happenstance that subtly and surprisingly connects with the final line. In the collection’s lead-off poem, Places, the poet revisits his lost self, a youthful visitor to postwar Copenhagen who falls for “a nurse-in-training called Gitl.” The temporary couple glimpses “inaccessible seasons together” – each will soon travel afar. The poem takes us to a club called the Røde Pimpernel, includes remarks on Gitl’s breasts, introduces a rude rival and is framed by a memory of reading Art Buchwald’s column – and later, learning of the journalist’s impending death. This swirl of incidents dovetails for the reader, who is left contemplating life’s fleeting passage, its missed opportunities as well as its evanescent joys. (The poem’s narrator pictures Buchwald living in Paris, writing “columns about restaurants/ … and the gardens of the Luxembourg,” and asks “could anyone be happier?”) There are wonderful asides, typical of Coles, as when the rude rival is brushed-off by Gitl and the narrator interjects, “That was it for him, he ends here,” or when Buchwald, suffering from kidney failure, declines dialysis, assessing it “as too boring,”

Several of the poems in this book employ narrative: Places achieves the translucent effect of a Salinger short story – think of For Esmé – with Love and Squalor with its evocative probing of a chance encounter. In Proust and My Grandfather (and Eaton’s, God Rot Them) Coles mirrors Proust’s reflective fiction, and in Five he uses the modernist technique of collage (and a footnoted digression) to relate five mini-stories. In an age when poetry often flaunts realism, Coles’s narrative gift gives his poems solidity and lends them a meaning beyond mere regret or platitudinous wisdom. The poems succeed because the Coles’ persona serves as a bemused analyst of its own thoughts and actions:

The young women keep on/ coming year after year, and although/ he signed off long ago on/ the lovely clamour/ there are occasions still when/ he falters – for instance when one of them/ … sitting opposite him in/ the subway seems sad in some way that, how/ derisory, only he could fix. (The Young Women)

We seldom hear a poetic voice as congenial as Coles’s, and we rarely encounter a phrase as memorable as “the lovely clamour.” The Young Women is one of several “home-run” poems in the book. Others? A Walk in the Woods and True Words (both heart-rending), Liebespaar vor Dresden (which juxtaposes two lovers and the Dresden firebombing), ‘Too-Tall’ Jones (ostensibly about the awkwardness and humiliation of being overly tall, but really about the writing of poetry), and Memory, Camus, and Beaches (my personal favourite; I’m a fan of the fatalistic Frenchman’s work.)

Occasionally, Coles’ charming talkativeness threatens to get out of hand and diffuse a poem’s tension. The Heat of the Day, for example, never quite coalesces. But with few exceptions Where We Might Have Been bolsters our estimation of Coles. It is difficult to think of another poet whose style is so unmannered, whose tone is so engagingly true.

Where We Might Have Been