Book review: Robert Boates • by Tristanne Connolly • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters     I remember a conversation I had on a bus in downtown Hamilton with Robert Boates sometime in the late 1980s, when I was a young writer and he was a mentor to me. No, “mentor” would put us both off for sounding so professional and ambitious; more like a kind and interested poet-friend. Robert told me how his father simultaneously denounced his love of poetry and reviled him as a person by saying that poetry is for sissies. I already saw how Robert clung fiercely to his sensitivity, and this let me see just how brave that was. My own poetry-loving father is fond of the saying, “Getting old is not for sissies.” If that means courage is necessary to endure the accumulation of mental and physical suffering over a lifetime, Robert Boates is the furthest thing from a sissy. Cataract of the Mind faces pain with a bravery that is so much more than stoical. It faces beauty with just as much vulnerability. We see the poet come right up against the real and terrifying danger of losing heart, losing soul, losing the tenderness of being human to the hard, cold, understandable anger of suffering. And we see him use poetry to shepherd his mind back to the light.    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Tristanne Connolly {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]