The title Night Vision refers firstly to the night vision goggles that enable soldiers to see through the darkness in order to destroy and kill, and secondly to a vision of the political and ecological night that threatens humankind, but also to the faint possibility, grounded in personal relationships and cultural values, that we will see through and somehow transcend this night. Night Vision’s subjects and scope extend from the anxious urban landscapes of Vancouver and Calgary to the conflicts and terrors, historic and ongoing, in the US, Latin America, and Europe
Short listed for the Governor General’s Award for poetry
Available for purchase at: Quattro Books, Amazon, Indigo
Christopher Levenson is at his best in a poem such as “Tafelmusik,” in which a cleverly controlled extended simile, starting with “As in…” compares a performance by a string quartet to an intimate dinner party:
Soon now the tempo quickens,
out of the air we pluck
uneasy resonance, a pizzicato
counterpoint, until our hosts’ continuo
with a perfectly timed intervention
eases us, conducts us gently back
into adagios, with maybe a searching question
we must pause to accommodate…
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